The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 30

I try my best not to click on internet ads. Last time I did that—I was looking at a piece of DJ equipment—I got blasted with Maschine drum kit ads for 369 days. But while reading about Cathy Pugh’s decision to veto the minimum wage bill I stumbled across an ad for the Baltimore Parking Authority. 

I know. Who the hell advertises for the parking authority??

Turns out they’ve a wonderful new ad campaign called Project Space (“more space for all”). On the surface it’s a campaign designed to highlight the various new ways Baltimore’s Parking Authority is working to improve service and access. It does four things: it reserves on-street metered parking for people with disabilities, it installs since-space parking meters at those reserved spaces, it retrofits current meters to make them compliant with ADA standards, and it requires payment for folks parking at ADA meters.

Maybe it’s me. What caught my eye though was the last one. The part about making sure folks pay. 

As resource-poor cities like Baltimore look for revenue sources they focus even more heavily on fees applied primarily to populations with the ability to pay (defined loosely) and the inability to dodge. Which means rather than look to an entity like Under Armour they look to the disabled. 

As I’ve noted above, Baltimore’s in a perpetual “budget crisis”. I place the term in quotes not because the crisis isn’t real…it’s real enough…but rather because crises like these are the product of political choices. It’s a bit more complicated than this to be sure, but there are enough revenue sources in the city besides the disabled to fund the city’s priorities, and likely enough voter-support. The budget problem, to the extent one exists, is the function of the lack of political will. Pugh wants to increase police spending to just a shade under $500 billion…and although according to Luke Broadwater this budget increase also includes cuts in spending on Homeland Security surveillance and criminal investigations, she’s also talking about reintroducing red-light cameras as a source of revenue enhancement. 

A wonderful beginning to April don’t you think?

….

We’re reading A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon for Africana this week. Of all of his works, this is likely the one that gets the least attention. The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin White Masks probably run neck and neck for our attention with A Dying Colonialism coming in probably dead last. Not saying Google Scholar is the be-all end-all of this type of thing, but whereas Wretched and Black Skin both get about 15000 citations each, A Dying Colonialism gets only a tenth as many. The easy answer for the difference is that Wretched and Black Skin are deeply theoretical while A Dying Colonialism is less so. And yes, there’s that. I’m not sure the Afro-pessimism school of thought exists without them. But for some reason, we’re still far more interested in the life of the mind than we are in institutions, practices, technologies. When Algerians gained access to and began to use the radio, revolutionary possibilities increased ten-fold because it became easier for them to communicate and garner information across long distances. When the national news as we know it comes into existence it “broad casts” what’s going on in the South to the entire country, making it easier to spread tactical innovations and far easier to garner resources. 

I think those of us dedicated to changing the world rather than simply studying it are probably better served by thinking about these types of institutional shifts. 

(And yes I guess I’d include the shift to social media, but I’d also think here about the growing use of blockchain technology.)

Monroe Nathan Work was the Director of Records at Tuskegee Institute. Although he worked at Tuskegee, he appeared to be a DuBois acolyte, holding fast to the belief that race prejudice could be combatted by facts, and promoting research projects that generated knowledge that could directly aid black political projects. With his wife’s assistance he generated the first National Negro Health Week and fought to garner government sponsorship. And he collected what might be the most exhaustive record we have of American lynchings. There’s now a website devoted to his work. I don’t know who AUUT Studio is, but they’re doing great work bringing this to life in ways that we can use in the classroom.  

….

I know crack isn’t really as wack (shout out to Whitney Houston) as we were led to believe (Johns Hopkins is bringing Carl Hart to campus to talk about his research along these lines). Yet and still, you know our infrastructure game is in dire straits if two men addicted to crack can break I-85. I neither create nor spread facebook/twitter/instagram memes. I can’t wait to see the ones that come out of this one.

And filed under they must be on drugs it looks like rest-stops are going the way of the dodo bird nationwide. (Unless, I suppose, someone can figure out how to monetize them like parking spots.)

….  

I’ve been keeping an eye on what’s going on in Jackson, Mississippi. You should too. 

I’m wondering if podcasts are the new blogs (or perhaps the new newsletter). Michael Dawson and the good folks at the Racial Capitalism project have a podcast called New Dawn.

….

I’m in Chicago this week for the Midwest Political Science Association’s annual conference. Will be presenting on my policing project Thursday, and will be there until Sunday, though my Thursday’s taken. If you’re around let me know. It’s the second to last talk of the school year—the third week of April I’m appearing on a panel at a conference devoted to Cathy Cohen. I double booked, as I was supposed to appear on a panel examining a talk Eddie Glaude’s giving on April 20. But we write books for a reason—Knocking the Hustle—was written against Glaude’s Democracy in Black (as well as against Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos and Cornel West’s Race Matters), so if I’ve got a chance to mine new ground and give a shout out to a mentor versus rehashing arguments I’ve made in print, I’ll take mining new ground any day of the week.

Thanks for reading. Thanks too for the kind words last week. Much appreciated. My name is Lester Spence. This is the Counterpublic Papers. On time for once.