Last night on NOW, Bill Moyers' show, David Brancaccio interviewed Constance Rice, co-director of the Advancement Project, an organization that advocates "social and racial justice" in the U.S. I found her remarks very interesting and sensible, and wished the interview had been longer.
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Yes, Rice is a very interesting person.
To me, the primary strength of her arguments is the consistent focus on the vital need for increased (or genuine) democracy. This is rather unusual in black public intellectual circles which is mostly characterized by, on the one hand, Tony Brown style 'dress and act for success' notions concerned with creating more petit bourgeois and corporate execs and, on the other hand, by Afro-centrists who fetishize some romantic idea of 'blackness'.
Rice and her colleagues at the Advancement Project - http://www.advancementproject.org/index.html - seem to have made a cognitive breakthrough beyond do-gooder band-aiding,'up-by-your-bootstraps' boosterism and 'the man's holding me down' posturing.
If The US was a democracy, the argument goes (I'm simplifying here), many of the structural obstacles to personal and societal advancement would melt away. It's the lack of democracy which creates the environment for persistent racism, corporate dominance, aggressive and destructive foreign policy and all the other ills we sadly know so well.
It was good of the Now folks to have her on; these ideas need a wider audience.
On the surface, it all sounds very reasonable and safe (safe enough for NPR even); but look beyond the surface, the apparently non-radical veneer. The full implications of what she advocates would overturn the way we live.
Some samples of her thought:
Alternet article on Dean and 'Stars and Bars' loving Southern men -
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17138
Commentary (audio streams) on a variety of topics delivered for NPR's Tavis Smiley Show -
Condensed url -
Original url -
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DRM