The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 1

Today’s the first day of the new school year, hence the beginning of the second volume. Still lightly edited....

Well. Technically last Thursday was the first day of school. I don’t teach for another six days—veteran trick, if school always starts after Monday but before Labor Day you can get an extra week of summer if you teach on Mondays.

I just came back from Philadelphia a couple of days ago, there for what is likely the largest gathering of political scientists known to man. Or any other semi-sentient being. 

And yes, 10,000 political scientists gathered in one place looks pretty much like you’d imagine that it’d look. Although I didn’t see as many khakis and blue blazers as I normally see. 

As a result this is going to be heavier than usual on the political science. Consider this the hard-core political science edition. 

….

I noted last week that I was on four panels. A Thursday panel on Black Lives Matter. A Friday panel on Race Relations (I took Melissa Harris-Perry’s place). Another Friday panel on Alternatives to the Neoliberal City. A Saturday panel on Marie Gottschalk’s wonderful book Caught. 

In between I ended up getting a book. 

No. Not like that. I mean I got a book given to me. 

(Read. You’ll see what I mean.)

And doing APSA Karaoke. 

(Which I won’t talk about at all. I created APSA Karaoke with a colleague several years ago. In my colleague’s case it was because he loves Karaoke. In my case it was because I’d finally gotten too old to dance every night without paying for it in the morning so I needed something in the middle. I won’t talk about it because in order for it to work we have to work on Fight Club rules. Rule 1—no one talks about APSA Karaoke. Rule 2—if you come to APSA Karaoke you have to sing.)

….

First panel—Black Lives Matter. The idea:

The mass mobilization against police killings in the United States over the last two years has inspired new forms of community resistance while sparking new national conversations about long-standing abuses. But what kinds of political analysis, vision, and strategies are needed in the long term to meaningfully impact the problem of police terror? What is the structural role of law enforcement in poor communities and communities of color? What kinds of coalitions will need to be built ? Is police reform enough, or do we need to re-think the very existence of law enforcement? This roundtable brings together scholars from various perspectives to discuss and debate these questions.

Great panelists—Princeton’s Eddie Glaude was supposed to appear on the panel but couldn’t pull it off. Chrissie Greer (Fordham University) filled in admirably. To be honest if I’d have chosen the panel I’d have gone with her anyway. Theorist Juliet Hooker wasn’t able to make the panel on time but graciously typed comments and sent them in advance, comments read by political scientist organizer Joe Lowndes (who organized the panel in the first place). Although a range of folk don’t think we gain a lot by thinking of black politics in transnational terms—in thinking about the effect of transformations in America on the Caribbean for example—I’m not one of them. Juliet Hooker is one of the best in the US in helping us think through how local movements as far away as South Africa take advantage of the opportunity provided by black activists in the US to frame their particular concerns in ways that can gain purchase outside of their borders. And Douglas Williams is one of the few graduate students with a real history of labor organizing. So whereas I had Greer speak to how Black Lives Matter complicates our understandings of black political power, and had Juliet speak to transnational black politics, I had Douglas speak directly to Joe’s idea. 

I wish I could’ve done a better job in writing the questions down because as good as the panel was, the questions from the audience were even better. One question stands out:

What if we thought of Black Lives Matter as endogenous to American Politics rather than exogenous? What if Black Lives Matter and the issues it raises were treated as a fundamental dynamic of American Politics rather than an unfortunate but kind of tertiary aspect of it?

….

Second panel—Race Relations.

Ok. So the idea of having a panel on “race relations” in the 21st century is kind of a hoot when you think about it. I don’t really care about how different racial populations get along. I’m even becoming less interested in some of the attitudinal questions that come out of this—how big are the gaps between Latina/o and black American attitudes on crime? But that was the title. 

Originally Melissa Harris-Perry was supposed to be on the panel, which featured Janelle Wong (Maryland), Lisa Garcia Bedolla (Berekely), and Paul Frymer (Princeton). But Melissa begged out, so I was placed in her stead.

(As an aside, you know political science is kind of in trouble when I’m the go to person after Melissa. I know some of you don’t really like sports metaphors, and I apologize, but it’s a sign that the political science bench is…well…weak.)

I took the opportunity to do three things.

First use the work of my advisor Hanes Walton (RIP) to critique the “race relations” frame itself. Many of us really are concerned more with how racial groups get along than we are about political power and social justice. Hanes was one of the first to show how this played out in political science by simply looking at the top political science journals and tracking how often articles dealing with “race relations” appeared compared to the number of articles dealing with black political empowerment.  

Second I brought in the Baltimore Uprising and the Freddie Gray murder to talk about the unasked questions. Although we’ve now embraced the idea that racial politics, black politics, Latina/o politics, and Asian American politics are a fundamental part of political science….there are still a range of questions we never quite get around to. To wit you’d be hard-pressed to find an article in any of the top-tier political science journals dealing with police in any way. Given how important they’ve become as political units I don’t know how this is. I used Freddie Gray’s death to make a call for us to be better.

