It’s time to connect political
violence with economic violence.
Lester K. Spence, Associate
Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University,
focuses on black, racial, and urban politics in the neoliberal era. In an
interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), he shares
his perspective on a false brand of economic and political “common sense” that
black elites helped sell to black communities.
Lynn Parramore: In your
book, Knocking
the Hustle, you describe a shift in America that took place when a new crop
of intellectuals successfully sold the idea that everybody and everything ought
to be judged by market competition and market-oriented behavior, something you
call the “neoliberal turn.” How did this change manifest in black communities?
Lester K. Spence: The change
really begins in the 50s and early 60s, but takes a sharp turn in the late 60s
and early 70s, when the middle class moves to the suburbs. Detroit’s population
in 1950 is 1.9 million, but by 1960 it has already dropped significantly. This
is a partial byproduct of federal policy and a partial byproduct of private
action, but the dynamic was racialized: whites had access to the suburbs and
blacks did not. Cities like Detroit become increasingly African American, and
as blacks come to take up a larger proportion of the population, they gain more
and more political power, which they use to elect representatives.
Black mayors take control of
the black cities, but as these cities become black, their ability to garner
revenue to provide social services drops dramatically. So one of the reasons that
the neoliberal turn takes the form it does in black communities is because the
cities that blacks increasingly live in are themselves altered by neoliberal
policies.
The decrease in the ability of
cities to collect tax revenues causes mayors to turn more to the bond rating
market and to things like downtown development. And there is an alteration of
the welfare state — we could think about welfare itself or things like the
transition to public housing, which really alters the policy terrain that
blacks can operate in. You increasingly see people begin to articulate
neoliberal policies as a way for black folks to advance.
LP: Could you give an example?
LS: In Detroit in the 90s, by
the time the neoliberal turn really takes shape, you see somebody like Dennis
Archer, Sr., the city’s second black mayor, attempt to use what’s called “total
quality management” to revamp Detroit’s bureaucracy. That’s a management
strategy that was taught at MBA schools in the late 80s and early 90s that puts
the customer and customer decisions at the forefront of bureaucracy formation.
You see it in Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s National
Partnership for Reinventing Government [a task force to reform the way
the federal government works] — but Archer is one of the first to
implement it in a city. He brought in Ford executives in order to get the
bureaucracies to think of citizens as consumers. This has an ideational impact.
You also see it in cities that
are looking increasingly to downtown development and forced to transform
downtowns into entertainment hubs. By the mid-to-late 90s, Detroit brought in
three casinos, the idea being to give the city the types of jobs it once had when
the automotive industry loomed large. Of course, it did not. They also created
two new publicly subsidized sports stadiums. In the last few years, even as
Detroit was dealing with bankruptcy, the state basically subsidized a new
stadium for the Detroit Red Wings to the tune of about $300 million.
LP: So people living in cities
are no longer citizens who require services to meet their needs but consumers
in need of market-based solutions.
LS: Right.
LP: The title of your
book references “the hustle.” What is it and how is it reflected in black
culture and entertainment?
LS: I begin the book by
juxtaposing Nat Adderley and Oscar Brown’s “Work Song” that’s about
a certain type of labor in the 1960s against Ace Hood’s, “Hustle Hard.” He
does more than just describe a condition in which he’s consistently having to
work to make ends meet for himself and his family. The video features Ace Hood
in a regular East Coast neighborhood, and all around him, people engage in
different hustles to get by. The seasons change, and although the things that
people sell change, like in the summer they’re hustling water and in the winter
they’re hustling coats and gloves, the hustle itself doesn’t change. He doesn’t
give a critique of that situation, but actually makes a normative argument for
it, suggesting that it is a good thing. If you want to work in the world, this
is what you’re supposed to do. If you don’t do it, your value as a human being
is significantly reduced.
Entrepreneurialism is seen as
the key to black problems and the key to being fully human. We definitely see
this some of Jay Z’s work and that of other MCs, although not as much lately
given the shift towards Black Lives Matter-type cultural production.
LP: What’s wrong with
entrepreneurialism?
LS: Empirically speaking, it
doesn’t tend to work. We don’t really have examples of poor communities that
become really successful through entrepreneurialism. Even when it does work, it
only works for a thin slice of the population. One of the fundamental
consequences of the neoliberal turn is a really sharp uptick in inequality in
the United States. It’s higher now than it was during the Great Depression.
This is partially attributable to the idea that entrepreneurship is our
solution.
LP: You’ve discussed a
tendency among black elites to come down harshly on the black family, blaming
it for problems like poverty and incarceration. It’s hard not to think of Bill
Cosby right now and his admonishing black people to behave better with his
image of the ideal, respectable black family. How does this fit into the
narrative of the neoliberal turn?
LS: The neoliberal turn isn’t
just a set of policies; it also embeds a certain type of common sense, like the
idea that what we need in black communities is more business development and
entrepreneurialism. The theory is that once you have these, the results trickle
down. It’s a black form of Reagonomics.
