The Counterpublic Papers, vol. 1, no. 21

Later on today we celebrate my oldest son’s high school graduation (Michigan, if you’re asking). So the summer is now in full swing. 

When people think about being a professor they tend to think of one of two things. First they think about teaching—how nice or cool or horrible it must be to teach young adults. Then second they think about those long summers. How wonderful it must be to have those lonngggg summers off. 

Long summers. 

Right.

Well the teaching thing is pretty important to me, don’t get me wrong. But for me being a professor is secondarily about teaching but much more about this. About writing. Recall that I started this newsletter largely because I wasn’t writing enough and tend to get antsy if I’m not able to put a coherent sentence on the page. And hell no Facebook doesn’t count. When you’re an assistant professor you don’t tend to have as many responsibilities so you’ve a lot of time (comparatively speaking) to write. 

This changes as you ascend. Promotion comes with responsibilities. Promotion when you’re black and there are only a few other people like you at the school, in the city, and in the nation, comes with a bit more than your normal load. So it gets a bit harder to write. Until last year I used to deal with that issue by simply getting up earlier than anyone besides INSERT PREFERRED DEITY HERE. But last year with everything going on I needed the extra rest. 

Which brings me to summer. Summer smashes two priorities. The priority for getting writing and other creative work done. And the priority to decompress after a pretty brutally productive year. But I’m not quite sure it’s going to work that way for me. Here’s an inkling of what my summer looks like, schedule wise:

Last week I was in NYC giving book talks on Thursday and Friday, this Tuesday I’m giving an OSI talk at Morgan State, next week I’m doing something at the Impact Hub. July 1-3 I’m at a socialism conference in Chicago. July 7 I’m doing a book reading in Detroit. July 9 I’m speaking at a Black Power Conference in Gary. And sometime around the Republican National Convention I’m doing something in Cleveland, and am still working on something in D.C. I’m going to try to go to vegas sometime around July 23 for a fraternity convention. 

Now I don’t know about you, but even typing that schedule has me feeling every single one of my 47 years (technically 47 today but i moved my birthday to January 1 well over a decade ago because it became harder to recall how old I was without doing higher level math—what year is it? what date is it? is it before or after june 5?).

I’ve tried various productivity techniques to get more work done, but the electronic ones don’t seem to take the way I want them to. So I’m trying to write them down in a large notebook size sketchbook. 

Here’s an inkling of the writing stuff I’d like to do before summer is over: finish up a collaboration on a public redlining syllabus, write a popular piece on the Under Armour TIF request (for those who don’t know UnderArmour is asking Baltimore for $535 MILLION in tax subsidies to help develop a chunk of under-developed land—the largest tif ever requested), write a popular piece on university naming practices focusing on the university of michigan’s potential decision to build a new multicultural center named after the donor rather than an activist, write two papers for edited volumes, finish the Live and Let Die book project, write a sketch of the police project, redo the website, research fellowship opportunities for 2017-2018, work on the political photo project (don’t think i’ve written about this here), create new versions of my American Racial Politics and Urban Politics syllabi for the fall….

And this is just the writing stuff. This doesn’t get at all the stuff I’ve got to do to get my house in order, to make sure my arms and limbs continue to function, my teeth continue to gnash, my kids stay on the right path, the accountant doesn’t come for my hide….

How long does that long summer look now?

….

Last week the remake of Roots aired. Over the last few years it seems like the embargo on projects dealing with slavery’s been lifted, with 12 Years a Slave and Django on the big screen, and Underground and The Book of Negroes on the small screen, and Birth of a Nation (a film about Nat Turner) coming soon. 

Some of you are old enough to remember the first series. It was groundbreaking. First it was the first real treatment of slavery to ever appear on film—this not even a decade removed from King’s assassination, less than a decade removed from the election of black politicians. Second it was one of the first (if not the first) episodic miniseries to appear on television. Third because at the time we only had three real television broadcast networks and video recording didn’t really exist until the eighties, everyone watched it pretty much at the same time. It could’ve failed miserably, but instead it was both a critical and a ratings success that may have singlehandedly changed the nation’s perspective on slavery. 

