The Counterpublic Papers vol. 1 no. 3

Snow Day #understatement

Hey. Today is the 38th anniversary of the White Hurricane, the worst blizzard of the twentieth century. I was 9 years old at the time. Within a 24 hour period the Great Lakes region was hit with so much snow they shut down the Ohio Turnpike. Drivers in the Detroit area abandoned more than 100,000 cars. As a result of the storm Detroit mayor Coleman Young changed many of the streets in my grandmother’s neighborhood to one-ways, to make it easier to deal with the snow. But as bad as I thought that storm was—again I can remember it clearly years later— the Detroit area only got 8 inches. 

Right now? They’re saying about 29 inches. Which means that since 2009 I’ve experienced three events (2010, 2013 i think, and this year) that dwarf the White Hurricane in intensity, if not in real damage (they’re saying only one person died in Maryland as a result of the storm). We don’t have the institutional capacity much less the will to deal with climate change the way we should. But it scares the hell out of me that these “once in a century” type events are now happening two or three times a decade. I ended up going outside for a bit to take pictures of the snowfall—the plan was to walk to my son’s elementary school, take pictures of the playground then trek back. On the way there I passed an older sister shoveling out her driveway by herself, without gloves. I offered to help, so long as she didn’t come out and try to help me. I told her that even though I was a heathen I knew that Christians would likely say she was “blocking her blessing” if she tried to come out to help me shovel. I also told her I had a job and wouldn’t take any money. 

But given that the liquor stores were closed I did tell her I’d take a bottle of wine. 

(She gave me two.)  

How Intellectuals Create a Public

Corey Robin wrote a piece about public intellectuals in The Chronicle of Higher Education that’s making the rounds. Robin basically argues that the primary goal of the public intellectual is not so much to speak to a public that already exists, with a unique voice that distinguishes him or her from other writers/thinkers. Rather, the public intellectual speaks into existence a public that does not already exist. Robin then uses the cases of Case Sunstein and Ta-Nehisi Coates to argue that the contemporary public intellectual tends to speak more to pre-existing publics (if that) than he is to speak into life a new public. 

Sunstein’s public intellectual work (particularly his books Nudge and Why Nudge?) doesn’t so much speak a new public into existence as it calls for a society better designed to shape (“nudge”) people’s behaviors to fit their (and society’s) needs. Kids, for example, would “naturally” eat right because the fruits and vegetables their bodies need would be placed at exactly the right spot in the food cafeteria line. Drivers would “naturally” drive at the right speed, reducing the need for traffic cops, through placing roundabouts at just the right place. Sunstein’s society as he imagines it wouldn’t even have a public, but rather a society of consumers with their needs individually tailored through techniques they are only dimly aware of.     

Coates would seem to present a very different case than Sunstein. Coates, writing as he does about the brutality of past and present racism and its effect on black and white bodies, would seem to forcing the reader to make a stark choice, the type of choice that can theoretically call a public into being. But Coates sees no political project powerful enough to end the racism he finds so problematic. Robin writes “It’s no surprise that Sunstein and Coates wind up in the same place: with a public destroyed. The presupposition of their writing is that a politics unafraid to put division and conflict, the mobilization of a mass, on the table, is in fact off the table.” For Robin this inability to call a public into existence, this inability to stretch one’s political imagination to the point where something like this is even conceivable, is the contemporary public intellectual’s greatest challenge. 

Robin’s piece has problems. 

The first is the title, though that’s probably not his fault. The article doesn’t talk about how intellectuals go about creating a public at all.  

The second is a definitional problem. Robin can’t define the public intellectual as the person who through his intellectual work calls a public into being that hasn’t previously existed…and then use Sunstein and Coates as examples, even failed ones. Either they’re public intellectuals, which means his definition requires expansion, or they’re not, which means they don’t count. 

Third while Robin turns to Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals as an important text, as far as thinking about this issue goes, Jacoby doesn’t really have much to say or contribute when it comes to talking about the growth of the black public intellectual, whether we talk about its first modern iteration in the early nineties or its second most recent iteration. Jacoby doesn’t really help us understand the rise (and fall) of someone like Cornel West, nor does he help us understand the rise of someone like Melissa Harris-Perry or Marc Lamont Hill. 

