The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 12

Author

Lester Spence
March 08, 2024

My 5000th day is February 12, 1983. 

It’s a Saturday, so I spend the morning bowling at Satellite lanes. We win the championship that year and I think I had my high score (213) that year. I’m still living in Inkster and am in my last year at Sacred Heart in Dearborn, Michigan. I’m in love with Angela Garrison, but I don’t think she knows it. I spend my evenings during the week in basketball practice—that year we’d go on to the Catholic Youth Organization semi-finals only to lose to Saint Leo’s. I’m committed at this point to being an astronaut, but two librarians in Dearborn’s Bryant Public Library refer to me as “the little professor.” It’s a few months after former (racist) mayor Orville Hubbard’s death (I remember the funeral procession began at the funeral home next to Sacred Heart), but his legacy is still felt. Dearborn residents passed a law that prevented non-Dearborn residents from using public facilities, and as a result I stopped going to the library. It’s clear—even to me as a child—who the law was designed to police. At this point if you asked me where I wanted to go to college I’d have said Michigan.  

(As far as I was concerned, everything after 1999 was “the future” to me, and I couldn’t imagine being alive after 2000 much less some of the things I’d experience. Neither Hubbard nor I would have imagined that forty years later, Dearborn would become majority Arab-American. And although I’d written an essay five years earlier about being the first African American President it was humorous.)

My 10000th day is October 21, 1996. 

I’m in graduate school at Michigan, living in family housing with my wife Shawn (who I’d met in undergrad) and my daughter Imani who turns two in November. I know she’s just going to be my first child, but don’t know she’s going to be the first of five. A few weeks prior I’d come across an article on the web making the case for the day as the fundamental unit of time. It linked to an age calculator and when inputting my date of birth I found out I was weeks away from my 10,000th day. We celebrate the day (Thursday) with my friend Al Robertson. 

My graduate stipend was $10K/year. Governor John Engler (whose twins were born the same day as Imani—he came and visited them when we were in the hospital and I recall kicking myself for letting him see Imani) was in the beginning of his second term and he’d spent much of his first and second term privatizing services and reforming welfare. Further, Bill Clinton had signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) just a few months before. We were on food stamps for a while but after these shifts we no longer qualified.

I’d defended my dissertation proposal—I was interested in studying the dynamics of gender and political participation among black Detroiters. And I was teaching at Washtenaw Community College to make extra money—in fact because my pickup basketball schedule was MWF I’m pretty sure I taught earlier that day. While my dissertation subhect—how gender functions to shape political behavior among blacks—was and still is important, I didn’t know that I’d spend the next thirty years or so studying the broader political-economic shifts that’d begun in that period—the elections of Clinton, Engler, and Archer all helped to consolidate the neoliberal turn. At this point my “plan” is to get a job somewhere close and then return to Michigan. I had an interest in photography because of a summer job I’d had at an oil refinery in 1989, but it’d be three years before I pick up a camera (in Santa Cruz during my first or second job talk). 

My 15000th day is June 30, 2010. 

I spent that Wednesday in DC at the Smithsonian, scanning documents for an NAACP project. In the evening I’m at a comedy event where my wife is performing. I’m there but I’m not really there. I’m in my fifth year as an Assistant Professor at Hopkins. I’m about a year or so away from Stare in the Darkness and have loose ideas for Knocking the Hustle in my head. I’ve been writing and talking about the neoliberal turn for a while at this point. On June 27, I’d written the following:

Twenty dollars a kid.

Ever since Obama penned Dreams from My Father he’s publicly wrestled with his father’s absence. His 2008 Father’s Day speech, delivered on the campaign trail, was one of his first attempts to translate this deeply personal experience into public policy pronouncements. 

And he didn’t stop once he was elected. 

