The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 13

Just two and a half more weeks and the academic year is over. It’s crazy how time flies. A few quick notes, including an overdue statement about what I’ve been up to this year. 

A bit ago, Perry Bacon wrote a column in the Washington Post about the rightward shift among non-white populations, questioning whether it’s a real thing and what it means come the election. He’s not the only one (but I don’t really feel like linking any of them). As an aside these columns and many others like them take more or less a standard horse race approach to the election. This approach was always a problem—even if we work under the assumption that most presidential elections contain a great deal of agreement between the two parties, there’s still enough variance to perform better examinations of the actual politics at play as opposed to the horse race approach that boils everything down to who’s winning and who isn’t. This approach is a particular problem now, given the radicalization of the Republican Party. 

But again, that’s an aside. 

I’m interested in another problem. 

The data problem. 

Focusing specifically on the New York Times poll quoted to signify the shift in black voters, the poll itself has a black N of approximately 110. If ten respondents in this group suggest they’re going to vote for Trump at Time A, and five additional voters suggest they’re voting for Trump at Time B, taking the poll on its face allows one to say that the black vote has increased 20% (not “twenty percentage points”—that would require an additional 22 voters). I haven’t seen a single poll that has a large enough number of black respondents to make the claims folks are making about the black electorate in general and then the black male electorate more specifically. If we’re going to take these polls and use them for anything we should use them to figure out why black populations tend to be durable supporters of both the Democratic Party specifically and then democracy more broadly, rather than make claims about ideological shifts based on bad data. While I get the pressures that come from increasingly being expected to churn out content for a reader base that seems to be dwindling, and the easy way that polls enable one to do this, it seems to me that there should be at least some attempt to examine the figures with care. And while everyone should make these attempts it is not unfair to expect black columnists to take special care here.  

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Over the past two years I’ve been working on a Sawyer Seminar project taking the right to the city concept and examining it through a black radical lens. While black radical organizers and intellectuals have long thought about the city as a specific space of black possibility and black subjugation, over the past two decades plus we’ve largely refracted that concept through the work of Henri Lefebvre. Doing so both ignores the work of organizers like James Boggs, but more broadly if we take a figure like Boggs (who was an autodidact) as the center, it ignores the critical role people outside the university take in knowledge production. Knowledge about the world (Hopkins’ tag line of sorts) isn’t simply produced in the university, to be used outside of it, it is produced in the city itself. We’ve held a number of public and more curated events over the past two years and we’re coming to a close with an exhibition featuring the work of radical black filmmaker Kurt Orderson, and a workshop examining the black radical right to the city concept that will bring together a number of stakeholders. During one of our recent parlors, I spoke with Dayvon Love on the issue of reparations.   

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(The NCAA ended its 2024 season last weekend. I wrote the paragraph below a few weeks ago. See how it held up?) 

The most interesting thing to watch from my own standpoint is the growth of the women’s game. Particularly if some combination of LSU, South Carolina, Iowa, and UConn make the final four, I wouldn’t be surprised if viewership of the women’s final four passes that of the men’s. With the rise of NILs (which gives college athletes the ability to legitimately make money off of their fame for the first time) and increased transfer mobility (which gives athletes increased opportunity to move), alongside Caitlin Clark’s meteoric rise, we’ve got a confluence of events that I think will lead to a durable shift in viewing practices. And it wouldn’t surprise me if one of the consequences will be significant growth in WNBA viewership. The WNBA is already the most competitive sports league we have—with only 12 teams and 144 spots it is harder for a college player to become a professional player in the WNBA than in any other major professional sport. All it needs is the equivalent of a Magic Johnson/Larry Bird/Michael Jordan and I think its growth becomes curvilinear. I know I have no real idea of who any of the top players in men’s college basketball are, while I know at least four or five in the women’s game (along with Clark, I’d put UConn’s Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd here as well as LSU’s Angel Reese). 

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I was in Chicago a few days ago for the Midwest Political Science Association, and for Michael Dawson’s retirement. Will write about Dawson and his retirement next time. See you soon.