The Counterpublic Papers vol. 1 no. 2

Hello

Hey. My name is Lester Spence. Although sometimes I play a photographer on the streets, I write, read, research, and sometimes teach black politics. The Counterpublic Papers represents my weekly attempt to give you an update about what’s been on my mind and on my plate recently. 

Knocking the Hustle

Got a chance to do a couple of book related events last week. I had an interview with a left leaning Washington DC show and my first book signing at Red Emma’s (an independent co-operatively owned leftist bookstore). Both went well but the book signing was…well I’ve been supporting Red Emma’s since I became aware of them some ten years ago, and have gone to several of their events particularly since they moved to their current home on Maryland and North. I’ve never seen the venue that packed. There were so many people inside that they had an overflow crowd outdoors listening to the event through the store’s loudspeakers. It was humbling to say the least. From what I understand they ordered extra copies and still sold out of every book they had, except one. The q & a was pretty straightforward…there are probably three lines of questioning that I’ll get going forward. 

One set of questions will probably focus on the inter- vs intra-racial politics distinction. Why am I focusing on black politics given the role racial politics plays in the turn? Because I really view the book as a broadside against the way black politics is studied and practiced, and because I believe any successful attempt to somehow create a more progressive racial politics will come only after the black politics question is solved….I focus on black politics. I tackle racial politics a little only because I need to tell the “how we got here” story and I can’t do that without talking about racial politics. But my thing is black politics.

A second set of questions will deal with capitalism explicitly. An older sister at Red Emma’s (who hadn’t read the book) asked me whether I mentioned class at all, and whether the phrase “class struggle” appeared in the book. I believe the book is all about black class politics and black class struggle, but I don’t use that language. Similarly some critiqued me for not dealing with capitalism instead of neoliberalism. This is pretty fair. I believe that neoliberalism is a particular form of capitalism…whether you call it advanced capitalism or “capitalism with the gloves off”…but it’s different enough from other forms that to simply call it “capitalism” is a misnomer. There’s a reason why the inequality curve I usually begin my talks with takes the shape of a U….it suggests that government can and has played a role in mitigating or exacerbating the inequality generated by capitalism…and this in turn suggests that there is no one capitalism but rather capitalisms, and it behooves us to study the differences between capitalist projects for empirical and political reasons.

And a third set of questions will probably deal with my focus on local activism as opposed to regional, national, or transnational activism. There is a way to lash up local activism to struggles at other scales, indeed we don’t have the civil rights movement without people lashing anti-Jim Crow activism in one specific locality to similar actions in other localities. But if we’re talking about black working class populations in places like Baltimore, who have limited time, resources, and capacity, it makes far more sense strategically to get them to think about changing the material circumstances they face directly, they see with their own eyes, hear with their own ears, than it does to get them to think about changing the circumstances at some other scale. But that’s me. 

Anyway i’ve got another book event coming up in DC this week. At The Potter’s House. Thursday January 21, 7pm. Come through if you’re around. 

Oh. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a few people about the book through email, twitter, fb, and in one case over pizza. Although I can’t go back and rewrite it, I am interested in hearing thoughts good or bad. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be wrestling with the ideas in the book one for the rest of my academic career, so the more critical feedback I get the merrier.

From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation and Democracy in Black

This week two other books were released that mine similar terrain as my own. One is Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation and the other is Eddie Glaude’s Democracy in Black: Race and the Struggle for America’s Soul. I recommend Yamhatta-Taylor’s book highly. Glaude’s I recommend but only to see the most recent iteration of the tendency I am trying to write against. Yamhatta-Taylor’s work is a clear and concise examination of the history of black protest against racism in general and anti-police racism specifically. It goes into a lot more depth than my book does in the period directly leading up to the neoliberal turn and spends more time charting black political responses to the racial, economic, and political crises of that era. In my conclusion I focus a little on #blacklivesmatter—in fact I ended up having to rewrite the concluding chapter several times in order to play catch up with events in Ferguson and then much closer to home in Baltimore—while Yamahtta-Taylor spends much more time dealing with it. For Yamahtta-Taylor and myself the best way to understand the contemporary condition is to understand it as the product of material forces that work through a combination of institutions, public policy, and rhetoric. This condition has a brutal effect on black life but also exerts an effect on non-black life as well. I already planned on using the book for my class on Black Lives Matter, sight unseen. Once I read it I knew I’d made the right choice.