This week, Barack Obama rolled out phase two of the fatherhood initiative, an initiative his predecessor began. Phase two includes an updated website that promises to include tips on responsible fatherhood, and motivation from famous figures in entertainment and sports, as well as evidence based research. More importantly it includes a promise to get Congress to allot $500 million to a proposed Fatherhood, Marriage, and Families Innovation Fund, as well as more resources for job training programs and jobs programs for fathers who are out of work, even if they do not live with their children. 

Now when you read $500 million that looks like a lot of money. And in certain contexts it is. Certainly if we read about a sports figure signing a $500 million contract we’d think it was absurd, even if that sports figure was absurdly good. If we read about someone winning a $500 million lottery, we’d think that person was one of the luckiest people on earth.

However this numbers looks very different when we turn to US government spending. $500 million is a drop in the bucket. We have spent 2,000 times more on the war. And another 2,000 times more on the financial bailout. This year alone we have spent almost 50 times more on the war on drugs. Doesn’t seem like a lot now does it? In fact, according to census figures there are approximately 24 million children who live without their fathers. Most but not all of these children are black. Most but not all of these children are poor. 

Now if we take that $500 million that Obama and divide that by the number of children who live without fathers we’d get….approximately twenty dollars per kid. 

Barely enough for a classic Xbox 360 game.

Now I understand that Obama thinks that fatherhood is primarily a moral issue, primarily an issue of personal responsibility. But twenty dollars a kid? Plus a website that at least on first glance barely appears to work? Perhaps for Obama $20/kid is “moral” enough. But for me (black father of five), I think he’d be much better off just getting an Xbox game and calling it a day. If this is what an Obama moral initiative looks like, perhaps black fathers really are better off on their own. 

I’m a year away from the publication of Stare in the Darkness so I’m editing it now. Imani’s about to be 16, Kamari’s 14, Kiserian’s 12, Niara is 10, and Khari is 6. And I’m in the first year of a broad attempt to get my life on track. I found a (private) post I’d written on my blog in July 2008 called “Looking to the Future and Seeing the Abyss” that gets what I was actively fighting against at this point:

In the end we all die right?

So why am I so nervous right now about the future?

Because we only have $50 for the rest of the month, and I'm about to turn 40 having to be responsible not only for my retirement but for my wife's. And we're bearing more debt than 95% of the American population…

This figure can't be right, but knowing this doesn't make me feel good.

I've got skills up the wazoo and we can do this, but knowing this doesn't make me feel good.

Damn we should be able to get something out of these troubles. Something more than a life lesson of what not to do, something that can actually help us deal with the challenges we are facing.

Times like this I wish I'd filled my prescription.

I don’t know if I’m going to get tenure at this point. 

I’ve stopped paying my mortgage. And I can’t see a way out, other than work. I’m planning for Knocking the Hustle to be my last book, so when I don’t get tenure I can at least say I’ve made a mark somehow. A couple of weeks earlier I was at the US Social Forum held back home in Detroit. Occupy Wall Street was a year away. I’m one of the internet’s first black public writers and one of the few black voices on NPR. I’m in my sixth year as a serious amateur photographer. One of my favorite shots of the year ended up being the cover of my book:

Kris Klayton

Today (March 8, 2024) is my 20,000th day.

A week ago I was in Columbus watching my middle son Kiserian fight his first amateur Muay Thai tournament—he’d go on to win the belt for his weight class. Two weeks ago I conducted the first Hopkins KSAS Senate’s first Public Assembly (on the proposed Hopkins police force). A few days ago I celebrated my girlfriend Tracey’s birthday. I am now the longest tenured black faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. For the first time in my life, money isn’t a problem. My daughter Imani is a card-carrying librarian at the University of Houston, my oldest son Kamari is a consultant in NYC. Looking back I can see patterns…and at least a few of you who’ve known me for the last 5000 days or so can see some of them too. There’s a lot more to say and write about this period. But I’ve a Senate meeting to attend…and a day to celebrate. Thanks to those of you who’ve made this possible.