I saw an old friend, Glenn Loury on "Bill Moyers Journal" on June 20, 2008.   Glenn Loury has always been very gracious to me and I shall never forget the occasion several years ago, when I was guest of honor at a reception and dinner in Glenn's stately19th century mansion in Brookline Mass.  I was doubly interested since his conversation partner on the 19th was Orlando Patterson, with whom I have conversed only once, telephonically, while we were both in Cambridge England—he on a Guggenheim, and I on a Ford Foundation Grant.   Obama's candidacy, especially his Father's Day Speech apparently provided the two of them with points of disagreement, although I didn't understand what exactly. I thought Loury gave a better account of himself, in the oral presentation, by stressing the valid point that black males are simply powerless and confused, and that their problems cannot be solved by sermons, regardless of how timely and appropriate. 

But Patterson had anticipated the same points in his brilliant book, Rituals of Blood (1998),  and both Glenn and Orlando agree that no change is possible outside the matrix of social structure and economic organization.  Obama is, of course, not the first person to describe the weak position of black males and to call for a lifting-by-bootstraps philosophy of social change.   I might have added that Booker T. Washington, W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Angela Davis, all made similar observations with respect to black family structure, calling for both institutional reform and personal responsibility, although Davis emphatically rejected the proposition that patriarchalism is the solution to problems of social disorganization. 

I also watched, that night, Larry Kudlow's show, "Kudlow Live;" his guests were Art Laffer; Joseph Battipaglia, Stifel Nicolaus; Brian Wesbury, arguing over what actions Bernanke should or should not take.   Mr. Kudlow, in another segment, commenting on Obama's decision to turn down public funds, expressed his contempt for McCain-Feingold, and opined that there are good flip-flops, and bad flip-flops.  As far as he is concerned Obama made a good flip-flop, and Kudlow is confident that Obama will move further to the right.   I am forced, kicking and screaming, to agree with Larry, whose show I prefer to Chris Matthews', since there are fewer commercials, and the guests are more interesting.

I am attaching a link to an article by my good friend Adolph Reed whose influences I consider healthy, if sometimes heavy-handed.   Adolph and I have had some very agreeable conversations, but he can be contentious, and he seems to believe that political reform is actually possible.  "Progressives," like Brother Adolph, are just as aware as Lenin was that government can never be anything more than a mechanism for the control of the masses. The masses are no stupider, than the ruling minority, but they are disorganized and also more poorly informed than the ruling minority, furthermore as Adam Smith sadly pointed out in 1776, the elites make the laws.

Capitalists, as James Madison stated in 1787, are divided into competing factions with mutually repugnant interests.  Political conflicts, whether inter-party, or intra-party, represent nothing more than the coalition politics of competing elite factions whose heroic role is to impede majority rule.  If Obama wins the election, which I consider unlikely, it will simply be due to the fact that a fortuitous and temporary coalition of elite minorities will have decided that he, rather than McCain, can best represent their interests.  With that in mind, I suppose I must concede that maybe he can win.

I see Obama as stamped exactly from the Kennedy/Reagan/Clinton mold, and I see no reason why I should be any more annoyed or excited by Obama than by anyone else.  He's just another clean-cut, articulate, polished gentleman of African extraction, with a high IQ and an appeal to young White liberals, Unitarian ministers, and Colored church ladies.   Very much in the same pattern as Condoleezza Rice, Manning Marable, Skip Gates, Evelyn Higgenbotham, Cornel West, Lonnie Guinier, Colin Powell, Mary Berry, John Hope Franklin, Adelaide Cromwell, Tiger Woods, and Adolph Reed---or, for that matter, Wilson Moses.

As for the current work of Wilson Moses, I am afraid I am not able to spend the summer in France, as I had planned.  Over the past 4 years, I have been able to reside a mere 11 months in Paris and only 3 months in Berlin.  A man of my severe disabilities finds the amount of time available ludicrously inadequate for one's ongoing projects.

I have been working on a short piece in comparative literature, on the medieval romance of Tristan und Isolde, which originated in my long-standing interest in Wagner, in whom Du Bois was also interested.  Wagner used only the Mittelhochdeutsch version.  I have been looking mainly at the 19th century reconstructions in modern French and German, with only occasional references to the original medieval languages, which I still find exceedingly difficult.  I am making good progress on another book, that offers a critique of the Political Thought of the Great White Fathers, whom I compare to their European contemporaries.  Thomas Jefferson's abilities and accomplishments were somewhat similar to those of the severely disadvantaged Benjamin Banneker, but far inferior to those of Kant, Goethe, Hume, Mozart, Haydn, Herder, Beaumarchais, or Adam Smith.  

I have been reading Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Aime Césaire of Martinique, both of whom encountered the works of  Leo Frobenius, although much later than Du Bois did.  I got the idea for this project from a speech that Senghor gave at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, originally published in German (1982), but subsequently available in French as well.  As Senghor explains, the Francophone Africans had to wait for the translation of Ursprung der afrikanischen Kulturen, into French.  Césaire and Senghor (to a greater extent) were influenced by Gobineau's Sur l'inegalité des races, which Du Bois seems to have known only from the decapitated American translation of Benjamin Nott (also read by Frederick Douglass), but I have touched on this in recent publications.  