On the flip side, once you
believe that black business or hustling hard is the solution, you have to
explain why some people don’t succeed and why some families end up at the
bottom. So the natural explanation is that people are poor because of something
related to their own personal circumstance. Maybe they don’t have the right
cultural appreciation of education; maybe it’s because men and women don’t make
the right reproductive choices; maybe it’s because they’re more interested in
buying Michael Jordans than books. Right? There are a whole host of rhetorics
that become naturalized, making it seem as if black poverty is solely the
product of black decisions.
Bill Cosby is a good example
of this. He gave a speech in 2004 at
the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education in front of a black
audience in which he argues that what’s happening now, particularly as a result
of Brown v. Board, is solely the product of black populations and black
choices, and what we need to do is to take our black family back.
We see the message that
poverty is the product of black family decisions as opposed to larger
structural dynamics in Cosby’s speech, or even going back 30 or 40 years in
popular culture that we thought of as progressive. There’s John
Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood. At the time it came out in 1991, the
movie was deemed progressive, a critique of Reagan era policies and their
effect on South Central Los Angeles. But it really argues that places like
South Central L.A. are in trouble because black men haven’t done enough to take
care of the black family.
LP: You write that the
neoliberal turn is not the 21st century version of Jim Crow. Why is that
framework problematic? Does racism mean something different in a neoliberal
context?
LS: The concept of the new Jim
Crow was popularized by a really important work by Michelle Alexander examining
the criminal justice system. It’s a powerful phrase and it speaks to a black
common sense about what going on now. It allows us to make easy sets of
connections between some contemporary dynamics and what happened in the 1950s
and late 1960s. We recently commemorated the 50th anniversary of Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. That event looms large in our memory, and you
can easily imagine people being more likely to engage in all kinds of political
activity if they think of something as the new Jim Crow.
But the challenge is that even
if we look at criminal justice, it’s not just blacks caught up in the dynamic.
Even in the old Jim Crow that was designed to deal with blacks specifically
through segregation, you see a number of white people who weren’t able to vote
due to restrictions, though blacks were disproportionately affected.
If you look at the increase in
incarceration, it’s not just blacks and it’s not just all blacks; it’s
working-class-to-lower-income blacks. The new Jim Crow framework can’t really
explain why that is. Why is it that I no longer fear the police? I don’t. I’ve
been stopped a number of times, and I now treat police as I imagine whites do
because I know and the police who engage with me know that I’m not the black
people they are trying to socially control. I’m not in that population.
Politically, even as I do
think the new Jim Crow concept enables us to mobilize in certain ways, it
doesn’t mobilize us to effectively to deal with the class dynamics. The new Jim
Crow makes it seem like it’s totally a race thing. There’s a way that you can
organize around race that leaves class and inequality totally untouched. And we
need to get at this race/class interaction that is prominent in places like
Detroit or where I work now, in Baltimore.
LP: Can you talk about Barack
Obama and his relationship to neoliberal ideas?
LS: I think a good example
is My Brother’s
Keeper (launched by Obama in 2014), which he talked about as a partial
response to the wave of murders, including that of Trayvon Martin. He argued
that if we brought together a robust suite of private-public partnerships, we
could then identify a set of best practices that can help boys of color.
Progressive women argued that he was ignoring the needs of girls of color, and
that was an important critique. But the most important critique is one that
very few people brought up, which is that Obama argued that My Brother’s Keeper
wasn’t a big government program. He didn’t propose any increase in government
spending, which, to be fair, would have been difficult under a Republican
administration, but at least if he’d argued for it, he could have potentially
created a constituency that could fight for it.
The other critique is that his
primary assumption about the reason boys are on the wrong end of a variety of
social and economic measures is because they’re not culturally predisposed to
do the work necessary to do well in school. They don’t know how to deal with
conflict, so all they do is get into fights and engage in other types of
violence. Because they don’t have fathers in the home, they don’t know how to
be good fathers themselves. Again, it argues that the reason they are at the
bottom end economically is solely the function of culture. It has no structural
dynamics at all.
Yet if we said that nuclear
families are better than other forms of families (though I don’t necessarily
agree with that), every bit of social science tells us that nuclear families
are more likely to happen where people aren’t poor. So Obama is reversing the
causal arrow. You don’t have to go to Marxist economists to find this. People
who are poor tend to have families that look a certain way versus people that
aren’t poor. If you have a robust safety net, families tend to have different
types of outcomes than if don’t have it. This is Social Science 101.
LP: How does the neoliberal
turn manifest in black megachurches like those led by popular ministers like
T.D. James and Creflo Dollar?
LS: Even when Martin Luther
King, Jr. was alive and running the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
there were different tendencies within black churches. Some, while not
necessarily supporting the Jim Crow regime, definitely kind of acquiesced to it
and were not interested in having their churchgoers be involved in anti-racist
politics. At the same time, you had people using the church to connect to a
really radical critique of capitalism and white supremacy.