I saw a single episode of the remake—unlike the original it’s possible to watch the remake for a brief while online—and thought it was pretty good at doing a few different things. For example, I think it did a better job dealing with the West African side of the slavery equation—showing some of the strife that the slave trade exacerbated as well as depicting how these societies were organized.

But the original Roots was created to deal with mid-seventies issues. With integrating black bodies into the warp and woof of American society (recall, Roots was the story of an American family). With generating a history more appropriate to the time. 

Obviously I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest that we’ve accomplished these goals.  I would suggest though that we’re more integrated into the nation than we were. And it’s no longer possible for a history professor with her stripes to publish an article in a prominent journal suggesting that slavery was good for black people or that slavery wasn’t really that important to the development of the “west” as we know it. 

For these reasons I think a reimagined Roots would be better off dealing with uniquely 21st century questions. Given the new focus on inequality and capitalism, a new Roots in my mind should do more work in connecting the development of advanced capitalism with slavery. And more work in detailing the various and sundry ways black men and women tried to find a way out of no way. 

….

I grew up watching Muhammad Ali, watching his bouts on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, years before pay per view and HBO came to dominate the sport. As I was only six or seven years old at the time I didn’t have much of an appreciation for the skill he brought to the sport—I did understand that boxing was something more than people just beating each other up but I didn’t really understand the science of it, that came much much later. I did though, understand his political significance, and looking back that insight probably came by way of my father. I knew about his name change. I knew about his anti-war stance. I knew they took the belts away. 

But growing up in the North, near a Black Power capital, I didn’t fully appreciate Ali’s complicated relationship with some black men and women in the South. 

About a year or two after I started grad school, I met a brother from Mississippi. He started grad school after having spent a few years out in the real world so he was old enough to attend segregated schools in Mississippi. While in grad school we had a conversation about Ali. Don’t remember how he came up, only that he did. My friend told me he didn’t watch much Ali growing up…in fact every time he came on the tv, his mother turned the tv off. It was like Ali (a Mississippi boy himself) was anathema. 

One way to read this response is to fall back upon standard stereotypes of black southerners. Here my friend’s mother becomes the stereotypical politically backward black southerner who doesn’t really love black people, who may not even think of herself as black but rather as a negro. She doesn’t like Ali because Ali represents a progressive mode of blackness she’s trying to dodge, trying to run away from.

This response though doesn’t really fit the facts. My friend and his mother were, what word do the kids use these days? Fierce. His mother owned her own bail bond company for decades, probably one of the only women in the state to do so. And they both had a deep love for black people. Though my friend was older than I was, he wasn’t old enough to have participated in movement activity, but it wouldn’t surprise me if his mother was clandestinely involved.

Clandestinely involved.

There were undoubtedly people who didn’t like Ali because they didn’t like his politics on the war, or on the Nation of Islam. People who didn’t like Ali because they were scared. People who didn’t like Ali because they didn’t like Black Power. But some didn’t like Ali because they felt that his transparency posed political problems in a time and space they felt called for discretion.

Muhammad Ali is one of the central figures of the 20th Century. He stood for a borderless black politics. He stood against imperialism. What I write above doesn’t detract from any of that. But it does complicate it.

….

One of the pictures I know we’ll likely see over the next few weeks is a powerful picture of Ali (then Clay), Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul Jabbar), and other athletes expressing support for a boycott of the 196X Olympics. It’ll no doubt be used to call attention to Ali’s own politics, and likely be used to juxtapose the athletes of yesterday against the athletes of today. 

But that picture erases the role black women athletes played in contesting racism. In fact when the picture was taken, women were explicitly prevented from appearing in the picture.  Amira Rose recounts this story in her dissertation on black women athletes. The athletes in that picture were likely heavily influenced by the gendered black power narratives that concentrated representative power in the bodies of black men. 

….

This week I’m talking about Race, Black Politics, and Neoliberalism at Morgan State University on Tuesday at 7pm. Details here. Next week I’m at the Impact Hub. Belated shouts out to the kind folk at Bluestockings in NYC and the Hart House for giving me the opportunity to talk about the book. Great discussions. 

On that note, my son’s graduation party calls. 

47 is the new 47. Just like 46 was the new 46.

See you next week.