Lester K. Spence is the author of the new book Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. He also has written Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics. He is an associate professor of political science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University, and his work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and Salon, and he is based in the Baltimore, Maryland, area.
Q: You describe the “neoliberal turn” as “the gradual
embrace of the idea that society…works best when it works according to the
principles of the market.” How does this concept affect black politics in
particular?
A: If you think about black politics as a problem-solving
enterprise, the idea that society is best governed by the market shapes what
actors within black politics think, and shapes what the solutions should be.
If, for example, kids in schools aren’t performing well,
black kids aren’t performing as well as their white counterparts, the
[approach] becomes to generate market-based solutions to deal with it, instead
of a solution [more focused on] the school system.
Q: Let’s look specifically at President Obama’s role—you
write that he “has done much to aid and abet the neoliberal turn.” What are
some examples?
A: If you look at what’s up to now his signature issue
designed to deal with people of color, the My Brother’s Keeper project, what it
does is acknowledge that young men of color face challenges, a range of
contemporary challenges—unemployment issues, an achievement gap in schools.
What he proposes is a set of public-private partnerships
that seek to make young men better fits for the market as it is, as opposed to
dealing with the structural factors that generate the problems they’re facing.
One argument could be, If they’re viewing the solution in
market-based terms, then what’s the problem? The problem is that the solutions
rarely work, and often make the problems even worse.
In the case of My Brother’s Keeper, the public-private
partnerships that seek to make the boys better workers actually generate more
inequality than what we had before.
Q: So what do you see as a better approach?
A: In general, if you look at the levels of inequality from
1929 to now, they dipped from 1929-1960, in large part because of political
processes—politics took more control over the economy.
If we injected the federal government more in the schools
than [under] the current relationship…if we had more taxes at the
federal-government level to increase resources to the schools…probably we’d
have better educational outcomes.
Instead of a market-based approach, what we need are more
political outcomes. The state has the most important role.
Q: Looking at the presidential candidates, whose platform
would you support?
A: Bernie Sanders. There are big challenges—the challenge is
that Congress is not changing, so it’s not that Sanders would be able to
implement through Congress any of the ideas he’s proposing.
Let’s take free public [college] education, that in and of
itself. As students are coming out of school with debt, [his plan] makes
college an option for large swaths of the population it’s not really an option
for now.
That dynamic would unleash innovation. All these folks who
are now educated and weren’t educated before, who knows what that would do? You
can significantly expand the middle class and that would significantly expand
the number of taxpayers and the ability of government to give the public the
resources we need.
It’s the type of thing that theoretically he could do. In
reality, he’d be significantly hamstrung. [But] he could forcefully make the
case for progressive government.
Q: What role do you see the Black Lives Matter movement
playing as far as attitudes toward the neoliberal turn are concerned?
A: A significant part of the neoliberal turn is when
industry moved out of cities. These moves started as early as the ‘50s, and by
the early ‘70s [the industries] were really gone. In the Rust Belt, it became
possible to discuss cities like Baltimore, Gary, Detroit, as post-industrial.
But there were a large number of people in these cities who
were put there to labor in industrial cities, and now are unemployed. What
happens is the prison-industrial complex—folks are placed under its direct
[control], or cities spend money on policing.
The Black Lives Matter movement is a response to the heavy
use of policing in the wake of industrial flight. What they’re doing is
responding to the consequences of the neoliberal turn, policing.
That’s something very valuable, because now we’re having
conversations about the police, the police budget, how they should function. We
haven’t had those conversations since I’ve been an adult—you may have to go
back to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
The challenge is the types of violence visited upon the
black population. There’s a lot more that black folks are having to deal with.
Freddie Gray, the neighborhood he lived in, Sandtown-Winchester, is pretty much
toxic. His family [filed] a lawsuit because the house they lived in was filled
with lead and they were afflicted with lead poisoning.
[The Black Lives Matter movement is] dealing with incidents
of anti-black police violence, which is important, but the economic violence in
general, they haven’t quite wrestled with.
Q: How did you pick the book’s title, and what does it
signify for you?
A: I talk about the hustle at the beginning of the book—the
hustle was synonymous with a con—if somebody was hustling you, they were
conning you. It was an illegal activity.
That term, the way we use the language now, has been
transformed. Hustle now refers to constant work—hustling and grinding.
A lot of people use it as descriptive, but make it
normative—that’s what we’re supposed to do. If you’re not hustling, you’re
sitting on your ass and you get what you deserve.
I wanted to critique that. As Jay-Z and some other rappers
talk about, “Can’t Knock the Hustle”—we should be knocking the hustle!
Q: Are you working on another book?
A: I’ve been working on a public health project, [looking
at] public health through the lens of HIV and AIDS in Baltimore. And I’m
collecting data for a project on policing in Baltimore back to 1965 or so, [and
the impact of] the neoliberal turn…
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: When I talk about [the neoliberal turn] in black
politics, what I try to do is hone in on some ways black political officials
operate—mayors of [mostly] black cities, how the president has operated, how we
see the rhetoric in the black church.
I try to cover as many areas as possible within black
politics. [The impact of the neoliberal turn] exists in all these places we
haven’t thought about, and shapes the degree to which we have black politics
that can cover everybody.
The other thing I drive home—it’s not just a critical book.
I use four cases to show how people are organizing against it, to make a claim
for political organizing as a solution out of the neoliberal turn.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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