This butchered translation may explain why Senghor and Cesaire— "Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai!"—recognized some of the points that I have made in my recent articles on Du Bois.   See my introduction to Brother Skip Gates' Oxford edition of Black Folk Then and Now.   Also see my article on Du Bois in Shamoon Zamir's Cambridge Handbook to Du Bois, which will be published this summer, or so I have been promised.   But I am planning a longer work on Du Bois and the Francophones as a long-term book-length project that will address both Frobenius and Gobineau, not to mention Oswald Spengler.

As you can see, I have much-too-much on my plate, but since family matters will probably keep me in the United States of America for the next 11 months, I may be forced to quit flitting around, and get a little writing done, for a change.

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Orlando Patterson is a public intellectual. For eight years, he was Special Advisor for Social Policy and Development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. He was a founding member of Cultural Survival, one of the leading advocacy groups for the rights of indigenous peoples, and was for several years a board member of Freedom House, a major civic organization for the promotion of freedom and democracy around the world.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. Professor Loury is a distinguished academic economist who has contributed to a variety of areas in applied microeconomic theory: welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of income distribution.

"About Face" is a necessary read. It concerns Glenn Loury's "transformation":

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Glenn Loury: A Nation of Jailers—A second piece on Glenn Loury, “A Nation of Jailers” fuels a continuing dialogue with regard to Obama's Father's Day speech and the perennial chastisement of black men as irresponsible. I agree with Loury, the lecture is probably necessary but the discussion cannot end there.
 
Clearly, Loury understands that the Obama father speech was acutely political and probably smart politics to emote and fire up black women for they are more likely to vote in larger numbers than black men in November.  Maybe Obama discovered the black gender proportional figures of voters during the primaries.
 
In "Nation of Jailers" it is stated that more than 7 million black men are caught up in the criminal justice system, though 1.6 million are imprisoned and there’s a large number who are not in prison with felony charges which disqualify them to vote in November and for many other reasons. Depending on what happens between now and November, a large number of black men may become disinterested and decide to sit out the general election. This attitude was termed "male envy" by one of my correspondents. So Obama may have indeed written the bottom half of the black male vote off as inconsequential.
 
A related matter. Louis Reyes Rivera has given these bottom-half brothers (and sisters) of a voice in the recent publication The Bandana Republic A Literary Anthology by Gang Members and Their Affiliates  (The Bandana Republic).
 
If libraries have not already bought it, they should be encouraged to do so. I think a lot of young people who are reading urban novels would go for this book, especially in the branches. High school kids might indeed want to check it out.—Rudy

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Responses

Rudy, I especially sent this article ["About Face"] to you, because I heard the Bill Moyers and Orlando Patterson and Glenn Loury interview.  Loury was not anti-Obama, nor did  he try trash man as some blacks are now trying to do.  He did, however, raise some important issues.—Herbert

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Herbert, those issues are not being addressed, and certainly not by you, it seems. Anyone who raises questions about policies and programs proclaimed by Obama is "anti-Obama" or deemed as "trashing" him; all the while, they are willing to give him a free pass because of the color of his skin. Here, I am paraphrasing Loury. But here he speaks for himself:

Here is what Loury says further and I encourage you to read and reread the interview manuscript:

This is a critique of Obama, not a pandering, to his views, programs and policies, which Loury suggests is the attitude of the 90% black voters for Obama in the primaries.—Rudy

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Rudy, I'm asking around to find out about a way to do a livelink.  You have a great collection of writers, poets, philosophersand artists who really go to "deep" when it comes to issues. These are the folk that we don't see on the corporate media programs and they have a much better sense of the national pulse (or heartbeat).  We're back to the lesser of two evils again and, if we support Obama as the lesser then we have to devise a strategy that will keep the fire burning beneath his soles. I'd like to hear a discussion of the issue—live.  I'm going to try and stir the pot. . . .  Regardless of how much Barack and others may want racism to be gone, I'm a skeptic and recall what a therapist friend once told me about the end of relationships:  That it takes at least half the length of the relationship to get over it.  The abuse by this country of its citizens of African Descent went nearly four hundred years . . . we've got a long way to go. Let's just hope that, if Obama wins, he won't screw up as badly as the other 44.  But we'll still have to get his ear and be a gadfly constantly buzzing and disturbing him, making/keeping him aware that we're not going to be passive in our acceptance of what comes from inside the beltway.—Chuck

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Morning my friend.  I read About Face early this am.  Thanks so much to you and Wilson for turning me on to this.  I loved it.  I understand it.  I understand what happened to Glenn.  I will re-read it and send it to others.  I understand "discrimination contact."  Brilliant way of putting it.  Love—Peggy

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Hi. It will be interesting to read about Loury. He did a lot of damage before we was "transformed". How interesting. Forgive me if I am somewhat skeptical. But I will definitely read it.—Joyce

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I think his [Obama's] speech had a triple purpose 1) connect with white voters who already believe what he said 2) to challenge the Black men who are not and have not been tcb'ing to step up and 3) like you share firing up Black women—I think though that since men are just as emotional as women—he's was appealing to everybody's emotions at some level—acknowledged or not emotions are part of all decisions folk make—another reason more of us need to get connected to how we really feel. Last, he didn't get me fired up—I've been fired up about brothers for both powerfully positive (the ones who "do" take care of home, family, etc. who do struggle against oppression, who do create wonderful art, serve community in numerous ways, etc.: my grandpa, my brother, my husband, Mandela the list is long) and negative (the lst is long) reasons for decades. 
 
At my center I love Black men, need them in the world and in my life. Don't excuse the ones who are out here fucking up royal.—Mary

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posted 26 June 2008