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Goodbye, “Good Jobs”

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

I spoke this spring in Chicago at the convention for the NFBPA, or National Forum for Black Public Administrators, an organization with 2600 members in civil service at the local, state and Federal levels. I talked about something that’s been on my mind: whether African-Americans should exit professions like teaching at a local elementary school; serving in the military; or working at the Post Office.

Public employment is undergoing some of the sharpest cuts of any sector, and black families are feeling the hit. Public-sector employment is the #1 employer of black men and #2 of black women. As the public job pool shrinks rapidly, it constitutes a major mover of African-American unemployment. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, as I discussed with the NFBPA. Public-private partnerships may expand the constituency for public employment, but in this political atmosphere negotiations are fraught. (I spoke at the convention of black public administrators shortly after the showdown in Wisconsin over public labor.)

Public-sector jobs — military, civil service, public k-12 education, public colleges and universities — were a ladder to the middle class for many black families, including my own. (Grandparents: Post Office and Social Security. Mother and siblings: Post Office, US Army, US Marines, Social Security, Baltimore City (schools and water department), Baltimore County (schools). My generation: almost all private sector, save one.)

Good jobs used to come with a promise of stability, leading to a here-until-retirement mentality. No more, not in the private sector or the public. The drop in African-American employment has helped fuel a drop in African-American support for the President. A recent Washington Post-ABC news poll saw the number drop from 83 percent “strongly favorable” to 58 percent now. The Congressional Black Caucus is running a jobs initiative that has challenged the President on his approach to jobs, specifically not addressing the African-American employment crisis as a discrete thing-in-itself. To do so could be political suicide; but to not name the problem could cause widespread African-American voter attrition, particularly around first time voters and those who voted for the first time in 2008.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently spoke at a Congressional Black Caucus summit on jobs. He’s also written about the global war for what people used to call “good jobs,” a battle with high stakes beyond money. Jobs have become synonymous, for many of us, with identity and personal happiness — not just in the US but across the world. There are few things people fight for as hard as their sense of self.

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Jobs, Race, and Reality

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

I hate the term “Post Racial.” It’s weasely. You might as well say that you’re post-reality.

To wit: a new report released today by Congress, revealing that 22% of Americans who have been unemployed for a year or more are African-American. The black population is 11.5 percent of the labor force.

I suspect, given the way unemployment figures are counted, that the figures are actually much starker.

The level of African-American joblessness is a profound opportunity. It’s an opportunity for us to restructure the ways we think about social mobility, business ethics, and the impact of employment on issues from mental health to child-rearing. It’s a profound opportunity for us to look at how the demographic least likely to vote for President Obama share many of the same economic issues as African-Americans. I’m talking about white Southerners in economically challenged states like Mississippi and Alabama. (Those states ranked 50 and 42 in per capita income, and ranked the lowest on the percentage of white voters who chose Obama, 11 and 10 percent respectively.) It’s a profound opportunity for us to challenge categories like “African-American” and “white Southerner,” and figure out how we can develop language about groups and constituencies that is not too broad, but does not ignore reality.

Well, that’s a lot of opportunity. There’s a lot of work to do.

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The Black President Trap

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

“For every factual attack, there are a thousand possibilities…and all of them strike down together.”

It’s a line from China Mieville’s speculative fiction novel The Scar, but it could easily describe today’s politics.

President Obama has been described as a socialist and tool of banks and big business; a “racist…who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture” and someone who “hasn’t done much for their [i.e., African-Americans'] bottom line” because “so-called black leaders are much more interested in invitations to the White House…than in raising any kind of ruckus that might benefit people in real trouble. Read More »

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Post-Racial At What Cost? (Reflections on Obama/Matthews)

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

After the State of the Union, MSNBC host Chris Matthews made this comment about the President:

He is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country, and past so much history, in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about.

What are we to make of that?

Well, the Associated Press did a smart piece (featuring one of my Twitter friends, @profblmkelley) on whether black folks want to give up blackness. (Short answer: no.)

That’s one way of deconstructing Matthews’ statements. What it called up for me was the fundamental question of payback. Andrew Hacker, the author of books including 1992′s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, wrote about race and voters in the New York Review of Books shortly before the 2008 election:

Resentment of perceived black privilege is also involved, as we have seen with respect to affirmative action, and even fear of some kind of racial payback. Over half of a largely white sample told a Rasmussen poll that they feel Obama continues to share at least some of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s positions on America.

The fear of black payback goes back as far as fear of slave rebellions. In modern politics, it means that some voters fear that black politicians will favor black interests, just as white politicians have often favored white interests. In fact, if you look at the history of American government, there has been a far greater transfer of black wealth to white Americans and skewing of public funds towards non-blacks than the reverse.

Instead of a payback mentality, the Obama Administration seems to deliberately be hands-off on dealing with problems facing black America. Last month, there was a spat between the Congressional Black Caucus and the Administration over whether the administration was doing enough for African-Americans. (According to economist Dr. Julianne Malveaux, the real non-employment rate among African-Americans may be 27%.) This is a struggle to keep an eye on, because it begs the question: is the only way to be a post-racial President to ignore the specific structural inequities of race, and if so, at what cost to the nation?

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Reax to Tavis publishing R. Kelly Memoir

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

Reaction is running hot to Tavis Smiley gearing up to publish R. Kelly’s memoirs.

From the SmileyBooks press release

“I’m writing this book as Robert, not R. Kelly,” the singer says. “I’m tired of being misunderstood. I will show you the tears, fears, and sweat. I will open my heart and reveal the good in my life as well as all the drama. I want to tell it like it is.”

There is no direct mention of the sexual assault allegations that resulted in an acquittal.

From Gina MacCauley’s What About Our Daughters:

I had hoped this was a hoax, but apparently Tavis Smiley, who is accused of gathering large numbers of Black folks together so that they could get pitched predatory Wells Fargo loans (disproportionately affecting Black women) is joining forces with another accused predator, R. Kelly. Its amazing that the primary unifying force in the Black community is EXPLOITATION of women and girls. If you go to TavisTalks.com you will see front and center and item announcing that R. Kelly has joined Smiley Books. When is that State of the Black Union and how do we get a permit to protest it? I’m serious.

The comments are no less critical.

And from Danielle Belton’s The Black Snob:

And this book will be just another in a long line of signifiers to perverts that you can do pretty much anything to a woman, girl, child, whatever, and someone will love your trifling ass anyway because it’s our fault for having vaginas. But for Tavis, and others who claim to be holding the entire race to a higher standard, this is further proof that you never meant to hold anything to any standards ever. That “cash rules everything around you, dollah, dollah bill, ya’ll” and you could seriously give two craps about the implication of being the speakerbox to a known predator. After all, freedom of speech, ya’ll! And SOMEONE was going to publish his book so why not Mr. Accountability? Pardon me while I go regurgitate something.

(Belton’s blog also has a link to a guest post about Smiley and Wells Fargo.)

It provoked a conversation on Twitter where several of us talked about who gets the mic when it comes to representing blackness in media. The short answer, in my mind, is that the people who are the best at getting the mic are people who help build the platform: people like Tavis who are business-builders as well as media-makers. So all critiques have to be funneled through the lens of economics: if you don’t like what one mediamaker does, do you have an alternative brand or model?

What do you think?

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