The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 19

(Day 14)     MLK Day. 

The Henry Louis Gates documentary I participated in last year is titled “Black America since MLK”. 

Think about that. 

We take something like this so much for granted that we don’t really think through it. Next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination, and we’re still thinking about black life before and after. 

Even if we accept that this is part of a marketing scheme, which doesn’t really make since because it’s on PBS after all, what does this say about where we are that they believed the best way to market this documentary was to focus on someone who lived and died almost a decade before it was possible to have the equivalent of a mainframe computer in your living room?  

We’re learning and repeating all the wrong lessons from the civil rights movement. And it’s hamstringing our ability to come up with a set of political practices more appropriate to this particular moment. 

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Finally went to go see Hamilton (thank you Annasara!). I knew enough about the musical to know what I was seeing, but hadn’t read anything, hadn’t heard anything (well, anything except praise), so I went in cold. I loved the play, but thought it was pretty problematic. Historians are all about the archive—about our ability to trace what “really” happened from using archival data. We know a great deal about Alexander Hamilton because of a combination of easily attainable public and private archival data. We know a great deal about what Alexander Hamilton thought, well, because of The Federalist Papers. But archival data isn’t pure, isn’t without politics. 

Hamilton, to me, was as much about the archive itself and about an attempt to recover that archive without actually recovering the archive as it was about Hamilton the figure. 

Here’s what I mean. 

By using a hip-hop aesthetic Lin-Manuel Miranda imbues a traditional story about the tragic rise and fall of an American revolutionary with a modern colored patina. Hearing Hamilton spit about “not throwing away his shot” makes his American story one that people of a variety of different backgrounds can understand and appreciate. Once Miranda makes this move he doesn’t have to actually include real life people of color—either the free men and women who participated in the American revolution or the enslaved men and women who made Hamilton’s life possible. If Miranda had decided to go this latter route—and he could have—he’d have had to put more more thought into the story, expanding it to include a wider array of characters and a much deeper narrative about political possibility and constraint. 

Hell. By the end it’s clear that while this is a story about Hamilton, this is also a story about his wife, a perhaps more tragic figure, who was responsible for creating and sustaining Hamilton’s archive. But the viewer only finds out about her critical role here at the end of the play. It should come as no surprise that the musical doesn’t pass the Bechdel test.  

With all of this written though I’d ask a question. If it weren’t Hamilton, let’s say if we were instead talking about Attucks…how different would the terrain be if the pay structure was the same? In something I don’t expect will receive as much coverage as the multicultural elements, Miranda just cut a deal to share the profits with the performers.    

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Melissa Harris-Perry left a gap when she exited MSNBC. While Joy Reid does a good job reporting on many of the same issues, as she isn’t an academic there’s a certain type of expertise missing. And even though Perry was (and is) an Obama supporting race-woman, as a viewer I still felt her exit. 

Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University, might be filling in that gap. She’s got a show on Oxy featuring interviewers with a number of prominent social scientists (with at least two progressive political scientists among them, one of them former MSNBC commentator Dorian Warren the other political scientist Niambi Carter). From the discussion with Carter, which focuses on Trump, it isn’t clear how much or to what extent Greer will deal with black politics, nor is it clear how she’d cover black politics issues if she ends up doing so. But I’m hoping her show gets a bit of traction and carves out at least a little space for thoughtful black academic discussion. Here’s her first interview with Carter.

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A year ago today I debuted Knocking the Hustle in Baltimore.

What does the year ahead look like? 

Hm.

I’ve got a piss-poor history of documenting what I intend to do…I always want to do much more than what I deliver on. But there are a couple of book length projects that I’ve been working on that if I can get more traction on, can provide kind of a roadmap as to what black folk in the academy in jobs like mine can actually do. As it stands, over the past few decades I think a number of us have done far too much “speaking truth to power” and not enough mundane careful scholarship. 

