The Counterpublic Papers vol. 1 no. 27

Past the half-way point. Didn’t know how long this thing would last but it appears to have legs. 

With Cleveland and Vegas looming—as I wrote on fb I’ve had so many people telling me to be safe in Cleveland I feel like a fifties era NAACP organizer on his way to Alabama—I’ve a lot to do. So an answer to my two weeks old question, a book idea (kind of), and links.

….

A couple of weeks ago I witnessed a carjacking in broad daylight. And asked how would it be handled if the police didn’t exist. A dear friend of mine answered:

As for me, questions about whether the police should be abolished and what would replace that institution lead to more and more questions- I almost said "just lead" but that sounds too much like dismissing the value of the process.  What do folks mean by abolishing police and replacing them with something different?  Posing the question of replacement seems to presume that there are some aspects of police and policing that ought or need to be preserved, and I wonder if there's much common ground on the specifics of this issue among abolitionists. It seems to me that the question of abolishment points to an examination of the modern police institution in all its complexity, to assess the functions and powers it holds, the forms of accountability applied to it, and the logics by which its appropriate powers and accountability mechanisms are decided and its actions are evaluated. We could pose the question of what the functions, powers and accountabilities of the police institution would look like, if the institution had a single guiding logic of protecting the well-being of every person in its reach and every person were regarded as equally worthy of protection, full stop, no variation based on race/class/"criminal" background or context/all the rest, rather than (for example) a logic of protecting the "good citizens" from the "predators".  What would protection look like if the well-being of a poor person of color was given the same social regard as anyone else's?  Of course no institution will ever actually have a single guiding logic, there are too many people with too many different ideas and agendas trying to make use of its powers.  I just mean this as a frame for thinking about how we might change the laws, accountability mechanisms, and not least the technologies of policing to reflect a logic of care.  (Why is it that we either haven't developed or don't exclusively deploy effective non-lethal tools instead of live ammo? To say nothing of f-ing "bomb robots" in the arsenals of domestic police?)  And this might mean large-scale replacement of law enforcement personnel, considering how difficult changing institutional culture can be once it is entrenched.  But if we got far enough with such a project, we might abolish policing as we know it.

There are people in cities like Baltimore who are victimized by the type of crime police are expected to deal with everyday. They don’t wish the police were disappeared. Rather they wish the police would simply perform their jobs better. If conversations are needed at all—and I don’t tend to think they’re needed with police officers (we wouldn’t have “conversations” with postal workers if they persistently refused to deliver mail or delivered it to the wrong house—they’re needed with this population. 

….

    So Knocking the Hustle received its first book review. 

    And it was bad, primarily because of two things. First, there were a lot of grammatical errors in the first version. Second because I used chapter numbers rather than chapter titles, implying that I intended the book to be read sequentially from chapter 1 to chapter 6 (I didn’t). I think the review is fair, and of course it hurt. 

    But here’s the wonderful thing about going with a print on demand publisher.

    Notice I wrote “the first version” above. 

    The second version got rid of all the major errors although some of the long clunky sentences are still there, as are the chapter numbers. I’m pretty sure if you read the first then read the second it’d be a much better reading experience. 

    Now normally you’d have to wait for this type of turn-around. I know Stare in the Darkness didn’t have this problem (the University of Minnesota has an established press while Punctum in some ways is still getting its footing) but there were a few things I wanted to correct and I had to wait for the second printing to do so. But with Knocking the Hustle I could basically make the needed changes almost immediately. 

    But it dawned on me.

    What if I could treat the book itself, kind of like a software update? IOS for example is coming up on 10.0 I think, with intermittent updates between 10.0 and 11.0. Neoliberalization, and the pushback to it, is a dynamic process. What if I updated the book?

    So 1.0 is the buggy version. The version good enough to exist, but far from perfect. 

    That would make 1.1 a less buggier version—the version with few grammatical errors.

    Maybe 1.2 would contain chapter titles, and then because I didn’t know what was going to happen with Detroit I focus a bit more on Detroit in one of the chapters. 

    Then 1.3 would have a chapter on the police. And 1.4 would examine the end of the Obama Presidency.

    Get the picture? At a certain point in time the changes would render the book a totally different version than the original, at some point in time we’d be looking at Knocking the Hustle 2.0. 

    Because the PDF itself is free even if you ended up stuck with 1.0 you could download 1.1 for free and then if you thought the book was enough of an improvement you could pick up a hard copy. 

    I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it, but as can be by the response to my police question, there are a number of you far smarter than I. What am I missing? I think I’ve found a way to transform a bug into a feature.  

….

    Last week I was on Maryland in the Morning with Tom Hall. Hall had Eddie Glaude and I talk about the Castile and Stirling murders. It was a good conversation. One thing I wish we could’ve spent a bit more time on is the issue of parenting. Glaude and I are both parents—Glaude has one son, I have three sons and two daughters. Glaude has given his son “the talk”. I have not. When asked about it, I told Tom Hall that I felt that at the micro-level one way we could begin to change the police is simply to act as citizens would. All the talk is, is a script detailing a list of behaviors an African American male should engage in, in a police encounter. “Put both hands where the officer can see them,” “Refer to the officer as ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’”, “don’t make any furtive gestures”, “don’t get angry”, etc. I understand why this talk is needed. I understand the purpose it serves. But it seems to me that the police won’t really learn to deal with younger black citizens until younger black citizens themselves act as citizens. Black citizenship is as much a matter of performance as it is a matter of constitutional law. We have to actually act our way into full citizenship. 

    Hence, no talk. I’d think differently if my kids were bigger (I haven’t met Glaude’s son personally but I’m pretty sure from pictures he’s taller than 6’0), if their skin shade was darker. I’d definitely think differently if I worked at the plant or at the post-office. 

    Anyway, here’s the link to the conversation. 

    And this is the day I performed double duty—appearing on the Marc Steiner show with Charles Johnson and Kalima Young thereafter. Here’s a link to that conversation.

….

    This week I’m in Cleveland at an RNC counter-event of sorts. Then on Saturday I’m going to be giving a book talk in Las Vegas. I should've figured out a way to get to Philadelphia--I heard about a panel that would be perfect but I'd already committed to attending my fraternity convention in Vegas.

    Recently Roland Fryer, Harvard economist, wrote a paper arguing that police officers were more likely to shoot whites than blacks. I’m in the process of writing a response in The Chronicle. He’s wrong and I talk about why in a piece that should appear sometime this week.

    As always if you know folk who are interested, send them here, and forward broadly. 

    And as always, my name is Lester Spence, and this is the Counterpublic Papers. 

    (Well. Sometimes my name isn’t Lester Spence. Like when I’m in Vegas.)

    See you soon.