The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2. no. 15

This week The Atlantic Monthly released the full version of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article on Obama. It’s beautifully written. But I’m going to repeat what I’d written last week. I think we’re going to look back at this work and see it as quaint. Doesn’t mean it’s worth reading. It is. Doesn’t mean that Ta-Nehisi Coates pulled a Michael Eric Dyson. He didn’t. Coates consistently puts a great deal of time and effort into his work and the piece shows. 

yet and still. 

So I began Stare in the Darkness with a scene from the 1999 Grammy’s. Lauren Hill basically smashed it. Picking up so many awards they probably needed to rent a U-Haul to carry them all out. Hip-hop and rap had maybe been recognized as a legitimate art form by the Grammy folk for, I don’t know….ten years? And here is Hill not just taking the best R&B award (when a number of prominent black radio stations would even then brag about the fact that they didn’t play rap) but several other awards including Album of the Year, Best New Artist, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. She didn’t just come away from those awards recognized as the best hip-hop artist, a feat worthy in and of itself. She came away as the best artist.

After she received one of the last awards she’d get, she gave gave the quote of the night.

“All of this from hip-hop.”

Later in the work, I move to Detroit, and Kwame Kilpatrick’s inaugural. Kilpatrick wasn’t Detroit’s first black mayor (he was the third). But he was arguably the first hip-hop mayor. 

I was at Kilpatrick’s inaugural ball with my parents. 

I was also at the inaugural party Kilpatrick gave for 20-30 somethings at the first major African American history museum. (The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, named after the doctor who’d created the museum in 1965—and incidentally brought me into this world.) I was there when Kilpatrick entered the party, then jumped on stage with Biz Markie (the headline DJ) to sing Markie’s “You Got What I Need”. 

We were all singing with him, tears streaming. This was our mayor. 

I used both of these anecdotes to suggest that there was power in symbols but we’d do well to course correct and locate power in…well…power. In taking politics as politics seriously. 

In writing about Obama and the power of his election Coates quotes a New Yorker article written by Jelani Cobb in which Cobb notes “until there was a black Presidency it was impossible to conceive of the limitations of one.” 

Cobb’s a card-carrying historian. (Incidentally, he’s also a friend.)

But he’s dead wrong.

We didn’t need to have a black President to conceive of that president’s limitations. (While we’re focusing on the power of symbols and popular culture as far back as The Man not to mention Richard Pryor’s biting 1977 skit. All we had to do is look at Detroit, at Atlanta, at Cleveland.  

We didn’t need to have a black President to think about the role black popular culture had in electoral politics. 

(Long before JayZ became a near-billionaire supping in the White House, he was in the Manoogian Mansion. In fact, Chris Rock wrote Head of State with Kilpatrick in mind. How soon we forget.) 

The office differs, sure. But that only has an effect on the type of constraints. 

Now I’m not suggesting symbols don’t matter.

An entire generation of Americans only know one President—a black one. The next President—and I’m editing this the day the Electoral College decides, so it’s possible it won’t be Trump—will be the first white President they have ever really known. This means something. On the other hand the casual myths white Republicans embraced about Obama? They mean something as well. These myths definitely played some role in Trump’s election, even though Obama wasn’t on the ballot. 

He’s just not right in focusing on them as the sole component of politics. Or as the most important or even perhaps the most novel feature of the Obama presidency.

I have much the same response to Tressie McMillan Cottom’s reaction to Coates’ piece. For Cottom the biggest problem with Obama, one that Coates’ piece gets at but doesn’t quite get at, is the fact that Obama had far too much faith in whites than they actually warranted. If he “knew his whites”, he’d have known they’d do everything they could in reaction to take their nation back from him. If he knew his whites, he’d have known that Trump could (and maybe would) win. 

