The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 27

March 11, 2017

Every year the American Society of Civil Engineers releases an infrastructure report card. Folks interested in alternative work sources might want to take a look. In brief our roadways are about 1.1 trillion short, our water infrastructure (they still can’t drink the water in Flint even though they’re now being charged for it) is about 105 billion short, the airways about 42 billion short, our energy infrastructure is about 177 billion short, and our ports are about 15 billion short. There’s no way in hell Trump’s infrastructure bill is going to do anything to fix these gaps but if the Democratic Party didn’t want to be anything other than what they used to be even during the Clinton era just calling for this and only this would be a good start. ASCE Report Card.

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Francis Slay’s been the mayor of St. Louis for the last 16 or so years I think—the first STL mayor to be elected four consecutive terms. Some would argue that given that St. Louis is a majority black city, this is a function of the lack of black leadership. When Slay decided not to run for a fifth term the standard empowerment narrative would have us believing this was the perfect time for a black mayor to take over, particularly given its status as the first major election in the region since Ferguson. Slay-supported candidate Lyda Krewson received approximately 17,000 votes, winning the election by 900 votes over treasurer Tishaura Jones. (Although this was only the democratic primary, this primary pretty much determined the winner of the race.) Krewson’s votes were concentrated in predominantly white South Saint Louis, while three other black (male) candidates ended up approximately 20,000 votes between them. For Jason Johnson the story is simple. Ego.

No. 

Ego, gender, and inter-generational strife are probably the three most hackneyed explanations analysts give for defeats like this.

Here’s why they’re hackneyed. 

Recall that most of the elections in the State of Missouri are off-year elections. And that off-year turnout, particularly for working class and minority voters, is usually low. 

28% of St. Louis city voters voted. If Johnson’s numbers are right (there’s a small discrepancy between the numbers he provides and the numbers provided by Ballotpedia from my quick google search) over 140,000 people in St. Louis didn’t vote. 

That’s 140,000 people who weren’t organized (many though not most of them black), not even mobilized to vote.

Listen. The more candidates we have in an election like this the better we are. Last year’s Baltimore mayoral election was the best I’d seen and may have been one of the best ever because of the competition and the stakes (having come on the heels of the uprising). Black folk interested in problem solving elections like these should think first and foremost about increasing turnout and organizing black voters….and if they castigate “black leadership” for anything it shouldn’t be for having the audacity to stay in the race but for having the audacity to claim to represent black people while somehow reproducing the conditions in which a full 140,000 voters decide to stay home.      ....

HERE'S THE OBLIGATORY LINK....IF YOU KNOW FOLKS WHO'D GET SOMETHING FROM THIS (LIGHTLY LIGHTLY LIGHTLY EDITED) NEWSLETTER, SEND THEM HERE.     ….

Re-reading The Souls of Black Folk for my Introduction to Africana Course. 

(Quickly, I’m taking kind of a “best books” approach this year. We’re reading Capitalism and Slavery, The Black Jacobins, The Souls of Black Folk, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Women Race and Class, and Black Power.)

Here’s probably the most quoted passage in the book:

 After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of sevenh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

This is the notorious “double consciousness” in a nutshell. It’s powerfully written. I’ve had this copy since graduate school and it was likely the first passage I highlighted. 

But the thing with coming back to books you’ve read more than once is tracing the passages you’ve missed. 

Like this one.

…by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms with ninety thousand acres of tilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, new and Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In a single decade the cotton output increased four-fold and the value of lands was crippled. It was the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life of careless extravagance reigned among the masters. 

Not as flowery. But whereas the first passage, quoted probably thousands of times, conveys an idea about how people with skin like mine supposedly see ourselves, the second passage describes a the way the economy of the south functioned off of black bodies. The Souls of Black Folk is probably one of the two or three most cited books about racial politics and black American life in the world…but I’m guess very few focus on his analysis of institutions like the Freedman’s Bureau and the political economy of the Black Belt. We all suffer as a result.

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Couple of Detroit related links before I jet.

I think I remember the first time I realized “ruin porn” was a thing. Way back when Mosaic was the primary way to browse the internet (I think it was Mosaic, it might have been Netscape), someone created a website called The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit. The curator approached Detroit the way archaeologists approached Ancient Rome. And there was something to it. Once Detroit was known as the Paris of the West, now not so much. (I don’t quite understand the direction thing either…If Detroit was “the west” what the hell was Paris?) 

We know Detroit serves as a stand-in here, for a certain type of urban blight. 

But what isn’t examined as much is the degree to which suburbs face similar challenges.

I probably won’t make it to Bloomfield Park before it all comes down. But if you’re in the Detroit area, a drive by might be interesting. 

And in under the heading of #smallvictories it looks like Detroit’s riverfront plan will be a lot more public than private, coming close to mirroring its southern Canadian counterpart.

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Faculty at Hopkins are holding a Trump teach-in March 28 from 7-10pm in Merganthaler 111. If you know people interested, please reach out to me. I think we might be the first people in the country to do this. A bit surprised—I’d have expected Michigan or somewhere like it to lead the way. 

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Going to be in Williamsburg at the end of this week, then Boston all next week. 

Hoping to not go snow-blind, given the weather.

Stay up. (and if you can't do that don't stay down.)