The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 31

Attended the Midwest Political Science Association’s annual conference last weekend. Held in Chicago (at the Palmer House Hilton) every year, it used to be an annual sojourn for me, but when I moved to baltimore I just couldn’t justify it anymore. First flying in from Baltimore is a lot more expensive than flying in from Chicago. 

Second, the Midwest has more science-envy than any of the other regional conferences. Definitely more than the theory heavy Western. And more than its Southern little sibling. As a result it can be hard as hell getting enough out of the academic portion of the conference to justify going, even given how many folk I have at the Midwest as well as in Chicago in general. In fact the reason I was able to justify going this year was because the policing project i’m working on is data-heavy enough that I needed the type of feedback folks from the Midwest could give. 

(The Midwest, like the entire discipline has a bit of a race problem—even though Cathy Cohen and Michael Dawson are training probably more than a dozen black and Latino political scientists out of the University of Chicago it seems like out of about 6000 or so participants there are rarely more than about 30 black and Latino folk there. The Palmer House Hilton has one of the most beautiful old school lobbies i’ve ever been in. There’s nothing like coming down the major escalator into the huge lobby with the four story ceilings and seeing…..a thousand political scientists in blue blazers and khakis. It looks just like you think it does. One of the ways I used to make the best of it was by not wearing a name-badge and just kind of acting like I was just there for the burgers. Had a professor from Harvard convinced I owned my own janitorial service and had no idea of what it took to get a PhD. But I’ve now been around long enough that I can’t fake like my name isn’t Lester Spence…”Jefferson Davis” doesn’t quite work anymore.)

Anyway.

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Met a graduate student from Penn who somehow got the addresses of all 22,000 check cashing businesses. (From what I recall, she noted there are twice as many check cashing businesses as there are Starbucks. If Starbucks represents the cutting edge of gentrification—you know you’re in a gentrifying neighborhood the moment you get a Starbucks or a Peete’s—the check cashing business represents it’s polar opposite. Although check cashing businesses don’t just pop up like Starbucks does.) I believe she’s going to connect this to survey data not just about how people use check cashing places, but also to get at attitudes and behaviors. While talking to the student I ran into Vanessa Baird—someone I don’t see as much as I’d like. She’s got GPS data on every single stop and frisk conducted by the NYPD, and on top of that some fascinating data on race and the rule of law.  As much as I trip on the discipline’s science-envy there really is something to be said for a rich methodologically informed approach.      

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United is in the news because it mistreated a passenger by forcibly removing him from his seat.

A colleague of mine had a very different take on it, basically arguing that it was the passenger’s fault rather than the airline’s. 

In defending his claim he turned to the fine print of the contract noting that the airplane had the right to basically bump someone and prevent them from boarding (if, for example, the plane was overbooked). Now this is basically what happened to me on Thursday—they oversold the plane, didn’t let me on, gave me a check (which I promptly lost—it’s been that type of year), and sent me on my way. A woman bumped off the same plane in the same way had a funeral she had to make and could only make at that time. In both of our cases though we hadn’t actually gotten on the plane. And in fact the fine print my colleague was defending didn’t give the airline the right to remove someone from a paid for seat….only the right to prevent someone from boarding. 

When someone brought this up, my colleague first doubled down on his claim…then went quiet.

When we all take a look at that video, which given the fact that the passenger wasn’t white (surprise!) isn’t that different from the various police videos we’ve seen, we make a snap decision. 

Who are we with?

Do we automatically think the institution’s in the wrong, or the individual? 

And that snap decision is driven in part, by interests. A part of me jumps quickly to support the individual against the institution because I’m far more likely to be dragged out—not that it’s ever happened to me but there’s a reason why I tend to use the phrase “i’ve been kicked out of better clubs than this”. Thinking through interests in this instance can help us think through political solutions. In some cases the interests are so strong you’d only want to deal with the other side so as to make there result you desire legitimate. In other instances the interests are weak enough that perhaps you can bridge them. 

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Had a chance to break bread with Michael Dawson. The work he and Megan Francis are doing on the race and capitalism project is groundbreaking. The grad student above doesn’t tackle the politics of check cashing businesses if room hadn’t been created for her, particularly in the most empirically driven segment of political science, to do so. He’s got a podcast too. 

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Read Shateema Threadcraft’s Intimate Justice. Relatively short. Brilliant. 

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Only three weeks left. At this point most of us are crawling to the end of the semester hoping we can eke out just enough so our students don’t realize how gassed we are. 

Hold on. Don’t let go.