The Counterpublic Papers vol. 1 no. 17

With the end of last Tuesday’s class the hardest academic year I’ve had on the other side of tenure is done. I can probably blame the fact that I’m going to need reading glasses for the first time in my life on middle age, but it sounds much better to say that the year was so fucking hard that it took my eyesight. Like I waged a battle against enormous forces and the toll was so immense I have to squint to read fine print. So I’ll go with that. Even though I know I sound about as smart as #24 in line on Free Comic Book Day (yes it’s a thing, yes i was #28 in line, yes I waited with my son a couple of hours before the store was open) who ended up leaving to get a second fifth of cheap vodka. But I’m sticking with my story. 

Vision fails while facing enormous odds. 

I’ll embellish as necessary. When my hearing goes because I’ve taken up DJing again, it won’t be because I was too stupid to think of wearing earplugs, it’ll be because I’d lost another battle facing enormous odds. (No. “Middle age” doesn’t count as a foe, as getting to middle age is far better than the alternative.)

I knew this was coming. We’d lost several black faculty members over the course of the past couple of years, so I knew I’d have to play a role in keeping the Center of Africana Studies afloat, a role in helping draw black faculty back to the campus, and a role (albeit small) in black student life. Similarly with the uprising I knew I’d have to play a role in what was happening in Baltimore. And I figured that a family transition intimated in Knocking the Hustle would occur (my wife and I separated in December—in fact today is technically our 23rd anniversary). So none of this came out of the blue. I just hoped that by the end of the academic year I wouldn’t be crawling on my knees hoping and praying that next year wasn’t as bad as this year. 

Thankfully I’m still standing.

(In fact, my vision seems to improving as I type. Nice.)

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Last week I moderated the last Redlining event. For those of you who’ve just joined us, at the beginning of the last academic year I joined the steering committee of the 21st Century Cities Initiative, a Hopkins project designed to both attract money from donors interested in urban affairs and to bring together scholars interested in problem solving the city. I joined the initiative reluctantly—I knew that being one of the only black faculty on campus meant that I would be asked to serve on every committee loosely dealing with racial issues known to man—but was convinced by a colleague that it’d be a good idea. At the very end of their first meeting of the year as they searched for a theme to focus on, I suggested redlining, proposing a month long series examining its causes and consequences as well as potential solutions. They supported the idea and ran with it. 

Now for me, the purpose of this series was never just to have a series of discussions on redlining. I do believe in the power of ideas, particularly in moments of crisis, but the power of ideas doesn’t lie solely in the ability of ideas to generate other ideas…lord knows folks can talk up a storm about “race” and “racial relations” if they’re given the space to do so. The purpose of the series was to generate enough critical discussion about the issue among stakeholders that they’d be willing to re-orient their interests to take region wide action seriously. 

So the last event of the series happened this past wednesday at Parks and People (near Mondawmin Mall, one of the uprising’s two epicenters). The last panel consisted of Sonja Sohn (who’d moderated every panel in the series but served as a panelist this time out), Marc Steiner (one of the most progressive voices on radio and a 60+ year Baltimorean), Michael Cryor, leader of One Baltimore, and another 60+ Baltimorean), and myself. I served as the moderator which gave Sonja an opportunity to contribute to the conversation a bit more. It was a good conversation…but again the purpose wasn’t just to have conversation for the sake of conversation. In my own case I think institutions like Hopkins have a threefold responsibility to take redlining seriously. They’re responsible as institutions of higher learning—students shouldn’t be able to matriculate without understanding how redlining shaped the nation. They’re responsible as research institutions—you can’t understand a range of social processes without understanding redlining. And finally they’re responsible because many of them are complicit, as many of them benefitted from redlining and some of them were indirectly responsible for generating the maps in the first place. The conversation went well, and at the end of it I proposed the development of a large research initiative to study redlining. We’ll see where it goes, but at the end of the event at least one stakeholder suggested that that the idea was a no-brainer. We’ll see where it goes.

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A few weeks ago Mark Bernstein (University of Michigan regent) donated $3 million to create a multicultural center on campus, replacing the William Monroe Trotter House (which had long outgrown its usefulness). A longer story about it can be found here but I want to highlight one sentence:

There was a Trotter House which was its own building, located on the edge of campus. There will now be a Trotter Center which will be housed inside of the new Bernstein-Bendit Center. 

I noted that the 21st Century Cities Initiative has two purposes. It has an intellectual purpose…but it also has another purpose, to attract financial resources from donors interested in urban issues. We can argue that the American university itself now has at least two purposes, an intellectual purpose, and a financial purpose. I don’t write about the university much in Knocking the Hustle but a number of other scholars have, arguing that the university like other major American institutions is being neoliberalized. And as a consequence they’re turning more and more to wealthy donors to fulfill functions that would in other contexts, be fulfilled by public resources.

 In this case the University of Michigan was interested in creating a new multicultural center, with this interest generated in part by student protest. Michigan didn’t have the resources to build the student center, so it turned to wealthy donors interested in creating space for students and interested in supporting their alma mater. And as is customary the university responded to their largesse by naming the building after the donors.

Sounds straightforward right?

Here’s the issue. William Monroe Trotter was one of the most important figures in American history. While some best know Booker T. Washington as the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, it is probably better that we know him for his accomodationism—rather than contesting Jim Crow racism and disfranchisement, Washington argued that blacks were better off accommodating it. Trotter was one of the first prominent African Americans to contest Washington, starting an independent newspaper (the Boston Guardian) to express anti-accomodationist politics, helping to found the NAACP to contest Washington’s stranglehold over black politics, and using the international arena when the likelihood of garnering success solely from national organizing seemed dim. 

The name “Trotter House” in other words, references a very specific time period, and calls attention to a very specific set of public values and commitments that seem in short supply. The Bernstein-Bendit Center which in effect replaces the Trotter House references a very different time period, and calls attention to a very specific set of private values and commitments. There’s overlap between these commitments in this specific case—otherwise Bernstein and his wife would have chosen to give money for other projects. However it seems to me that the public values Trotter fought for (and arguably died in poverty for) are more important than the private values embodied in naming rights.    

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President Obama gave Howard University’s graduation address. In a way it represents a homecoming of sorts, as Obama used a 2007 Howard convocation address to make one of his first quasi-campaign speeches. There’s a larger piece on presidential rhetoric calling somebody’s name…but suffice it to say that both Howard speeches embraced black protest and blackness itself (last week Obama actually told graduates to be “confident in their blackness”) while many of the speeches delivered in between focused less on black protest than on black cultural dysfunction. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the 2007 speech occurred on the heels of the Jena 6 protests, while this last Howard speech occurs on the heels of Black Lives Matter. 

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And on that note you’re reading the (lightly edited) Counterpublic Papers and I’m Lester Spence, Patricia Spence’s oldest son. Happy Mother’s Day to all you fly mothers. Get on up and dance.