Lester K. Spence, PH. D.

About Lester Spence

Over the past 40-50 years we’ve seen a sharp rise in income inequality. Rather than being a natural function of cultural capital or education, with some populations being better able to adapt to post-industrial America than others, this sharp rise is a function of politics, of public policy that reduces the scale and scope of the US welfare state, of political rules that simultaneously increase the mobility and power of capital and reduce the power of labor to organize, and of political rhetoric that lauds the entrepreneur over the citizen. In short, the rise is the result of the neoliberal turn. And during this period, not only has inequality within black communities increased, there’s more inequality within black communities than there is between black and non-black ones.

It’s this dynamic I’ve sought to examine over the course of my career for both intellectual reasons and political ones. In Stare in the Darkness: Hip-hop and the Limits of Black Politics (winner of the 2012 W. E. B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award) I examined how various neoliberal themes were reproduced in hip-hop rather than contested. In Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (winner of both the Baltimore City Paper and Baltimore Magazine 2016 Best Nonfiction Book Awards), I built on this. We don’t just see neoliberal themes in black popular culture, we see it in black churches, in the actions of black mayors, and in the rhetoric and policies of black elites. I am currently at work on three book length projects, an examination of the contemporary politics of HIV/AIDS in black communities (under contract with Columbia University Press), an attempt to trace the contours of what I call Afro-Realism, and an investigation of the thick blue line of urban policing.  

In addition to my academic work (which also includes one co-edited journal and almost three dozen academic articles and reviews in The American Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, The Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race among others) I’ve written several dozen essays and think pieces in a range of publications including The New York Times, Jacobin, Salon, The New York Daily Review, The Boston Review, Democracy, The Huffington Post, Dissent, and Mother Jones. I can also be regularly heard on public radio stations throughout the country (particularly in Baltimore and Detroit), and seen on The Real News Network, Al-Jazeera, and other progressive media outlets.