The second book is Eddie Glaude’s Democracy in Black. Glaude’s been working on the book for around the same length of time I’d been working on Knocking the Hustle and if you’ve followed Glaude’s public work in the pages of the New York Times or on social media you’ve seem him work through some of the ideas he ends up expanding on in the work. I got a chance to read it earlier this week…in fact I was able to find a copy quickly because when I walked into the local Barnes and Nobles an older brother was in the process of giving one of the two copies he had back to the staff at the information desk. Without going too much into depth the challenge with Democracy in Black is that it takes the opposite approach Yamahtta-Taylor’s and I take. While we focus on interplay between the economy, the state, and non-state institutions (foundations, think tanks, activist organizations, other non-profits), with a focus on culture, ideas, and values every now and again….Glaude focuses primarily on ideas and values, with a focus on the economy, the state, and non-state institutions every now and again. The end result is a book that makes an attempt to generate enduring political change through changing hearts and minds, with that hearts and minds project coming largely though not primarily through elite action. I don’t find this project useful, not empirically or intellectually, and not politically.           

Flint and DPS

Probably the biggest issue I’ve been thinking about is the Flint water crisis combined with the sickouts conducted by Detroit Public School teachers in order to protest their decaying infrastructure. For the unaware, Flint, Michigan was placed under emergency financial management some time ago. In a cost-cutting move the emergency financial manager decided to start piping water into Flint FROM Flint as opposed to Detroit (where they and many other municipalities have historically gotten their water). The water contained so much lead that a local General Motors engine stopped using it because it rusted parts, but political officials continued to either ignore or dispute the signs until October 2015, one year later. By this point over 9,000 children had far higher than normal levels of lead in their blood. Earlier this week, Obama called a state of emergency. While Flint was dealing with its water crisis the Detroit Public Schools faced its own crisis. Over the past few decades a number of schools in Detroit have fallen into disrepair. My mother is a retired Detroit substitute school teacher. The school she spent the better part of two decades in suffers from water leaks so bad the (relatively new) gymnasium floor buckled, and was filled with black mold. Other schools reported far worse problems. In response to the issue Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan promised to visit every single school in the system, but this was only after teachers shut down sixty Detroit schools through their sickout.     

Journalists have covered both issues—Rachel Maddow’s work has been particularly important nationally—I don’t think we’ve seen anyone connect the dots here. And the dots are there to be connected. The story is pretty straightforward as what happened in both the Detroit Public Schools and in Flint is the result of neoliberal policy. Nearly every school system and municipality with a predominantly black population in the state either has been placed under emergency financial management or is currently under emergency financial management. And nearly every school system and municipality placed under emergency financial management has had one of two results. Either the school system/municipality has had significant fiscal/political crises afterwards, or they have had so much of their power taken away that they are largely unable to serve the interests and needs of their working class constituencies. Michigan’s current governor Tom Snyder was elected because he was a businessman, and he campaigned on using his business acumen to transform how the State of Michigan conducted business. He’s been successful, but not in the way he imagined he would be.  I expect to follow these instances closely. May write something shortish. But I know these incidents will be covered to some degree in my untitled Detroit book project. 

MLK Day and other related events

MLK Day is tomorrow. I’m doing a couple of radio shows back to back I think. One at 10am with Marc Steiner on WEAA, another at noon on Midday on WYPR. And I’m giving an MLK Day related lecture on Saturday at the Waldorf School (4701 Yellow Ave, Baltimore MD) at 1pm.  

Trying to cap these things at about 1500 words. Share if you want. Holler if you hear me. See you next week. Thanks for subscribing.