This Week

• Publish or Perish: Disseminating Black Thought in Times of Crisis

• Cultivating Radical Imagination: Rethinking the Role of Institutional Power in Detroit and Beyond (keynote lecture)

Publish or Perish: Disseminating Black Thought in Times of Crisis

Last Wednesday we held the second of our Black Studies series “Black Studies in a Dark Conjuncture” featuring Olakekan Kamau-Nataki from Everyone’s Place (Baltimore’s oldest black bookstore), and Paul Coates of Black Classic Press. 

(As a sign of how tired I am, the BlueSky flier had “conjecture” rather than “conjuncture” and I couldn’t peel it back because it had already been retweeted like thirty or forty times.)

It was a great conversation, held in Baltimore Unity Hall (if you’re in the city and need a spot for an event I’m not sure you can do better). The folk at Black Classic Press streamed it, so it’s possible I’ll be able to share a link. I want to talk the title. 

“Publish or Perish: Disseminating Black Thought in Times of Crisis.”

C. Darius Gordon came up with it. (Shout outs to Darius and also T. Smith for their work!) Near the end we were asked what it meant. 

It’s a play on words to an extent—to the extent people think about what we do in the academy, the catchphrase “publish or perish” comes to mind, and it applies as much to Black Studies scholars as it does to anyone else. You either write and publish your work (at institutions that focus on research) or you find yourself out of a job. 

It also, though, describes the work of booksellers and publishers, who’ve made their living on books. 

For them, publishing and selling work is the difference between being able to make a living….or not. 

The crisis referenced in the title is multilayered as well. 

On the one hand both the academy and the bookselling/publishing industry has experienced a seemingly never ending crisis. There’s been a PhD to job issue that’s gone on as long as I’ve been employed. A few moving parts here but there’s the issue of too many PhD granting institutions which then produce too many PhDs all while the number of jobs remain stable (at best), and then the related issue of higher education tuition increases with more and more responsibility placed on the folks who pay for it. 

In the case of independent booksellers and publishers, they’ve had to deal with the behemoth that is Amazon for two decades, and even though it looks like Barnes and Nobles is making a comeback by turning to the type of individual curation that constitutes the essence of what makes independent booksellers and publishers unique, we’re still talking about a corporation rather than independent (often family owned) businesses and the day to day struggle they have to deal with regularly. 

These crises aren’t unique to blacks but are felt more intensely because of where we fit in higher education and in the broader society. There likely was an Obama effect that generated more interest in the study of black life and the role of race in American life more broadly, and then more interest in black books and black booksellers. But that’s the exception. 

And this brings me to one of the ways it becomes possible to talk about a uniquely black crisis. In general we tend to think of crisis as something that has a beginning and an end—it’s a rupture. While that applies in general, with blacks it’s like crisis is our default state.

But even with us, there are crises, and then there are crises. 

When I try to describe what life is like at Hopkins now, I juxtapose it against three other time periods—the mid 2000s (when I was just starting), the 2015 period (the period marked by the Freddie Gray Uprising and then the Trump election), and then the 2020 period (marked by COVID). Each of those moments were marked by crises. 

But the scope and the scale differed. 

In the mid-2000s and early 2010s  the crisis was an endogenous one, driven by making our work matter to the departments in which we were employed and then perhaps making them matter to the broader administration (and students) enough to grant us an academic unit at best and then more positions within academic units at worse. 

In the mid 2010s with the murder of Trayvon Martin and then Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and then Freddie Gray, we move beyond the institution to the scale of the city and then the nation. The last day of my Black Politics class—itself designed to deal with growing activism around police violence—was cancelled because administrators were fearful the uprising would come to campus. 

(When I show of my photography, I’ll no doubt include the video below, taken the day classes were cancelled—one of the things Baltimore political officials did was shut off the single line above/below ground Metro system, with the exception of the final Baltimore stop (not coincidentally, at Hopkins).    

This coincided with the exit of most of our black faculty, so there was both a certain type of state crisis and then a “normal” crisis. One that ratcheted up another notch with Trump’s election and then relatedly Brexit, which both signaled rising authoritarianism. Faculty organized—I still have the minutes of the first packed meeting in Merganthaler Hall—but, and this is really important to note, we felt we not organizing on behalf of the university, we were organizing on behalf of populations we thought we would be adversely affected. We were organizing to protect students, we were organizing to protect the city. And although I don’t know if we talked about it in these terms, we were beginning to organize to protect democracy.     

With COVID the stakes became world altering. I think I have a post somewhere here where I attempted to list the people I lost to COVID—although it wasn’t my intention I’ve never not written about death here—but even that post understates both the number I actually did lose as well as the effect living under COVID has on all of us. And at 1000 words I haven’t even gotten to January 5, much less to the 2024 election. 

I’ll try to do that next time. 

(Otherwise this will double.)

Cultivating Radical Imagination: Rethinking the Role of Institutional Power in Detroit and Beyond

In two weeks I’ll be delivering a keynote lecture at the Damon J. Keith Center at Wayne State University. As my lecture will focus on the role thought can and should play in this moment focusing on the “disseminating black thought” in the next issue should fit.