The Counterpublic Papers vol. 1 no. 29

Three or four days in my own bed and I feel like a new man. Well. Except for that aching feeling I have from playing basketball after about a week layoff. It’s not that the body doesn’t bounce back like it used to. It’s that the body doesn’t bounce back. Maybe tomorrow.

(Right.)

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The past week Democracy Now’s been running debates about the DNC and about Hilary Clinton. I caught two of them…one between Eddie Glaude and Michael Eric Dyson, and another between Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor and Janaye Ingram. I like Democracy Now for a number of reasons, but it doesn’t have a good record of featuring left voices of color. That’s certainly changed with the addition of Baltimore’s own Carla Wills, and her mark is all over all these debates. Just like we should think longer and harder about institutionalization than we do leadership, we should think more about the people behind the scenes rather than the person in front of the screen. 

Anyway here’s a link to the Glaude-Dyson debate and here’s another one to the Taylor-Ingram debate. 

While Dyson and Glaude have been eloquent intellectuals they don’t really have a handle on political economy. Dyson has (surprisingly) been fairly consistent in his criticism of Obama, but his critiques primarily focused on Obama’s rhetoric—this video was taped barely 100 days into the Obama presidency but Dyson’s approach hasn’t changed much, except for the fact that he’s now riding hard for Hilary Clinton. Glaude has transitioned from being on the national board of Teach For America to being a staunch critic of the neoliberal turn….however his most recent offering Democracy in Black, doesn’t really deal with political economy at all, much less how it affects black folk, preferring to focus instead on moral values (as if these values weren’t shaped by political institutions and interests). Because neither has a handle on political economy what we’re left with is a debate that is heavy on rhetorical flourish but light on substance. While Glaude has the capacity to push back against Dyson’s (deeply problematic) assertion that black folk don’t have the capacity to vote sophisticatedly, he doesn’t have the capacity to push back against Dyson’s notion that Clinton and Sanders have both imbibed the neoliberal Kool-aid.  On the other hand in the Taylor-Ingram debate we see a much richer discussion of political economy—this is Taylor’s strength. Ingram a lot better than Dyson, but it’s clear that the Clintonian position is hard to defend. 

Now as I stated last week I don’t plan to vote for Clinton. But Trump really does represent a clear and present danger to the republic and to the world. And one only needs look at the most recent legal push back against the attempt to gut the Voting Rights Act to understand that courts do matter. A Clinton appointee wrote the decision that basically sent North Carolina’s racist voting law to the dustbins of history. Further, it does appear as if Clinton is actually responding to the leftward push coming from Black Lives Matter activists and Sanders supporters—she used to support privatizing social security and now she supports expanding it, although not going as far as Sanders she now supports making public college free. 

If Clinton supporters need to do a much better job of articulating why people on the left should support Clinton (and organize for better alternatives at the local and state level), people on the Left need to do a much better job of articulating a vision that doesn’t presume that Clinton and Trump are the same, that doesn’t presume revolutionary change is going to occur in one fell swoop.

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Last week in Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby decided to drop charges against the four remaining officers in the Freddie Gray murder. Freddie Gray represents another Homo Sacer—the figure who can be killed but not sacrificed. I do think things are getting “better” in that it is becoming harder and harder to imagine this type of thing visited upon a black man who wasn’t living in abject poverty (or close to it). I’m not sure that gets us much here. She gave a blistering press conference excoriating the police department. Freddie Gray didn’t break his own neck. Now some point to Mosby’s own mistakes in failing to garner a guilty verdict. She has no real history prosecuting these cases, she let go over half of the staff of the former prosecuting attorney, and some argue she made a number of tactical blunders that made guilty verdicts less likely. I think these critiques have merit. 

But.

I recall a conversation with someone who worked in the State’s Attorney office after Mosby’s election. She was convinced that the reason Mosby defeated her boss was because of “identity politics”—because black people voted for Mosby because she was black. This, even though it was clear that her boss was not only extremely reluctant to prosecute police officers, he expressed significant disdain for the families of people victimized by police. She couldn’t fathom the idea that perhaps blacks voted for Mosby because they believed Mosby would treat police as if they were governed by the law rather than placed above it. 

If just a portion of Mosby’s predecessor’s staff felt this way, Mosby was right to let them go. Right to force them out even.

Given Mosby’s own inexperience though, this move creates a problem. If Mosby didn’t have any experience, and the people she could’ve turned to for that experience (long time staffers) themselves are reluctant to serve in ways Mosby sees fit…then how does Mosby actually develop the capacity to deliver the services she’s expected to deliver?

I’ve been pretty hard on black mayors over my career…but the one thing I haven’t fully reckoned with is the role racism plays in structuring expertise. Because both the political offices and the political appointments that come with the office were racially exclusive most first-time black elected officials had absolutely no expertise in governing. They were committed to serving black populations, even though they were perhaps more interested in directly serving middle-to-upper income black populations. But because they had little experience this “committed-ness” could only go so far. Although Mosby isn’t mayor, I think she’s in a similar situation. 

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Last week over 600 people packed a hearing about the proposed Under Armour development. Kevin Plank seems to actively believe that creating a second more exclusive downtown, will actually serve the purpose of uniting Baltimore. I don’t know how the hell that’ll happen, unless he means uniting Baltimore against working class black citizens. Thankfully we’ve been seeing a great deal of pushback here—pushback that was in part generated by the Baltimore Uprising. I don’t know where this pushback goes…but I’ve some ideas.

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The National Urban League comes to Baltimore this week. I’m giving a book talk on Thursday afternoon. Thanks to Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, Julie Fain, Tonya Allen, Renee Hatcher, Arthur Russell, R. A. Washington, Leisa Moseley, Frankie Verley, and the others that helped make my trip around the US a decent one. It’ll be good to give a talk up the block from the office for a change.

Be decent. 

Thanks for reading.