A couple of weeks ago Rev. Al Sharpton and other prominent African Americans (including NAACP head Benjamin Jealous and Council of Negro Women President Dorothy Heights) were invited to the White House to discuss President Obama’s job bill. Afterwards some of them suggested that Obama would be better off not explicitly touting a “black agenda”. Both Tavis Smiley and Cornel West have attacked such a position, arguing that an explicit call for a black agenda is necessary given how hard blacks have been hit by the new economic normal (some have called it a “crisis” but this presumes that what we’re looking at is somehow temporary).
After the meeting, Tavis Smiley called into the Tom Joyner show, and strongly criticized what he understood to be Sharpton’s comments. Sharpton responded in turn, and this led to a heated exchange between Smiley and Sharpton on Sharpton’s radio show.
I had a chance to talk to Dedrick Muhammad briefly about this issue. Although I think there’s a tendency to take something like this and examine it through the lens of ego, particularly given the individuals involved, Tavis and West are on point.
Last Saturday the NAACP replaced longtime Chairman Julian Bond, naming health-care administrator Roslyn M. Brock as its chairman. Brock, 44, is, like President/CEO Benjamin Jealous the first such chairman to never have experienced legal segregation. I’m mildly surprised that there hasn’t been a bit more coverage on this news, but they made the move on a Saturday, which even in this age of 24-hour instantaneous news coverage is not necessarily a “good-look” news wise. You want to make a splash with something like this? Do it in the morning during the week.
But I digress.
So I’ve begun doing the research for my second book project (on neoliberalism in black politics) in earnest. The NAACP is one of the entities I am interested in studying, not just because they are the oldest and most venerable civil rights association, but because of two administrative moves made in 1977 and in 1996 respectively. In 1977 they changed the title of the Executive Secretary to the Executive Director/CEO. IN 1996 they eliminated the ELECTED office of President and established the title of President/CEO.
The latter move effectively takes away the ability to select a President from NAACP members at large, and to an extent from the 67-member National Board of Directors. The former move sounds like a simple name change–I don’t know whether any formal responsibilities changed–but I think it signals something a bit more. Different thoughts come to mind when we think of an “executive secretary” than come to mind when we think of an “executive director/ceo”. In fact, different thoughts come to mind when we think of an “executive director/CEO” than when we think of an “executive director.” Indeed, the very term “CEO” has become in some ways more powerful than “congressman” or “senator”.
I imagine that the reason both of these moves occurred was to bring the NAACP into the modern era of civil rights advocacy. But what does this mean exactly? What do we lose when we take the ability to elect a leader and replace that with an executive headhunting firm? I’d argue that this move is part and parcel of the neoliberal shift in black politics, the shift towards a corporate management approach to race relations and to black politics. And although the first NAACP leader with corporate experience (Bruce Gordon) was not chosen until 2005, it seems that the organization was moving towards this point much much earlier.
February 03, 2010By: The Good Doctor Category: media
This month The Urbanite is running an issue on “Race”. I was asked by the editor to write about the phenomenon of “self-segregation”. So rather than pen a piece about black kids deciding to sit all by themselves, I took another approach. I wrote a piece about the desirability of “black spaces”. Spaces black people can effectively “breathe” in. Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that. But I only had a couple of thousand words to work with. And on top of it I was able to take one of the worst days of 2008 (the first day of the Fall 2008 semester) and use it. Take a look and see what I mean.
About an hour before Obama’s State of the Union Address, I had the pleasure to deliver a keynote lecture at Hobart and William Smith College. My talk “Constructing Pookie: The Politics of the Black Male Crisis” was sponsored by The Fisher Center for the Study of Men and Women and was the first talk of their “Engendering Crisis” series. I’m going to put the video up later, but I had the chance to talk with the Director of the Center, Cedric Johnson. Cedric’s first book From Revolutionaries to Race Leaders unpacks the politics of the black power movement. It’s required reading for those trying to understand the politics of the post-civil rights era. He is one of my favorite scholars,because he’s deeply engaged in the politics of “black politics” and also in trying to create or at least begin to articulate what a new world should look like in doing so.
And besides that he’s “good people”.
We had the chance to sit down and talk Thursday before I flew back to Baltimore. I had the presence of mind to tape our one hour conversation. I edited it a little bit. Check it out. We talk about neoliberalism, parenting, the Academy, and the black male crisis, among other things. We don’t talk about his book, but maybe we will next time around.
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January 22, 2010By: The Good Doctor Category: media, npr, politics
John Edwards revealed that the affair with his campaign staffer Rielle Hunter produced a child, even as his wife was dying from cancer. Although a number of pundits and politicians are glad his political career is over, I’ve second thoughts.
The tragedy in Haiti has taken a devastating turn, and the media has followed turning towards looting and making it the central issue. We saw this narrative four plus years ago in Katrina.
I wrote a couple of pieces on these issues for NPR. My Edwards piece can be found here. My Haiti looting piece? Here.
January 18, 2010By: The Good Doctor Category: Uncategorized
Haiti is the first instance in the modern world of the enslaved taking their country back. And they’ve paid for it ever since.
In talking about what’s going on in Haiti now, this is the SECOND thing that should be mentioned…as it provides context for the enormity of the tragedy. Why is Haiti so poor that they had to tell American planes not to come (because they didn’t have the resources to refuel them)? There is really only one reason.
I’ve seen a few pieces here and there bring this up, but more have focused on the tragedy itself, sans context. And some have made the Katrina like turn towards looters.
I was on The Barbershop last week. We talked about Senator Reid’s “Negro dialect” comment about Obama made off of the record. We talked the Conan vs. Leno case. But we talked about Haiti first.