Finally I closed by pointing to the increase in public intellectual punditry. We’ve more people claiming to talk about racial politics and black politics with expertise than we’ve likely ever had…but very few of the pundits have any formal expertise in political science. As problematic a field as political science is as far as questions of inequality are concerned, it’s the only field we have that takes politics as its fundamental terrain. As a result we tend to have a richer understanding of how institutions function, about how ideas change, about how attitudes are connected to policy, than any of our counterparts in other disciplines. We’re in too dire of a state to simply accede terrain to our well-meaning colleagues who desire a better world but don’t have anymore than a 1st year undergraduate’s understanding of how politics functions. 

….

Third panel—Alternatives to the Neoliberal City.

Here I was a discussant, that is, I spoke about papers that other folk wrote. Two of these papers were on “the right to the city”—an idea proposed by a French theorist that suggests that people who live in cities have more of a right to them than people who own them. One of the papers focused on the unique problems rationalism poses for urban policy in general. And another paper dealt with urban land use disputes—let’s say a group of folk want to take a plot of land in Baltimore and turn it into a park…but another group of folk want to take that same plot of land and turn it into private condos, how do we go about figuring out how what to do with the land in a way that somehow acknowledges both perspectives? 

Rather than simply provide each paper with comments I used the example of Baltimore as a hard case of sorts. That is to say, if each author were writing specifically about Baltimore how would his or her intervention help us better understand and problem solve what’s going on in Baltimore now? How does the concept of “the right to the city” help citizens move against Kevin Plank’s attempt to get baltimore to subsidize a second downtown designed primarily for upper income residents? How might rethinking the role of rationalist thought (or the way we approach land use disputes) help us devise a new logic that would prevent police from acting like an occupying force? 

….

Final panel—Author Meets Critics

The Author Meets Critics panel concept is kind of a weird one. It basically brings together a group of people to gently critique a book that’s already been published. It isn’t as if the author can take our comments and go back and rewrite the book. In this instance we took on Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics.

Anyway I played the role of “critic” alongside Jacqueline Stevens (Northwestern), Megan Francis (Washington), APSA President Jennifer Hochschild (Harvard), and Adolph Reed (Pennsylvania). I’m glad I was asked because it gave me a chance to reread what really is a wonderful work. But again it’s kind of a weird framework. 

My hot take?

Someone needs to take her ideas about the growth of the carceral state and apply them to education. We don’t have “zero tolerance” policies in education without “three strikes” legislation. Even though I’m pretty sure it isn’t true, people believe that California calculates how many prison beds it needs in the future based on how many black third graders it has. They believe this for a reason. The book is already pretty big but a chapter talking about how ideas associated with incarceration as well as techniques associated with it have bled into other institutions would’ve been a good look. Along the same lines I’m really surprised she didn’t spend more time on police—how do the prisoners in the various state and federal prisons get there in the first place? Finally, and this is something she could’ve done, she doesn’t spend enough time on black political actors and their role. Black mayors across the country articulate tough on crime policies as early as the mid-eighties and by the early nineties you’ve mayors in places like Detroit deploying rhetoric no white mayor would likely be able to get away with. 

….

In between all this I ended up getting a book dropped on my lap.

Last year I got into a debate with a colleague over the role hope should play in black politics. My colleague believed hope was essential, and that a work like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me was poorer primarily because it wasn’t hopeful. I on the other hand thought differently.

The debate is here. 

On the way to sneaking into the APSA Presidential Reception—I don’t care if you judge—I ended up talking about this with two colleagues, one of them being one of the most important left social scientists of her generation. Anyway to make a long newsletter less long, I saw her this year and we continued the conversation. She agreed a lot more with me this time around than she did last time around, and proceeded to walk me through what a book that tackled this question might look like. 

(Like I didn’t have enough on my plate, but I’ll take it.)

One more thing then I’m out, swear to God. Well, I don’t really believe in God. But you know what I mean.

First, my colleague, former teacher, and friend Jacqueline Stevens—mentioned above—was recently banned from Northwestern University. Her account of what happened is here. I know one of the people implicated in her account and he’s got another take on what happened…but I don’t find his account persuasive. I’ve heard of circumstances involving alcohol abuse and sexual harassment where university officials had to step in and do something. In the first instance a colleague was forced into retirement. In the second instance a colleague was forced to leave and find a job elsewhere in the academy. 

I believe Stevens is being railroaded. Even if she were guilty of being a bad colleague and persistently disruptive in meetings I don’t see how either rise to the level of banning someone from campus. She isn’t the first this has happened to and unfortunately she won’t be the last. But I plan to write a letter on her behalf. 

Odds are if you’ve made it this far, you’re in the academy. I ask you to do the same. At least it seems to me that due process should be given here. 

Sorry for so much shop talk. Less next week.

Be good. Or if you’re going to be bad, don’t get caught, and choose the right targets.