The ‘Free’ Market, Public Goods & Black Lives

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The ‘Free’ Market, Public Goods, and the Making and Unmaking of Black Lives

A Conversation with Lester Spence

Join us for a discussion with Johns Hopkins University Professor Lester Spence about the ways inequality, government, entrepreneurship, and private investment impact black communities. This discussion will be moderated by Duke University Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith. Over the past decade, Professor Spence has published articles on American institutional legitimacy in the wake of the contentious 2000 Presidential election, the effects of long-term black political empowerment on black participation, the role of media narratives on black attitudes about HIV/AIDS, and the determinants of support for black nationalism. But with his first and second books (2011 W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Book Award Winner Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics and Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics) he’s become particularly interested in studying the causes and consequences of growing inequality within black communities.

Free and open to the public. Copies of Knocking the Hustle will be for sale at the event by The Regulator Bookshop. Co-sponsored by the Forum for Scholars and Publics; the Department of African & African American Studies; the Center for Arts, Digital Culture, and Entrepreneurship; the Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity; Black Wall Street Homecoming; and Scalawag.