Not even enough reading of mundane, careful scholarship. With academic journals increasingly walling themselves off in order to make enough money to justify their existence, the knowledge they generate is increasingly walled off from the regular public. There’s a need for people to simply translate the work they read in technical academic journals to lay audiences, to give those audiences the knowledge they need to make better decisions to generate a better set of politics. I’ve never been one to be about that “speak truth to power” life…but even those who think there’s something to that life have to acknowledge that there’s a lot more possibility in translating truth to those without power than there is in speaking truth to those who already know what the truth is. Or in the case of people like Obama, those who already have a very very firm belief in what they think the truth is. Granted, there may not be much money in that, either in the form of honoraria or big book contracts…but if that’s the life you wanted then you should’ve gotten a gig in another line of work. I think that for folk who work in the academy, have an expressed interest in helping black communities, and tend to study black people as part of what we do, our goal over the past eight years wasn’t that much different from our goal in other periods—to expand what we know about the human condition through research and intellectual production, to teach students to think critically about the world around them for the purpose of changing it, and to broadly share our findings with the public for the purpose of increasing that public’s capacity.  

(For a decent attempt to trace not so much what we should be getting from the civil rights movement, but what we should be studying politically speaking the American Political Science Association just put it’s 2016 State of Race Relations panel on youtube.)

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For a number of reasons I’ve had Gregory Porter on the brain. I think he’s got to be one of the best two or three jazz voices of our generation. Turns out the video for Be Good was shot totally in Baltimore around the Visionary Art Museum. In fact the video was directed by an NYC expat—Pierre Bennu. Bennu, his wife (a powerhouse in her own right), and a few other folk have been making the move to Baltimore in droves, in kind of an attempt to make Baltimore the new Brooklyn. Indeed one way to think about the Baltimore-DC corridor is to think of Metro as akin to the line connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan. 

On the one hand there’s something beautiful and wondrous in realizing just off the cuff that you’re surrounded by this type of talent, much of it black.

On the other hand there’s the potential if we’re not careful that this group ends up congealing around a set of interests that are more vested in generating a black version of Under Armour than in generating an equitable Baltimore that has a very different relationship with financial capital. 

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If Warren Ellis is to be believed, customs is now asking foreign journalists for their social media account data when they enter the US. 

“Voluntarily.”

I have a LinkedIn account but don’t use it all that much. I’m on Facebook (with a public account and a personal account) but don’t use it as much as I used to. I’m on Twitter but use it largely to get news I don’t get from Facebook. And Instagram has largely taken Flickr’s place for me. It’s unlikely I’ll stop using these spaces as they’ve become a way for me to reach out to and keep abreast of my folk. 

I do imagine though that I’ll increasingly do my thought work here. Some of you might want to consider doing the same. 

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The Senate interviewed Ben Carson last week. Carson’s got about as much expertise with something like Housing and Urban Development as I’ve got doing brain surgery. There are two ways to take this. It’s possible that Carson’s inexperience here may actually save HUD from a great deal of damage. Carson’s going to end up spending a significant amount of time on the ground not just learning about HUD but about government itself. By the time he gets a working sense of what needs to happen it may already be mid-terms. If the everyday bureaucrats responsible for maintaining HUD just keep their head down and do just enough to keep him from breaking anything, HUD might come out relatively unscathed. 

Might.

On the other hand, it’s possible that someone like Carson at the helm will end up being even more reliant on private actors than someone who has a vested interest and an ideological perspective. 

Whatever the case, I can’t imagine Carson having either the expertise or the interest in making sure that public housing units have low lead levels. 

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I missed the first twenty minutes of Obama’s farewell address. Obama’s going to go down as one of the most thoughtful presidents we’ve had. And one can argue that even to the end he’s doing whatever he can to leave the office in as good a position for the next person as he can. Yet and still, I found the speech troubling. He consistently placed responsibility for our circumstances on the back of American citizens, as if he had none. I gain a little bit of solace in the fact that in implying that Americans were dysfunctional he adopted the same stance towards Americans at the end that he adopted towards African Americans at the beginning. But only a little. 

From what I understand he’s attempting to resurrect Organizing for America. Too little too late. 

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Tomorrow I’ll be presenting at the Bayview campus in front of a group of real live doctors. Should be interesting.