snapshots of Black politics

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Since the 2008 election, I have been privileged to spend seven or eight days in meetings with predominantly African American scholars or activists, talking about politics and Black issues.

It’s said that wherever there are two Jews, there are three opinions. That is true of most communities, at least when the political discussion is healthy, and it is certainly true of politically active Black Americans. There is much healthy disagreement. Nevertheless, I will offer a few tentative generalizations.

Obama is a widely seen as a challenge. The administration has not forthrightly addressed issues of particular significance to African Americans, such as the incarceration industry, workplace discrimination, police profiling, or teen violence. I am not sure why: it could be that the president is leery of alienating independent White voters, or it could be that his administration is not sure what to do about these problems. Or maybe they think that the Race to the Top education reform was the best response to the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

Even though the president does relatively little to address the specific issues of African Americans, some loud White voices are accusing him of hating White people–as if to send a warning. Obama is increasingly controversial in Black America, too (see Lupe Fiasco, Cornel West, and others), but African American organizations are still leery of putting him in a tight spot by pressing on issues like incarceration and racial discrimination. He is, after all, the best defense now against disastrous policies. He is beset by maniacal enemies–like the people in my town who stand outside our post office with pictures of Barack Obama in a Hitler mustache, advocating for him to be removed from office as mentally incompetent under the 25th Amendment. With this going on, who wants to criticize the president for giving way too easily in budget negotiations? Nevertheless, Black groups would probably put more pressure on a White Democratic president, and they might get more action from a Democrat who was more worried about Black votes. One final irony: the flow of progressive money to the Obama campaign apparatus in 2008 caused older, community-based, Black-led political organizations to take a financial hit, which was then compounded by the recession. So the infrastructure is weaker than it was before the Obama era.

African American scholars and leaders of organizations are socioeconomically diverse, and some are relatively privileged. Yet many have deeper and more pervasive connections to people who are seriously suffering than comparable White scholars and leaders would have. In any group, some people bear private traumas. But in a group of African American leaders, the issues on the official agenda are also personal. Some participants have lost their own sibling or parents to murder. The intensity of concern is much deeper; the level of detachment, much less. Yet an inimitable, wry, worldly sense of humor often emerges to keep the intensity under some control.

The deepest irony or paradox is the combination, which everyone recognizes, of astounding progress on some fronts and disastrous setbacks on others. Today, Black scholars and leaders can gather in halls of power and privilege, connected not only by similar skin color but by personal networks to the president of the United States, the heads of major foundations and universities, and rich and influential celebrities. (Here is Cheryl Contee, who was at the meeting with me, reporting on her meeting with the president the day before.) That status was unthinkable 30 years ago. Yet the number of young Black men killed in a single year in any of our large cities is greater than all our deaths in Iraq or Afghanistan since those wars began. Where do we go from here?

African American youth civic engagement

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I am at the Open Society Foundation in Washington, DC for a convening on Black Youth Civic Engagement, which has drawn many of the leading experts and activists on African American young people and politics. The CIRCLE PowerPoint that I presented provides an overview of this issue from our perspective:

African American Youth Civic Engagement

Here is a sample graph from the presentation, showing that African American young people set the all-time record for youth turnout by any racial or ethnic group in 2008:

It’s important to note that the trend was already up in 2004, so the high turnout was not just an Obama effect.

universities must take responsibility for the communications environment

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Communicating is what we do in academia: we talk, we write. But is anyone listening? Many students are not prepared or motivated to absorb and critically evaluate what their professors say. The broad public is uninterested in, or skeptical about, much of what professors write. For example, large numbers of people don’t believe in human-caused global warming, the lasting effects of social class on life prospects, or the persistence of anti-Black racism, despite scholarly consensus on all these points.

Perhaps it was always so. The gap between public and scholarly knowledge is not new and may be an inevitable function of differences in attention and experience. (Nor does the gap imply that scholars are right and the public is wrong; I am open to the opposite diagnosis.)

But things have changed in one respect: academia used to be able to rely on a division of labor. We communicated in our own way, and other institutions mediated. High schools prepared our prospective students: that was their business. Journalists selected our most interesting findings and explained them to the two thirds of Americans who received a daily newspaper. The function of a newspaper was to attract people by giving them what they wanted–including sports, comics, etc.–but also to tell them what they should know on the front page.

Professors complained (incessantly) about actual high schools and actual newspapers. Their whining was unattractive but it reflected a social contract. Communication was a shared responsibility. Academics felt they did their own job well and had the right to criticize others.

Today, communications is our business if it is anyone’s. Newsrooms are closing; journalists are being laid off. The communications marketplace has fragmented so that there is nothing like the front page of the newspaper any more. High schools have other problems to deal with.

Meanwhile, we in academia have resources: nearly 5,000 institutions distributed across the country, commanding about 3 percent of GDP, employing and enrolling millions. We can address the communications problem if anyone can.

Here is a modest proposal. A liberal arts college–or even a whole university–would launch its own general-interest online magazine. This publication, professionally edited by a journalist, would present interesting and important work by faculty and students on a regular basis, perhaps weekly. It would be highly selective; authors would usually be required to revise before publication. The institution would reward them if they contributed frequently and well to the magazine.

I think the magazine would have to allow public comments, but if it received a high volume, many of the comments would be repetitive, hostile, and uninteresting. (The comment threads of most newspapers make depressing reading.) Thus I think a better way to promote constructive criticism would be to hire particular people to provide official responses. Leaders of local community groups could respond. So could proponents of ideological views not well represented on campus, such as social conservatives (if those happen to be rare).

This proposal would certainly not solve the problems with which I began this post, but it would have the following objectives:

1. To provide the magazine as a public service.

2. To encourage faculty to explain their work publicly, and to teach them how to do that.

3. To help the institution to identify scholars who are able to communicate with the public, thereby modifying somewhat its hiring and promotion criteria.

4. To provide an impressive venue for the best student work.

5. To offer a model of how one should respond critically to scholarship.

Fourth of July

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Between white picket fences, the cobbled sidewalks are packed with people in crazy hats, waving the Stars and Stripes. A Land Rover carries the officers of the Edgartown Yacht Club, gold buttons on their navy coats and hats. A colonial marching band stomps by, and then the Irish and the Scots in their contrasting kilts. Martha’s Vineyard’s Returning Peace Corps Volunteers get a special welcome for their service; they are gray-haired, athletic, waving the flags of their host countries from decades past. The Peace Council’s float reminds us that war is not the answer. A rat, taller than the ante-bellum houses, passes on a truck, advertising pest control. The residents of a group home are pushed past in wheelchairs, faces painted as clowns, looking shocked to me. Fire trucks, one for each town. Then my own kid on the back of a truck, throwing candy.

Later, the beach. First a natural display in the west, the vast disk slipping out of sight beneath thick strokes of yellow, orange, and crimson, while the placid ocean seems like gel lit from within, lapping the sand. Anything else would be anticlimactic, but as the sky darkens, the anticlimax comes: first, illegal bottle-rockets popping overhead, then the professional show in Edgartown and a matching one to the left in Oak Bluffs. From the invisible shore opposite, little smokey puffs and starbursts just above the horizon: Cape Cod saluting the Vineyard.

(I had a much more cynical take on a Memorial Day parade in 2010.)