I had the chance to address the politics of Haiti, and an opportunity to connect this to former President Aristide’s desire to return. I did not. Kicking myself about it, but I thought I’d at least talk about it here. Aristide wants to return, many of his citizens want him to return. If Obama is willing to–in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation–bring Bush into the picture, then Aristide should be there. Before we even take into consideration the fact that he is “former President” largely because of a coup that many think the US helped in.
….
Later that day I had the opportunity to participate in a discussion about MLK and what he means today. Marc Steiner is a Baltimore jewel. He invited Mina Cheon, Mike McGuire, and myself to talk about what Martin Luther King jr. means at this particular moment. The discussion is worth listening to. Over 20 years ago a group of students took over the University of Michigan and forced them to dedicate MLK day to anti-racism. Although I do think about MLK on MLK Day, how young he was when he began, how his ideas changed as he grew older, what I really think about are those kids who had the audacity to believe they could make one of the largest and most prestigious public universities in the world, a better and more humane institution.
This news is important enough to cover…and particularly interesting given the fact that New York City is no longer majority white. But the reality is that the Harlem we carry in our head? The Harlem viewed as being the capital of black America? It was more of a public relations construction than anything else. Compare the artistic output of the Black Arts Movement–spearheaded in cities like Newark, Chicago, and Detroit–to the Harlem Renaissance and Harlem’s art movement becomes some guys who wrote a couple of poems in comparison. Jazz, the blues, rhythm and blues, rap, hip-hop, techno, house, none of the musics we associate with blacks were birthed in Harlem. Harold Cruse spent the majority of his seminal book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual deconstructing the cultural politics of Harlem as if Harlem could stand in for black America writ large…and his analysis was powerful. But Cruse made a critical mistake positing that Harlem was black America. Harlem was never the cultural site that Chicago or Detroit were. Further, politically it was always underdeveloped, particularly because it lacked the type of union-connected black class that Detroit and Chicago were able to use to great success. (This is the same reason why I have never held much love for Atlanta.) Finally, economically Harlem never had access to the type of wealth that other cities had. The year before Detroit’s Coleman Young was elected mayor, blacks had $25,000 in city contracts. The year AFTER he was elected? $125 MILLION.
Is there anything in Harlem’s history that compares here?
“Losing” Harlem to non-blacks may represent the passing of an age to some. But for me to the extent such a thing matters, we never really “had” Harlem to begin with.
January 04, 2010By: The Good Doctor Category: media
I knew Baltimore was the right place for me when a month into my time here I found out they had an annual book festival. I really knew it was the right place when I first appeared on the Marc Steiner Show. Baltimore is blessed with a few top notch interviewers–people who have the right politics as well as good people skills. Today I was on the Marc Steiner Show talking 2009 politics at the local level. I talked a little bit about the Sheila Dixon case–an issue I don’t think I got around to blogging about here. I compared her and Kilpatrick in Detroit, and talked a little about what I think needs to happen in both cities as we enter the second decade of the 21st Century. Listen in here. Please chime in.
January 03, 2010By: The Good Doctor Category: media, npr
Tell Me More had me on last week to talk about the top political stories of the decade. It went…ok. I wished I could’ve gotten another crack at some of the questions. Michele asked us which loss hit us hardest. As I’m thinking about it now, I realize that I lost two very close friends I thought would be around for the long haul. The first friend I lost at the beginning of the decade, not a week after the 9/11 attacks. One of my oldest friends, he sold weed to make ends meet in the poor working class town we grew up in. He was murdered in his home while defending his family. More than any other individual put paid to the myth that 9/11 changed ALL of our lives irrevocably.
(9/11 happened back when the Afrofuturist list was still vibrant. After the attacks, one of the list members asked what she could do to feel safe. I responded slightly tongue in cheek “move to somewhere black people live.” A white science fiction author–I believe it was Bruce Sterling but don’t get me to lying–delurked. I didn’t even know he was there. He went on this long spiel about how Al-Queda didn’t give a damn about black people and would kill black Americans as readily as white ones. I then asked him whether each discrete American building/city/space was equally in danger of being targeted by terrorists, and THEN whether the places that were more likely to be targeted were more likely to be populated largely by whites. I KNEW black people who barely escaped 9/11…but at the same time I knew that cities like East St. Louis, boroughs like the Bronx, weren’t in danger of terrorist attack. He never responded.)
The second friend I lost this past Labor Day weekend. A vice-president of a Detroit Benz dealership (the only one IN the city), he had a heart attack while at work. By the time his co-workers realized what happened it was already too late. His wife was a doctor, and while he was big, with a shot-putter’s build, he had a clean bill of health as far as I know. A member of Kappa Alpha Psi, so many of his fraternity brothers paid their respects they encircled the church three times. I still find it difficult to think too much about it without breaking down. He left behind his wife, and three children. He was two months away from 41.
I wish I had the presence of mind to mention them.
I also wish I had the presence of mind to be clearer about my critique of Bush. (As an aside THE most important political event of the last decade was Bush v. Gore. We’d be living in a VERY different place if Al Gore is President between 2001-2008. The economy would still have tanked, perhaps. But 9/11 wouldn’t have happened–recall that Rice ignored the Clinton administration’s warnings that terrorists planned to fly planes into American targets.) When asked what Americans could do in the post 9/11 moment, Bush said something to the effect of…”shop.”
The moment he missed there? I can’t think of a single statement that was more inappropriate given the moment. Because of our patriotic fervor–fervor that the Bush administration used to invade a country without cause, used to pass an act that gave US officials the right to spy on American citizens without cause–we would’ve supported almost anything at that moment. And what he suggested was that we…shop.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. My specialties are racial politics, urban politics, black politics and public opinion. My book Stare in the Darkness: Rap, Hip-hop, and Black Politics will be published in August 2010. More information about me and my work can be found here. I can be reached at UNBOWED AT GMAIL.COM