In the 70s and into the 80s,
this radical-to-left tendency is becoming less and less important in black
churches. What you see instead is the growth of churches that use the Bible as
a kind of self-help guide and promote the prosperity gospel, which holds that
if you follow the Bible, you will become not only spiritually but materially
wealthy. The flip side is that if you don’t follow the Bible, you’ll become
poor. So somebody like Creflo Dollar [founder of the World Changers Church
International based in College Park, Georgia] argues that you’re poor because
you don’t have the right mindset. That’s naturalizing poverty.
Related is the growth of black
megachurches with as many as 10,000 or even 20,000 members. They have their own
community development corporations. Some of them actually look like
corporations in their design and require a significant outlay of capital in
order to operate. So even if they are not proposing the whole prosperity
gospel, they have to propose some aspect of it in order to exist.
LP: It seems burdensome that
in addition to paying taxes, churchgoers end up funding social services through
tithing.
LS: States and local
governments are now outsourcing some of their social service provisions to
churches. This is problematic for several reasons. One is because of the
important distinction between church and state. It’s all too likely that a
church would use the resources to proselytize instead of provide services. Also,
churches provide a function of spiritual guidance – they aren’t bureaucracies.
People who work in churches don’t know how to deal with poverty or public
housing provisions.
We wouldn’t expect a charity
to fund NASA: the scale of the challenge is something that no private entity
could actually fulfill. Well, it’s the same with social service provision. When
people pay their tithe, the resources might really go to social services
instead of lining somebody’s pocket, but those services are nowhere near what’s
needed to deal with inequality. In a way, it demobilizes people when you
connect this to the rhetoric that suggests that people are poor because of
their own choices, it makes it more difficult for people to organize not just
for more social services, but to get at structural dynamics.
LP: What does it take to
challenge the neoliberal turn? What have we learned about what’s effective and
what’s not?
LS: Martin Luther King, Jr.
talked about a wrong-headed approach that posits that the reason we have gains
is because of leaders like him who spoke to power and as a result were able to
galvanize hundreds of thousands of folks in the South and the North to overturn
the Jim Crow regime.
If you really look at the
history, what you find instead is really deep organizing. What that charismatic
leadership cannot do is build deep, enduring institutions to build the
political capacity of regular folks. These institutions tend to have at least
some modicum of democratic accountability. With the charismatic leadership model,
there’s the idea that everything the leader says is correct. There are very few
ways to hold them accountable or even create debate about strategies or
tactics. But in a robust model of organizing, people can actually create
conditions to lead themselves and engage in making decisions, whether we’re
talking about labor issues, racial inequality, or #MeToo and gender inequality.
One of the things that
happened with the neoliberal turn is that the ability of labor unions to
organize was significantly reduced. In the 2012 strike that was the first of
the current wave, the Chicago teacher’s union had to organize tens of thousands
of teachers in all these local spaces to get them to understand why schools
were being closed, how their current contract made educational circumstances
worse as opposed to better, and how the possibility of losing income in the
short-term would actually increase their ability to build in the future. They
had to do this in a space where there were already a whole host of arguments about
education (that it didn’t operate according to the values of the market) and
about teachers’ unions (that they are the problem) — this whole common sense
apparatus. They were able to contest it and replace it. The teacher’s strikes
we’re seeing now across the country get at the deep organizing we have to
engage in that works across time and is durable.
When you look at Black Lives
Matter, it focused our attention to police killings as a function of a state
that doesn’t work. People are able to use social media to quickly galvanize
people and move them in interesting direct action ways. There have been some
political successes: Marilyn Mosby [State’s Attorney for Baltimore] actually
brought charges against police in Baltimore and we don’t have her election
without Black Lives Matter. There have also been various Justice Department
victories. But we need to connect the argument about state violence to a larger
argument about economic violence. That’s where you need ideation work, like the
work done in think tanks.
A lot of what we have to do is
mundane work so that we can be ready when the moment comes; things like
collecting data, building an archive. Maybe you get something unexpected — a
candidate like Bernie Sanders. But the opportunity only means something as a
result of the mundane work of preparation. Often women perform this kind of
work. Our economy is based on labor that women aren’t really acknowledged for,
and if you look at the political labor, a lot of the organizing labor tends to
be done by women and it gets devalued. People focus on more on charismatic male
leaders.
Overall, I think we need to
focus more on developing institutions. Organizing has to start locally, maybe
even best on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, educating citizens, giving
them the ability to understand their situation and giving them another set of
narratives. We need to work with these communities developing coalitions across
cities and then states in order to promote policies and individuals who support
them. Policies have to be about reorienting the economy in such a way where
lower income people get the bulk of the resources as opposed to the dynamic
that we have now.