Cottom implicit assumes that Trump’s victory was pre-ordained somehow because of white racism. It was not. It’s worth noting that as much as Tressie thinks whites came to get their country back, Clinton still won the popular vote. And although Cottom could spin revelations about Russia and the FBI into her narrative by suggesting both are about that whiteness thing, it really isn’t clear Trump would’ve won had we not had domestic and international interference (two dynamics that while perhaps connected to racial politics aren’t synonymous with it). 

For a very different view, one worth taking seriously, read Carlos Lozada’s Washington Post piece. Whereas both Coates and Cottom locate politics explicitly in Obama’s ability to navigate the hearts and minds of white and non-white voters, Lozada focuses on the degree to which Obama’s tendency to use his own story “as a default reference and all-purpose governing tool” (taken from Lozada’s byline—technically I don’t think it is a byline but i’m going to call it that) end up ends up working to Obama’s own personal benefit, but to the detriment of more broader concerns. The Democratic Party didn’t lose 900 seats over the course of Obama’s two terms because of racism. I’d argue they lost those seats because neither they nor the person at the head of the party was particularly interested in building power in regular people. Certainly if you’re willing to tell black people to get out to vote so your legacy won’t be tainted, you are likely unwilling to be all that interested in that project.

(It’s worth noting again that we didn’t need a black President to understand this phenomenon. William “Nick” Nelson and Philip J. Meranto wrote Electing Black Mayors in 1977. We’d gain a lot by going back to it.)   

…..

While we’re talking about the Washington Post, it recently reported that DC’s mayor may be “losing control of the city”. 

Now when we talk about cities we’re not talking about nations. Even though I compare the experience of the first black president to the experience of first-time black mayors, the state isn’t a city. Cities can’t mint their own money. Cities can’t declare war. Cities can’t enforce borders. 

In part because of these limits we often look to mayors to be far more of a manager than a political actor.

But what are they asked to manage?

I’d argue that one of the things mayors are asked to manage progressive expectations. In DC’s case the left-leaning city council, who have far more control over the city’s budget than they do in a city like Baltimore, are making demands upon the city that go against the will of the mayor. 

From the article you’d think the city’s spending money hand over fist in order to support every cause from Palestine to Black Lives Matter. Reading the fine print though suggests something different. It suggests more of a pushback against the DC status quo than anything else.  

What drives this pushback? I remember the first time I walked in Adams Morgan. Makani Themba, Founder and then head of The Praxis Project gave me a tour of the neighborhood. She showed me a shell of a brownstone that was purchased for approximately $20,000 that was in the process of being sold for seven figures. 

Where do those profits go? Where should they go?

Now I don’t know whether they should go to provide benefits for city workers…but in as much as there’s a long term trend to reduce benefits to public workers at the local, state, and federal level (under Clinton there were approximately 4.9 million federal workers, under Obama that number’s fallen by about 700,000; a similar trend )…this pushback is remarkable and welcome. 

Cathy Pugh just took the reigns of power here in Baltimore. Although there was a sense that she’d be better than Stephanie Rawlings-Blake at dealing with the needs of black working class citizens, it’s telling that one of the first acts she engaged in as mayor was to write a letter to Trump asking for support for the Port Covington project. 

If the election holds, and again it’s crazy that I even write this, the city will be the line in the sand. And we need to do the work required to make that position intensely political. Vehicles like The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun will likely report these moves as signaling “a loss of control”. We’d do best to recognize these attempts for what they are.

…..

That’s it for now. If I’ve my calendar right next week is the last one of these for the year. Rather than pontificate on what we should do now, I think I’ll save that for the next one. 

Glad as hell I ended up moving my flight to Detroit to Tuesday. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to hang out until 5:30am listening to two of the best DJs in North America, on the heels of serving as the kitchen DJ at one of the best Xmas parties in Baltimore.

(i don’t put a hell of a lot of stock in hope. but i put a lot of stock in a banging party.)

My name is Lester Spence. You’re reading the Counterpublic Papers. Lighly edited. And every now and then worth reading. For the Xmas folk among you, don't drink the egg nogg.