But last and most important, at least here in the United States, people like Cass Sunstein and Ta-Nehisi Coates operate in a market. Coates’ blows up largely because of the thousands of readers he’s cultivated on his blog, readers who provide The Atlantic enough clicks to sell high end ads. His article on reparations is so important not just because it is well written and researched but because it had more readers than any other article The Atlantic published (maybe ever). His book is so important not just because it appears to capture the spirit of the times better than any other book like it, even though it does, but because it stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for weeks, and will likely remain there for some time to come. Writers like Coates can’t call a public into existence that doesn’t exist, in part because he isn’t solely writing for a public, he’s writing for a market. 

Neither Robin nor most of the people who’ve written about the public intellectual over the last couple of decades seem to acknowledge this distinction. 

With all this said the essay is worth reading and thinking through.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bernie Sanders

So Coates made the news twice this week. Last week he criticized Sanders’ stance on reparations. Although Sanders supports a range of policies we could accurately deem as “radical” (using government resources to pay 100% of college tuition for example), he doesn’t support reparations, largely because he doesn’t seem to think it’s feasible. For Coates this is kind of odd and points to a long time inability of left radicals to properly deal with racial inequality. 

Coates kind of makes sense. It does seem odd for someone to simultaneously say “we should fight to bring universal health care to the United States”—an incredibly hard battle to win given current political conditions—and then say “well we can’t possibly get reparations for slavery, that’s well crazy.” 

But there are a few things wrong with this position.

First, while it is hard to get something like universal health care, or free college education, passed by this Congress….it’s pretty straightforward to chart that path. We’re at A (some public support for universal health care/free college education, an institutional structure that grants government some role in providing health/post-secondary education) and we want to get to Z (full public support, a robust institutional structure). We can get to Z by building public support through (admittedly decaying) public unions, through getting college presidents to support the plan, through getting regular folk to realize how much easier their lives would be if the plan was made real, etc. We’d have to deal with serious institutional opposition, and serious political opposition as well. But we can do it basically by gradually building support for it through getting people to see how their lives would materially benefit from such a policy. And then getting those people to put pressure on various political and institutional actors. 

How do you do that with reparations? What does the A to Z route look like here? While we’ve plenty examples of reparations-like policies in the United States and elsewhere—there aren’t many legislative examples, examples that were passed by a democratically elected body. We would have to fundamentally reorient the way the world works to even imagine such a thing coming to pass. 

So that’s the first problem.

The second problem is that Coates works under the assumption that Sanders’ class radicalism isn’t somehow beneficial for black people, that his radicalism is purely a class radicalism that ignores racial inequality. This assumption too makes a great deal of common sense. Many American policies designed to deal with income inequality have disproportionately benefitted whites. Further if we control for income and education and compare black and white life outcomes, whites still live longer healthier lives than their black counterparts. Both suggest that there will still be a “racial residual”, a racial difference in life outcomes that can’t be dealt with solely through means devised to deal with income inequality. I’d argue however that this racial residual, the residual between blacks and whites, is actually lower than the income residual, that is the residual difference between well-off citizens and not-so-well off ones. That is to say, the difference between the lives of well-off Americans and not-so-well off Americans is bigger than the difference between whites and blacks. Any policy that reduces that difference will significantly improve black life. It won’t get rid of that racial residual, there will still be a racial difference. But something like free post-secondary education will help black people so much particularly given…

Hilary Clinton. 

I’m not going to go into depth here because I’ve already gone over my word count. But the Clintons have been pretty bad for middle-lower income black people. Bill Clinton was one of the founders of the Democratic Leadership Council, created in order to contest the Democratic Party’s more liberal wing. He supported a range of conservative positions from killing welfare, to supporting punitive crime policies (while Governor of Arkansas he halted his presidential campaign in 1992 to witness the execution of Billy Ray Rector, a mentally retarded black man). On more than one occasion he made racist campaign appeals in order to generate support from white working class voters, and on more than one occasion he gave “tough love” speeches to black audiences…speeches that suggested black irresponsibility was more harmful than racism. Hilary Clinton may not be Bill Clinton, but if her 2008 campaign is any indicator she is close enough. Certainly her policies aren’t anywhere near as progressive as Sanders, and given the level of support she’s exhibited towards Wall Street and the amount of money she’s made over the two years alone (approximately $30 million), it seems to me that he should be giving her the same type of scrutiny if not more.

