Lester Spence addresses an audience in Watson Forum about
historical racial inequality.
SAM CARAVANA / THE DEPAUW
DePauw students found a warm haven in the Pulliam Center Thursday night when Lester K. Spence arrived in the Watson Forum. Soft conversation and laughter floated about the packed room before professor Clarissa Peterson gave Spence’s introduction.
As Peterson explained, Spence is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His lecture, entitled “The Right to Ferguson: Race, Rights, and Power in the 21st Century,” was organized as a Black History Month Talk and was presented by the Black Studies department.
“What I want to talk about today is variance,” said Spence early into the lecture. He let the word hang there; he even repeated it a few times before continuing.
A New York Times article titled “History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names” served as a significant resource for Spence’s explanation of racial inequality in the United States. Spence explained: “What you see is variance.” He could not divorce the past from his message about the present and future. “We talk about the Jim Crow era as the Jim Crow era,” said Spence, “but really we should call it the Terrorism era.” Shortly thereafter, he added, “Lynching was constitutive of capitalism in the South. The lynchings were made public, newspapers sold special editions, trains had discounts to get people there. That was an industry.”
In speaking about the Ronald Reagan era, he defined “neoliberalism” as “an ideology that promotes the idea that every human institution should be governed by the market.” He drew parallels to how a failing school might try to remedy its shortcomings by making “it run more like a business.” Cities are then expected to operate in the same way: become “entrepreneurial in their revenue income.”
Spence explained how cities result to a reliance on municipal bonds and on the militarization of the police when given this expectation. Said Spence, “One way to understand Ferguson is to understand a long history of the relationship between cops and black people.”
Junior Amanda Buening appreciated Spence’s patient approach to talking about Ferguson, as the issue is far some simplistic. “What I really liked about it the most was how he talked about the structural causes,” said Buening. “It’s not just one thing that can be fixed, it’s a lot of things that need to be fixed.”
Junior Hannah Viti also appreciated the structural focus of Spence’s speech. She said, “I don’t think you can segregate this issue to just Michael Brown, or just Ferguson, or even just relations between police and black males. It’s a much bigger, systemic, cultural racism.”
St. Louis County has 90 municipalities, each with their own electoral and tax structure. To explain this significant political reality, Spence “cherry-picked” various municipalities and revealed the ratio between the black population percentage and the revenue percentage those municipalities receive only from “policing and fining.” “If your county depends upon policing,” asked Spence, “what kind of relationship [is there going to be] between the police and its citizens?”
This question largely explains why Spence assigns so much importance to #blacklivesmatter movement. “The move to make black lives matter is arguably one of the most important moves we’ve seen in black populations in modern time,” said Spence. “I can’t think of something more important.”
Buening added, “I definitely learned I need to get more into politics. I feel like I’ve definitely been getting more involved with the issues, but as he was talking about grassroots movements, I feel we aren’t active enough.”
St. Louis native, junior Taylor Jones said, “Of course when students go away from their hometown, and especially when it’s a town of violence and inequality, and it actually impacts you personally, you want to do something about it. You want to make change.” She smiled when she spoke, however. An optimism shined in her eyes as she said, “I feel really empowered to learn more about it and to find the solution to it, and study it, to help alleviate the problem.”