The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 12

I was in Michigan last week at an event honoring Rev. Jesse Jackson. I consider Baltimore as about as safe a space as you can have. But Trump depression is real. I needed a change of scenery. I consider the University of Michigan home because of the sweat equity I and others put into it. My son is a first year student. My parents are only 35 minutes away. And I still know professors, grad students, and even undergrads there (pledging has its benefits).

So my job at the conference was to play the critic. 

Here’s the rough sketch of what I said, borrowed heavily from Adolph Reed’s The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon. Black politics has a two fold challenge. The first challenge is white supremacy. Historical and contemporary racism reduces black access to resources. This adversely affects black political culture. Because blacks couldn’t trust the white-appointed black elites couldn’t choose representatives through normal routine political channels blacks “created” a mode of leadership based on racial authenticity, charismatic authority, and protest tactics. 

Now racial authenticity is kind of fuzzy. What does it mean to be “authentic”? How does “authenticity” translate into representation? At best what you get from such a thing is an elite leader who doesn’t really engage with broader black publics but somehow acts like they do (the elite who “talks black” for example). Even the protest tactics in some way still rely on whites—protest tactics that whites didn’t respond to failed and reflected poorly on the leadership that proposed it.  

Fast forward.

Blacks get the right to vote. Use that right to vote to elect hundreds of representatives at the local, state, and national level. Finally black people in general have the right to objectively choose representatives, are able to see whether or not the representative actively represents their interests, are able to have public discussions and debates about what they’re doing, and are able to get resources from the government through normal routine. 

Because it’s black people it doesn’t really work that way, but it begins to work that way. However it isn’t as if the old Jim Crow model of black leadership goes away into the good night. It erodes perhaps but isn’t dismantled directly. 

This creates a two-fold typology of black leadership. There are those who are elected with flesh and blood constituencies….and there are those who are Jim Crow era charismatic authority figures. And as bad as elected officials may be, they are simply better than those of their non-elected counterparts on a number of fronts. People who don’t have flesh and blood constituencies for example can use a variety of techniques to front like they do.

Jesse Jackson is one of the last two figures (Rev. Al Sharpton being the other) to represent the old school type of leadership. Jackson isn’t really attuned to institutional development, focused primarily on protest, and a firm believer that the black agenda was embedded in him. The system he comes from generated significant victories—tracing the line back from jackson to king one would have to be a fool to argue otherwise. Hell, we don’t even have to go back to King, as Jackson’s run for president as well as his many brokerage projects ended up garnering black gains. However these victories come at the cost of generating the type of institutional apparatus that would give black people the right to govern themselves and embed in black communities the types of institutions that could generate the type of healthy internal debate a functioning democracy needs. 

I made these claims in the 15 minutes or so I had, connecting them to Obama’s signal failure and to BLM’s failure as well. 

But Rev. Jackson was in the audience. Heard what I said. 

Here’s what happened. With everything I said about the charismatic authority model, with everything I’ve always said about the speaking truth to power model, there’s something to be said for someone who can accurately assess and diagnose a moment. 

In talking about Jackson and bringing it back to Obama I mentioned Organizing for America (OFA), the thing I talked about last week. Rather than focusing on mis-steps by either Obama or Clinton, Jackson focused on one thing. 

Voter suppression.

And it was like a light bulb went off. 

What I said about OFA was right. But it’s not just about OFA, it was and is about voter suppression. Over the past several years the GOP has gutted the voting rights act through legislation and through the Supreme Court. The votes that were suppressed likely ended up being larger than the gap in Wisconsin, in Michigan, and throughout the deep south. This in combination with the fact that Clinton won more votes means that she, not Trump, should be the president-elect. What he said cut through most of the bullshit I’d read up until now. 

The students had a walkout at 3pm on the Diag. I felt like it was 1988 all over again. Jackson knew about the walkout and led a procession there. When Jackson came, the entire group became silent…and parted like the red sea for him. 

For all the criticisms…there’s a reason we still look to Moses.

…..

With his presidency in the rear view mirror I think many will write of Obama as the natural extension of a King or a Jackson. And yes I think in some ways he was. But not in a good way. What Obama was able to do was fuse the charismatic leadership of a King or a Jackson with neoliberal technocracy. He consistently used this authority to stave off critics, to responsbilize black consistencies, and then when he needed them, to get black folk to vote. But that’s about it. He urged blacks to engage in the process in order to critique him, suggesting that he’d move if people forced him. This proved to be true to a certain extent. But it’s worth noting that there were constituencies Obama had who did not need to push him in order to get their needs met. And for all Obama did to urge Cousin Pookie to get out to vote I don’t know how much he did to actually make sure that was possible. Cousin Pookie couldn’t get out to vote if he had a record. 

….

I’ve now appeared with Leah Wright Rigeur twice and both times I came away impressed. One of the things she mentioned in her talk at the Jackson conference was the voter gap in black communities. Only 4% of black women voted for Trump whereas approximately 13% of black men did. I thought this gap statistically though not substantially significant. That is, if only 13 out of every 100 black men voted for Trump there's not really a there there.  

I’m no longer sure. I think I’m more amenable to Rigeur’s comments.

My dissertation was basically about gender differences in political participation in Detroit. I argued that the gap we saw in Detroit—women out participated their male counterparts by a significant amount—was produced by networks—women were more naturally put in networks that spurred their participation whereas men weren’t. And on top of that men had an ideological antipathy towards politics. 

There was no political economy in the work. I didn’t focus on the role shifts in labor played in creating conditions where black men were taken out of the labor loop entirely, didn’t focus on laws that may have made it harder for them to vote, didn’t focus on the gendered nature of the institutions that perhaps shifted folks ideologically. 

But still. 

I think this is what’s going on at a national level and may explain not only the clinton vote gap but a range of other phenomenon that suggests that black men are either dropping out of politics or to the extent they participate do so holding anti-government views.     ....     I had all intentions to send this out Sunday like I do. But frankly I'm still coping.     I imagine we all are. One day at a time.