There’s another argument i’d make, but rather than go even further over the word count I’ll just point you to this interview with Adolph Reed (start at about the 8 minute mark). Reed’s been the hardest critic of reparations for over two decades, and in this interview he gives Coates the business. Now I’d ignore what Reed says about Coates’ writing as it’s about as unfair and uncharitable an analysis as I’ve heard. But hone in on the political critique. I love Coates’ book…but his book doesn’t express the type of political ideas that mark him as someone worth listening or following politically. 

... Coates wrote a response today that dealt with some of the critiques above. It's pretty good.

Water Politics

I think that with time the Flint disaster and what’s going on in Michigan in general will go down in history as one of the worst man-made disasters of the first half of the 21st century. We know enough about lead poisoning to know that the kids the state poisoned are going to need decades of government support, and I don’t know how the anti-government sentiment this type of crisis provokes can be reversed. I’m hoping that with Snyder’s decision to release emails exchanged about the crisis and the political decisions that caused it, enough pressure can be generated to repeal the emergency financial manager law that played a significant role in the crisis in the first place. 

Anyway for folks interested in works that deal with water politics, here are a few links. :

The Water Front—connects the politics of emergency financial management in Michigan to battles over water. 

Ten Documentaries on Water Politics (many of them on Netflix)—includes The Water Front along with nine other documentaries (many of them on Netflix).

Stop Veolia Seattle—Veolia is one of the largest private infrastructure companies in the world, providing a range of privatized municipal services from water to transportation to janitorial services. A group of Seattle activists created a 100 page zine documenting their abuses.

The Politics of Bottled Water by Gay Hawkins—the abstract: “This paper investigates the rise of bottled water as a commodity that has inaugurated distinct drinking conducts and material politics. Rather than reiterate existing critiques of this phenomenon based on exposing the political economy of the industry, the focus, here, is on the constitutive role of bottles in social and political life. In seeking to understand the potency of bottles in various forms of everyday conduct the paper analyses the diversity of associations between humans and bottles and the ways in which the bottle, in some arrangements, can be understood as having political capacities. Once the bottle's contingent materiality is recognized, it ceases to be simply an inert bad object and becomes, instead, a heterogeneous and complex artefact that participates in political process in different ways; something that is, quite literally, the stuff of politics.”

Privatizing Water by Karen Bakker—“In Privatizing Water, Karen Bakker focuses on three questions: Why did privatization emerge as a preferred alternative for managing urban water supply? Can privatization fulfill its proponents' expectations, particularly with respect to water supply to the urban poor? And, given the apparent shortcomings of both privatization and conventional approaches to government provision, what are the alternatives? In answering these questions, Bakker engages with broader debates over the role of the private sector in development, the role of urban communities in the provision of "public" services, and the governance of public goods. She introduces the concept of "governance failure" as a means of exploring the limitations facing both private companies and governments.”

Cheers. 

Knocking the Hustle 

Finally, I gave a second book talk last week at The Potter’s House in DC. It went remarkably well. Like the first event the week before it was standing room only, most of the people that came stayed until the end, and the audience posed a lot of tough and productive questions. I’m going to be in Chicago the last week of February and it’s possible I’m going to do a bigger east coast book tour. I got a favorable blurb from Bookforum, and I think a few reviews will appear soon. If being a public intellectual really is about creating a public or at the very least about creating support for the idea of the public, this book  could do some important ideational groundwork to that end. We’ll see.

If you’ve stuck around this long, thanks for reading. If you’ve comments, questions, or anything, holler. [email protected]

Hopefully the next issue will be a bit shorter, and will be written by someone not forced to wear two sets of winter mittens while doing so.