The Counterpublic Papers vol. 1 no. 18

For those of you on the other side of 45, you ever had one of those days where you wake up in the morning, had sleep good enough to remember what you dreamed about, only to find someone staring back at your bathroom mirror that looks about ten to fifteen years older than you thought you were?

You have?

Good morning.

You haven’t?

Well. There’s a small possibility that some of my undergrads have found out about this newsletter, or heavens to murgatroid one of my flesh and blood children. 

So I can’t say “fuck you.”

(But I can think it.)

…..

One of my girls from way back has gotten over Prince’s death just enough to write a blistering post about Beyoncé’s Lemonade and “Formation”. (I’m over his death enough to finally listen to something else on hard-drive—give Ambrose Akinmusire a spin—both his 2011 When the Heart Emerges Glistening and his 2014 The Imagined Savior is Far Easier to Paint bear listening…with him and Kamasi Washington I haven’t been this excited about the future of jazz music in over 20 years.) And while I know she isn’t alone I think the fact that you can’t find more than say five or six critical examinations of the role of capital says a great deal about contemporary black political ideology, but it also says something about the increasing coherence of contemporary black feminism.

So let’s go back. Fifteen years ago Michael Dawson publishes Black Visions, perhaps the most important book on U.S. black political ideology written in the past forty or so years. In it he analyses the content of black political ideology using primary documents and the degree to which various black political ideologies cohere in black mass publics. It’s one thing to, for example, claim that something like black radical thought exists in the texts of someone like Adolph Reed, but it’s another thing entirely to claim that something like black radical thought exists in the attitudes of black folk from New York to Los Angeles. 

Although we can go back several decades to find evidence of something we can call black feminism in the texts of writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, activists like Angela Davis and the members of the Combahee River Collective…Dawson doesn’t find evidence of a coherent black feminism. That is to say, if you generated a battery of questions based on black feminist principles as they appear in text…then surveyed folks based on those questions, the answers to those questions wouldn’t cohere statistically. You could no better predict how a sister would answer one of those questions based on how they answered another of those questions than you could by flipping a coin. 

Now I think to a certain extent this happened because the questions weren’t designed as well as they could’ve been. The National Black Politics Study (the survey Dawson put in the field to generate the data used to write Black Visions), like many surveys used to assess black attitudes, didn’t have the same level of resources surveys like the General Social Survey and the American National Election Study have. The questions contained in the GSS and ANES are routinely tested and retested over and over again and this process tends to lead to much better survey questions. Further both the ANES and the GSS are released once every few years refining them even more. 

But I think this also happened because the infrastructure needed to generate a coherent black feminism didn’t exist yet. The reason black nationalism is so coherent is because we can find a whole host of black institutions that implicitly and explicitly articulate black nationalist ideas, from more community centered ones like the idea that a city like Baltimore should be run by black politicians, to more separatist ones like the idea that black people should actually leave the US for Africa. These ideas are generated in popular media, in scholarly texts, in newspapers, in black barbershops and beauty salons, in black organizations, and in black music. 

The growing body of black feminist scholarship, blogs, and mass media, which itself is the function of the partial growth of black women as consumers and political power brokers has in effect produced a newly coherent black feminism. I’m betting if Dawson or someone else put a survey into the field now they’d find that if you asked the same questions you’d find much more coherence now.

But.

There were actually two other black political ideologies that were statistically incoherent—black conservatism and black radicalism. The incoherence of something like a black conservatism explains not just the lack of support for someone like a Ben Carson, if we extended the concept of “incoherence” beyond the statistical sense I’m using, we can also explain Ben Carson himself. 

The incoherence of something like a black radicalism explains the low level of support for someone like Bernie Sanders.

It also however explains the content of black nationalism on one hand and black feminism on the other. 

What do I mean?

During the nineties the two largest black nationalist mobilizations were arguably the Million Man March—which at its base argued that the reason black people were broken wasn’t white supremacy but rather the cultural failures of black men—and the failed black nationalist attempt to get black political officials in Detroit to award a casino to a black business owner. If we looked at the content of black nationalist thought and stripped it of its racial overtones what we’d see is an economically and socially conservative program. If black radicalism were more coherent, we’d see a different type of black nationalism. At the very least we’d see more contestation among black nationalists, with some black nationalists promoting conservative visions and others promoting more radical ones. 

The reason we can simultaneously point to dozens of wonderful thinkpieces on Lemonade and only a few thinkpieces critical of its capitalist implications is because the content of contemporary black feminism lacks a radical core. 

One step forward. Two steps back.

….

I’ve been taking pictures seriously since 2004. Taught a class combining black politics and photography some years ago. But as a result of a bit of burnout I put my camera down for a few months. 

I picked it back up again. I’ve written a piece about what I call the racial residual. I think I’ve found a way to capture that residual on film.

We’ll see.

In fact if you take the seed of the idea I have, and plant it within the idea contained here, an idea expressed in the redlining series, you’d have something. 

(One of the readers here asked if the redline series sponsored a reading list. Not yet. But soon.)

….

I think that’s enough. I’m DJing at The Crown on Tuesday night. The Prince party was just the warmup. Doing it with a colleague from history. He’ll be playing a mix of house, electro, and disco, with an emphasis on track selection. I’ll be playing house, maybe some soul remixes, and a little bit of electro, with an emphasis on mixing. If you’re around, come around.

Oh. 

Someone’s taken my ideas about organizing and activism and put them to video and music.  

See you next week. If you're around. Here's to looking in the mirror and seeing someone your age staring back.