The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 13

    So I asked a question on Facebook. 

    I was trying to get at a problem Adolph Reed identified in the early nineties in a Village Voice article called “What are the Drums Saying Booker?” Reed wrote the piece in the wake of a series of pieces lauding “the black public intellectual”. For Reed people like Cornel West, bell hooks, Robin Kelley, and Michael Eric Dyson (not Henry Louis Gates so much but I’ll include him anyway) were making names off of interpreting black life for whites on the one hand and acting as if what they were doing constituted political action on the other. As none of them were either involved in political organizing nor in possession of a real constituency such a two-step enabled them to dodge the demands of real scholarship and real political organizing.  

    The question I asked on FB was a way to get people to think about distinguishing political action from one’s job. What would you do if you were an academic or artist who wanted to get engaged in politics but didn’t think your work was inherently political? 

    I didn’t get a lot of responses… 

    Relatedly, I had another conversation with a friend on fb. Bernie Sanders caught a lot of flack from some black activists and public intellectuals because he didn’t seem to get the concept of racial inequality. He fully understood class inequality but many felt his racial inequality game was suspect. Now the thing is, even though Sanders might not have had a good read on anti-black police violence, his proposals would benefit blacks disproportionately because we are disproportionately poor. In other words, Sanders’ racial inequality game might have been weak as water, but his class inequality game was arguably strong enough to make up for it. Some activists weren’t hearing this in part because the one identity they can’t quite intersect with race is class. Intersectionality is all the rage when it comes to thinking about race and gender, about race and sexuality, about race and disability. But when it comes to race and class, it’s another story entirely. 

    So I had this conversation with my friend. He’s going in on Bernie like nobody’s business and I take the bait.

    “if college tuition were free would blacks: not benefit, benefit the same, or disproportionately benefit compared to whites?”

    Now I know the answer to this question. Again, because blacks have less income and wealth than their white counterparts odds are they would disproportionately benefit. I damn sure know I could use it, even with the tuition benefit I get from Hopkins.  

    My friend wasn’t having it. And none of the people chiming in would. They came up with a range of excuses as to how such a policy would actually end up hurting black folk rather than helping them. My friend even went so far as to suggest that to keep blacks from benefitting from it, whites would end up passing legislation making it harder for blacks to do so. 

    Right.

    So the state of Michigan has a proposal which, when passed, ended up killing Affirmative Action for college admissions in Michigan. University of Michigan enrollment ended up dropping significantly, and enrollment also dropped for first generation students in a few other public colleges in the state. But here’s the important thing—black college enrollment in general didn’t drop. It’s not like blacks who didn’t get into Michigan ended up not going to college. Odds are they either went to a school like Michigan out of state or ended up going to Michigan State. 

    This makes Michigan the perfect test case. They have a proposal that already has the effect of killing affirmative action. My argument was that they would benefit disproportionately even in Michigan, again because they’re disproportionately poor. 

    My friend wasn’t having it even then. Still believed that whites would find some way to take the benefit away from blacks. 

    Now there is precedent here. Once blacks were finally able to take advantage of the New Deal suite of policies whites did end up gutting welfare changing it from a right to a 5-year lifetime limit in the mid nineties under Bill Clinton. But this didn’t happen for unemployment insurance, social security, or for other similar policies blacks disproportionately benefit from. And it’s worthwhile to note that it took over 60 years for them to kill welfare. 

    I do happen to believe that we need a course correction. Many academics and artists (myself included) need to rethink the nature of our work as it relates to politics. And many of us need to take class more seriously than we do. How does this course correction occur though? 

….

    I finally got a chance to meet DeRay McKesson a few weeks ago. Right after the election at a panel I moderated. He’s incredibly smart and thoughtful. There’s a reason he has the following he has. 

    However at the same time he doesn’t really grasp the concept of representation, of what it means, of why we need it. 

    For him, talk of accountability is dishonest at best, because it’s not equally applied —the people who demand he show them the work he’s done in Baltimore don’t have to do the same for him. 

    But some were asking him to prove his hood credentials most were not. And even if most were, there’s a far more important conception of accountability he glides over. And it isn’t just him. I’m betting most of the serious Black Lives Matter activists have the same challenge. They don’t really see the need for formal mechanisms of accountability except perhaps for the ones they establish with their peer network.  

    The 21st century thing about it is that I get the sense McKesson and others like him do understand how certain types of representation and accountability work. During the panel we were on together someone mentioned his Twitter account….and he noted that he had 2 million unique impressions…perhaps per day. I’ve a sense that if the number of followers he had significantly decreased, he’d not only not only know it, but he’d try to do something about it. Perhaps not “whatever it took”—I don’t get the sense that McKesson is craven that way. But he’d do something. He’s accountable to them. 

    But this isn’t anywhere near enough.  

    I wrote about this last week in regards to Jesse Jackson. In fact when I saw DeRay in action I thought that he’d borrowed a great deal from Jackson and Sharpton in carving out his niche. 

….

  A group of folk out of New York put together a quick edited volume on the Trump election. They asked me to contribute an essay on the role racial politics played in the election. I obliged. I didn’t push hard enough on the intra-racial dynamics—many of the big city mayors only interested in high turnout in presidential elections are African Americans. But it was a decent first cut at what I imagine is going to be a long set of conversations about this. 

….

    The Pistons came back to Detroit last week, signing a deal that’ll see them sharing space in the new arena originally built for the Detroit Red Wings (a new arena subsidized by taxpayer dollars to the tune of at least $600 million). This will mean that Detroit will have all four major sports teams within the city’s borders for the first time since 1974. Of course the race and class optics are so bright they blind—the Pistons and Lions both leave the city around the time blacks take it over…and come back right in time for significant white middle and upper income gentrificatio. Of course both the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News are hyping the deal, noting that just a short time ago the city was facing bankruptcy….kind of ignoring the fact that the owner of the Red Wings cut a deal to build the new stadium with city tax dollars during the bankruptcy.     

….

    Henry Louis Gates produced a four hour documentary about Black America after King. Gates has been involved in a few of these over the past three decades. I got roped into appearing in this one. I haven’t seen it, but suspect it’s just left of center enough to fit black common sense, but mostly ignores political economy.

  Anyway, check it out.

….

    So it didn’t take long. Trump’s election results hadn’t even fully come in yet—they were still counting votes in California and Michigan among others—before signs that he planned to use the office in the same way he used the Presidential campaign, to fill his coffers. The media is covering it, but only a little. When you think about it, we only really had a fully participatory democracy for about 50 years or so…and even here we only had a deeply critical media for about 15 or so of those years. I don’t want to say “it’s a wrap” because it isn’t over yet. But again, interest shapes information processing. If someone like me with over 20 years of education can suggest with a straight face that archival work is similar and perhaps the same as running (or even staffing) a voter education campaign, then it isn’t hard to imagine some Trump voter saying that it’s ok that the President require leaders of other nations to stay at his hotel when they visit D.C. 

….

    Castro passed.  

    I’ve nothing. 

    Well. 

    Maybe one thing.

    Is it wrong to suggest that maybe a lot of folk are getting out while they’re ahead because they know what’s coming?

    (Don’t answer that.)

    Be good. Share if you’d like. In fact, sign folk up if you’d like. 

    This is Lester Spence. And for the first time in a bit I think i got this out on time.