The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 7

Author

Lester Spence
January 15, 2024

So I began writing this issue on Maryland’s eastern shore, in Cambridge MD. The first time I was in Cambridge was a bit over a decade ago. I was surprised to see so many black people. That was the midwesterner in me coming out—if I’d grown up here (or even read Fredrick Douglass’ biographies a bit closer at the time) I’d have known that the eastern shore has a long history. Harriet Tubman’s journey begins here. And more recently, before Baltimore exploded in 1968 in response to Martin Luther King jr.’s assassination, Cambridge did. 

One of the first emails I received on my last day in Cambridge concerned Dr. Sherita Hill Golden, our medical school’s Chief Diversity Officer. One of the things her office does is post a newsletter, one designed to make stakeholders aware of various initiatives, and then one designed to educate them about contemporary DEI terminology. Her office’s most recent newsletter defined “privilege” in a way standard to the sector, as an individual aspect of one’s identity that grants or withholds benefits.  A recipient of the email publicized it and the next thing you know we get this:

I remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter and most pundits assessed it as an economic move, wondering if Musk would be able to turn a profit with it. It wasn’t ever primarily an economic move, it was a political move, which perhaps Musk thought would have economic benefit.

Not long after Musk picks this up, Donald Trump jr picks this up. And then three things happen.

The Med School Dean and President both back away from the definition of privilege, apologizing for it, an email coming from Golden apologizes for the newsletter and Golden is temporarily moved from her post.

And the forces arrayed against her make her private information available.

Now last week I noted that what happened to Claudine Gay (and relatedly to Penn’s president Elizabeth Magill) was part of a political project, rather than an academic one bound up with academic standards. I didn’t say what that political project was last week. I didn’t, for instance, write that the political project was a Zionist project, although in Gay and Magill’s instance the precipitating factor was student activism in support of Palestine. 

Neither Zionism nor Racism captures the full range of the project. If Zionism was the project, what is happening to Golden wouldn’t be happening. If anti-black racism (focused particularly on black women) was the project what happened to Magill wouldn’t have happened.

Although I don’t agree with Adolph Reed on a range of issues, I find that few are as able to deconstruct the politics behind identity construction as he does. In Nonsite.org, Reed uses a New Orleans case to unpack these dynamics. A little over a year ago, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, the city’s first black woman mayor, was the subject of a recall campaign. The campaign failed, but what stood out to many was the seeming racial nature of the campaign—even though the chairs of the recall campaign were themselves black, white petition signees outvoted black their black counterparts over 3 to 1 (23K to 7K) in favor of the recall. For Reed, this approach, “…offers the benefits of familiarity.” It fits into well-worn grooves of racial interest-group politics on both sides.” But such an approach misses important data. In this instance, while 23,000 white voters did support the recall effort with their vote, New Orleans has over 80,000 white voters, which means that over 57,000 whites did not vote for the recall. 

For Reed race ended up being a convenient means of scapegoating:

The recall campaign condensed frustrations and anxieties into a politics of scapegoating that fixates all those vague or inchoate concerns onto a malevolent, alien entity that exists to thwart or destroy an equally vague and fluid “us.” And that entity is partly racialized because race is a discourse of scapegoating.

But race is not the only basis for scapegoating. As I indicate elsewhere, “the MAGA fantasy of ‘the pedophile Democratic elite’ today provides a scapegoat no one might reasonably defend and thus facilitates the misdirection that is always central to a politics of scapegoating, construction of the fantasy of the ‘Jew/Jew-Bolshevik-Jew banker’ and cosmopolite/Jew and Jew/Slav subhuman did the same for Hitler’s National Socialism.”11 The scapegoat is an evanescent presence, created through moral panic and just-so stories and projected onto targeted individuals or populations posited as the embodied cause of the conditions generating fear and anxiety. As an instrument of political action, scapegoating’s objective is to fashion a large popular constituency defined by perceived threat from and opposition to a demonized other, a constituency that then can be mobilized against policies and political agendas activists identify with the evil other and its nefarious designs—without having to address those policies and agendas on their merits.

  What we’re looking at with these cases represents a similar effort to use moral panics to increase pre-existing antagonisms in such a way as to destabilize support both for American higher education and as important the principles of inquiry that these institutions seek to promote. It is crucial to note that some populations are far easier to scapegoat than others largely because the politics behind identity construction places some populations consistently outside of the border so to speak. 

I don’t know what’s going to happen here regarding this specific instance. I know that Golden has supporters (I consider myself one of them). But we have to connect this to the larger project if we’re going to properly get a handle on the forces we’re fighting against.