The Counterpublic Papers vol. 1 no. 16

Yesterday was the first day I was able to get up out of bed without trying to convince myself that Prince’s death was a rumor. And last night I DJ’d publicly for the first time in 33 years at a party held in Prince’s honor. It was cathartic to see folk from 18-65 celebrate his life. A few of my undergrads were there—including one who’d taken pretty much every class I offered over the past three years. His comment?

“Professor Spence, that was without a doubt the blackest thing I’d ever done in Baltimore.”

I’ll take that as a victory.

I think we’re going to make this a yearly event. A LOT of tracks we didn’t play. But when you’ve got 39 albums to choose from at least, you’re not going to be able to do much. If you’re interested in seeing the playlist let me know. 

…

This past week sees us at the one year anniversary of Freddie Gray. And there’s a lot to cover, so what I’ll do is focus on a few quick hits in no particular order.

The week after Freddie Gray was murdered, The New Republic published a hit piece on Cornel West written by Michael Eric Dyson. By this time West had become known as one of Obama’s most trenchant critics, and Dyson—who’d earlier been a critic himself—was known as one of his staunchest African American defenders. I thought the piece never should’ve been published. Just within the sphere of black intellectual production Roland Fryer’d further established himself as the most important black public intellectual no one had ever heard of (hm. that’s a guardian article title if there ever was one.) by winning the Jon Bates Clark medal award, annually given by the American Economist Association to the economist under 40 who’s made the most significant contributions to economics. I write about Fryer in Knocking the Hustle, but suffice it to say that he’s done more to impact the public than West and Dyson COMBINED (with a lot left over—did you know that if you put San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan inside of Detroit you’d have 39 square miles left over? you could fit West and Dyson inside of Fryer like that). And of course there’s no way in hell a personal beef between Dyson and West was more important than Gray’s murder. A picture of Baltimore during martial law. The ride home.     Baltimore public officials shut public transportation down during the uprising. But they didn’t shut down the Hopkins Metro stop (which, depending on which direction you go, is either the first or the last stop on the one line above-underground Metro system). So I was able to take the Hopkins shuttle from to that metro stop. The link above captures much of the ride—there are usually seven or so underground stops…but on this ride the Metro moved through all of them. Felt like I was in a science fiction movie.

Baltimore held elections last week.

I lot of people have asked me about how the uprising affected Baltimore politics. The candidates we saw run for mayor and many of the city council seats were the best candidates the city’s seen for a while. In fact I don’t think i’ve ever seen a mayoral race with as many quality candidates. I’m going to write more about this soon, but there’s no way in hell we get these candidates, nor the progressive rhetoric they articulate, without the uprising. How does this new energy translate into policy though? That’s really the question. Looking over the notes I wrote to myself last year I seem to have focused primarily on economic policy—on generating more economic opportunity to Baltimore’s most distressed communities. It’s not just about economics. It’s primarily about returning the right to the city to the folk who live in it. Economics is in here, but there’s much more to it than that. 

Along these lines I gave a talk last week at Rutgers. I ended up giving the paper an innocuous title, but while I was drastically trying to finish it at the last minute a new title came up: Freddie Gray and the Black Power Horizon. 

Sorry it isn't more. Dedicating my the ginger ale and whisky I'm about to drink to your good health. This is the sixteen (lightly edited) issue of The Counterpublic Papers. And I'm Lester Spence.    (I'd write something like "Lester Spence out", but Kobe Bryant's retirement doesn't really seem to mean that much to me anymore, considering.)