The Counterpublic Papers vol. 1 no. 30

I’ve got two unfinished syllabi, one book manuscript, two late paper reviews, one book review, and three academic conference panels breathing down my neck. And it doesn’t help matters that I spent much of this weekend sneaking into the National Association of Black Journalist conference in DC. (Well…not really. Remind me to tell you about the time I did sneak in. Drinking good liquor with Evander Holyfield before Mike Tyson bit his ear off, winning the NABJ Electric Slide contest, meeting Bill Clinton while trying to find a way to preview at Spike Lee’s Malcolm X without a ticket. Good times.) 

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Earlier this week Korryn Gaines was shot and killed in her home by Baltimore County Police after an hours long stand-off. Rather than go into details I’ll point you to this story. 

Last month Chicago police officers shot 18 year old unarmed Paul O’Neal. Video was just released last week. I point you to this story.     

As of yesterday, US police officers have killed 700 people in 2016. So many young black men die from police encounters that “legal intervention” is now the 9th leading cause of mortality of black males between the ages of 15 and 24. 

The National Urban League held its annual conference in Baltimore this week. I was supposed to participate in a book talk but didn’t because of planning snafus, but in a panel on policing, former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmolke argued that perhaps we were spending too much time on police and not enough time on “black on black” crime. He received a (deserved) tongue lashing from other panelists and the panel moderator (former BET personality Jeff Johnson). I continue to be amazed at the degree to which black elected officials consistently shunt black audiences away from politics and towards culturalist solutions to black problems. Anti-violence initiatives aren’t new. Rallies to stop the violence aren’t under-attended. But I just go back to the car jacking I witnessed a few weeks ago and wrote about in an earlier newsletter. The first response of the victim was to take the law into his own hands. I believe he did that because subconsciously he had absolutely no faith in law enforcement to help him. Any conversation about neighborhood crime has to start with the police. What rules, norms, and regulations structured the encounter between Korryn Gaines and Baltimore County Police? Even if we go with the narrative that suggests Gaines was disturbed (from legal documents it appears she, like Freddie Gray, suffered from lead poisoning), the police had at least several opportunities to de-escalate the encounter…first when they attempted to serve the warrant, deciding to enter her home without her permission, second when did so and saw she was armed, third when they contacted Facebook and disabled her account, and finally when they prevented family members from contacting her during the stand-off. What factors went into these decisions? When the police realized they were facing a stand-off what were they concerned with? Were they concerned primarily with their own safety? How are these decisions bolstered by caselaw that gives police the right to use “fear” as a rationale for deploying deadly force?          

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Recently, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake articulated strong support for Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank’s Port Covington project—a project that if approved will be heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars (at the very least through over $500 million in tax increment financing). In expressing support the mayor suggested that if it were approved it would “keep millennials coming”. 

This isn’t the first time the mayor’s connected baltimore development goals to a kind of biopolitical project—a few years ago in a state of the city address, the mayor articulated a grand vision of bringing in 10,000 new families to the city.  

But it bears noting that Freddie Gray and Korryn Gaines were both millennials. The “thugs” the mayor excoriated after the uprising were by and large millennials as well. Just as its highly unlikely the mayor had the typical West Baltimore family in mind when she thought about all those spanking brand new families she wanted to bring into the city, its highly unlikely the mayor has the typical millennial in mind when she’s thinking about Port Covington. In fact millennials like Gray and Gaines are arguably the people she wants to inoculate the city from. 

Take a look at this interview with the Baltimore Brew. (I’ll say this for the mayor and this isn’t a knock. She stays fly.)

Last week Cathy Cohen released GenForward the first ever attempt to track “millennial” attitudes over time, with special attention given to the role race and ethnicity play in attitude formation. For me this is important for a few different reasons.

First, a lot of the knowledge we have about millennial attitudes and behaviors are based not so much on research than on media-driven accounts about them. At best we have works like Cohen’s own Democracy Remixed, which while more than good really presents a snapshot of young adult attitudes as opposed to a dynamic rendering. What GenForward does is present a rolling month to month snapshot of millennial political attitudes, something that gives us the ability to (for example) track attitudes about policing in something close to real time. 

Second, while I think we should be doing much more in political science than tracking attitudes, generating data like this will increase the ability of young graduate students (particularly graduate students of color) to generate the type of cutting edge research that helps build careers. We’ve a pipeline problem in political science—the number of students of color applying to graduate school has been dwindling, the number of students of color who end up making it to dissertation stage has been dwindling and the number of students of color who end up finishing their dissertation has been dwindling. The major reason the pipeline problem exists is something outside of all of our controls—I tend to believe that the growing reality of student debt is having a serious impact on the types of decisions folks make about graduate school, and student debt is having a really problematic effect on black and Latinx grad student decisions. Who can go to grad school with $50,000 of debt hanging over their head? This doesn’t deal with that.

But what this project can do is generate enough interesting questions and data to drive all types of new research. This is something we can control. Combine this with political economy…with work that examines how the local political and economic context shape attitudes or shape institutions that themselves shape attitudes, then we’re talking about something that might not be a new ballgame but might create the possibilities for a new ballgame. 

Third though, I don’t know what the payment structure looks like. But if this is like the project that created Democracy Remixed this gives students involved in the project the resources they need to conduct the research. And this can help indirectly fund political action. 

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Finally the Black Lives Matter folk have produced an integrated set of local, state, and federal policy demands. It’s both broad and deep, and reflects the work of dozens of different activist and policy oriented groups. It’s worth reading, sharing, and discussing. 

That’s it. This is the (thinly edited) 30th issue of The Counterpublic Papers. Last I checked, my name was Lester Kenyatta Spence. If you’re so inclined, share.