The Counterpublic Papers vol. 9 no. 2

Author

Lester Spence
September 04, 2024

LL Cool J is a grandfather. 

Now I imagine that some combination of folk reading this are likely young enough for this not to matter.

But for those of us that do?

I’m listening to Common and Pete Rock’s new album (The Auditorium vol. 1) with old ears. A bit less than twenty years ago when I moved here I used to take the MARC to DC regularly to tape Tell Me More episodes with Michele Martin and Jimi Izrael. Common’s Be was the soundtrack—I’d just gotten my first iPod and played it on repeat. I hear a lot of Be in The Auditorium, but I also hear Pete Rock’s T.R.O.Y. as well—thematically Rock’s pretty much always been about what I guess I’d call “grown ass hip-hop.” I noted in an earlier issue that one of the reasons André 3000 turned away from the mic was because he thought he could express more adult themes through the flute. It’s not like a lot of time has passed since that moment but my thoughts have only changed a little. There are market related reasons why 3000 might have felt that way—hip-hop still hasn’t created a Grown Ass Hip-hop subgenre and still appears to treat the genre as if its main artists are 22 year olds—but he’s in a different class. Hopefully Common and Pete Rock will help point the way forward.

….

This semester I’m teaching Urban Politics at the graduate level and American Racial Politics at the undergraduate level. We’ve got any number of graduate students writing dissertations about city politics, but it’s only recently that I realized they needed to be exposed to the classics. So that’s what I’m doing. The first real week (which began yesterday, Tuesday Sept. 3) I’m kind of hazing them—they were responsible for Robert Dahl’s Who Governs and Floyd Hunter’s Community Power Structure—but as Dahl’s work is to an extent a response to Hunter’s book I figured that making them read both would be a good primer. You can learn a great deal about how politics shapes the types of questions scholars ask through reading the urban politics literature—Dahl isn’t just responding to Hunter, Dahl and Hunter both are responding to the Cold War. I’ve taught the American Racial Politics course before, but I’m adding a few wrinkles. Last week for example I had the class array itself according to race, then color, then ethnicity, and finally nationality, just to give them a sense of how these categories overlap and relate to one another in strange ways—the second lightest student in the class “color” wise is “black.” This week I talked to them about the creation of “racial common sense,” a term that I thought would’ve had a literature attached to it, but interestingly does not.

I have to say that teaching without all of the extra obligations I’ve had over the past few years has me feeling great about the semester. Like a weight’s been lifted.    

….

I think I mentioned before that I submitted a proposal to write an article in the Annual Review of Political Science. Here’s the abstract:

Abstract: Over the past decade, autocratization has increased world wide and the United States itself has seen its own democracy erode. While political scientists have begun to study both in earnest, with exceptions they’ve been unable to fully wrestle with either phenomenon. We suggest this is the the result of the discipline’s problematic racial history. At the time of its founding in the late 19th century, Political Science provided a eugenicist justification for the very hierarchies and segregations that are now under scrutiny. Race was understood to be the quintessential subject of social scientific inquiry. After World War II, political scientists rejected eugenics and instead focused on  defending democracy against totalitarianism. In doing so, they relegated racism to an ideological/irrational phenomena and thus extraneous to the core concern of the discipline. In this annual review article we refract the discipline’s contemporary and historical concern with democracy through the lens of racial politics, in order to provide scholars with tools better equipped to examine and critically diagnose contemporary politics. 

We just got the ok, so there’s still some work to do but it’ll be in the 2025 issue. It may be the most important academic article I’ve ever written.

…. 

This week and next are going to be a bit rough travel wise. I’ll be in Philadelphia from today to Friday at the American Political Science Association conference—serving on an author-meets-critics panel for Jillian Schwedler’s Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent, and then serving as Chair and Discussant for a panel on black politics and political philosophy. If you’re around let me know! Friday evening I’m coming back for a night, then flying out to Detroit to see my nephew get married. Just found out about an all-white party celebrating Kevin Saunderson’s 60th birthday, so I guess I’ll break the Labor Day rule just this one time. 

….

Interesting thing about Dahl and time. There’s a chapter at the end of Who Governs? about the democratic creed. I’m not sure how many times I’ve read the book since undergrad. Maybe a couple of dozen? But one of my students was particularly struck by this passage:

…No one, I imagine, has ever supposed that the existence of the creed entails no risks. People can be deceived by appeals intended to destroy democracy in the name of democracy. Dissenters who believe in the democratic creed may unwittingly advocate or legitimists may insist on preserving rules of the game destined to have unforeseen and unintended consequences disastrous to the stability and perhaps the survival of the democracy.

Nonetheless, we can be reasonably sure of this: even if universal belief in a democratic creed does not guarantee the stability of a democratic system, substantial decline in the popular consensus would greatly increase the chance of serious instability. How the professionals act, what they advocate, what they are likely to believe, are all constrained by the wide adherence to the creed that exists throughout the community. If a substantial segment begins to doubt the creed, professionals will quickly come forth to fan that doubt. The nature and course of an appeal to the populace will change. What today is a question of applying the fundamental norms of democracy will become tomorrow an inquiry into the validity of these norms.

Robert Dahl Who Governs? p. 325

I’d never paid this passage any real mind, to be honest. Because I’d never had any need. Until now. 

….

When I went home this summer—later than I’d planned, because I got caught up in the Delta snafu (well, not just because of that, turns out that living in the DMV makes it possible to buy a roundtrip flight involving more than one airport…imagine my surprise when I went to National Airport in DC only to be told my flight was out of Baltimore)—I drove to northern Michigan for the first time in about 20 years. I went for a house music festival, but I also went to visit Idlewild (the site of the festival). Idlewild used to be a resort for black families up until the late seventies/early eighties. My mom’s side of the family spent their summers there for decades. Given where it’s located, I thought I might get a few shots that communicate our current political moment. GIven the quote above, I think this shot works:

See you next time.