The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 35

Ok. A lot of news. Not a lot of time. This is going to be very very short.

I think.

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I wrote about Chokwe Lumumba in Knocking the Hustle. A black radical turned city councilperson turned mayoral candidate turned mayor, Lumumba revitalized the political possibilities of the black radical left in ways we hadn’t seen since the seventies. Unfortunately he died a few months after being elected and we didn’t have the chance to see if he could take the grassroots force used to elect him and transition it into an effective governing mechanism. We might get another shot, as his son Chokwe Antar Lumumba just won Jackson’s mayoral primary by a large enough margin that run-off won’t be required, making him for all intents and purposes Jackson’s next mayor. The challenge with candidates like Lumumba is the challenge we faced with Obama and first-time black mayors before him—how do we ensure that a charismatic candidate with at least a pseudo-progressive vision is actually held accountable? Time will tell. We’ll see.

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Last week i got a chance to talk about privilege with Stephen Henderson on WDET. Henderson and I attended Michigan as undergrads together. Henderson spent most of his time working at the Michigan Daily, parlaying his work there into a pulitzer-prize winning career. Though he had a working class background his current status, particularly given how far money goes in Detroit, is anything but. I too grew up working-middle class, and though Baltimore money doesn’t travel quite as far as Detroit money does, I’m not quite there anymore….

I’ve said I wished I could kill the word “privilege” in the bed while it slept. I still have that wish. But I think the discussion on the concept of “black privilege” if such a thing could be said to exist, was interesting. You can find it here. If you get a chance to actually listen to it, tell me what you think? I tried to get across the intra-racial dynamics but not sure how successful I was. 

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Yesterday, Donald Trump fired the head of the FBI. I’ve been thinking off and on about a book project designed to show what political science can tell us about this particular moment in time. I don’t think any of us would’ve possibly imagined that the FBI, as right-wing and police loving as it is, would be the entity we’d turn to in the fight against Trump. (And when you add the CIA in, my head explodes). But there it is. 

Political scientists on the other hand, particularly those interested in political development, understand all too well that in a system like the US with a lot of moving parts, an institution like the FBI won’t simply walk in lock step with the President simply because they share ideas about how, for example, black people should be policed. There are other dynamics at work, dynamics that may on occasion place the FBI at odds with the President. In this case, it’s clear to me that the FBI simultaneously didn’t want Clinton in office and is dead set on getting to the bottom of the Russia question. The first interest places them on Trump’s side (although interestingly enough it was Comey’s actions here that supposedly caused Trump to fire him). The second interest definitely doesn’t. I’m not sure what happens now—it’s a bit above my pay grade. But I will say that for those putting money on Trump not lasting the rest of the year, i’d start checking with folks to make sure their checks don’t bounce. The last time we’ve seen something like this in the US is the early seventies. 

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It’ll be announced formally one way or another but I’ll be co-directing the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins next year. I’ll be working with Katrina McDonald, a sociologist specializing in the study of black families. The Center’s come a long way since 2004, and I’m hoping we can build on the successes we’ve had. This was not in the plan, but I’m looking forward to it. Usually when someone tells me they’ve been named the head of something like this I say “congratulations and I’m sorry.” Both hold in this instance. Along somewhat similar lines I was awarded the JHU Provost’s Prize in Faculty Excellence in Diversity. It comes with research resources that should prove useful in the projects I plan to work on this summer. 

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On Hypatia.

I’ve a number of readers who aren’t academics, who don’t quite care about the academy as such. I’m not going to write enough about the issue to inform you, so if you want more, check out this open letter. To make a long story short, they published a journal article (“A Defense of Transracialism”) that, after significant protest, associate editors state shouldn’t have been published. 

I have not read the article so I don’t have well-thought out ideas yet. And I’m not sure I will. One of the things that distinguishes my approach to issues of identity from those of many of my colleagues is that I emphasize class. When i think about or teach feminist thought I’m interested in the way something like Solange Knowles' A Seat at the Table may end up reproducing elements of Sheryl Sandberg’s aspirational feminism as opposed to someone like Angela Davis. 

Given this, someone like Rachel Dolezal only interests me to the extent that people focus on her to the detriment of class questions. 

As a result, even if I were interested in the degree to which we might compare someone like Rachel Dolezal to someone like Caitlyn Jenner, I’m only interested in the degree talking about Dolezal and Jenner end up taking our eyes away from more substantial issues. 

Now I get that there is an economy of sorts at work in an academic journal like Hypatia. Publishing or not publishing an article in a journal like Hypatia can be the difference between getting tenure and not getting tenure. I also get that most disciplines are pretty problematic when it comes to issues of race, gender, gender identity, and sexuality. Top political science journals for example rarely publish works by women, in part because women don’t have the same resources their male political science counterparts do. But yet and still I simply don’t have it in me to support the radical (for academics) step of asking a journal to retract an article because the article doesn’t do the work we think it should. I remember when The Bell Curve was on The New York Times best seller list….we aren’t talking about quite the same thing with quite the same stakes. 

Anyway, those are my thoughts. 

And I’ve now broken my promise that this would be short.

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This means what I’m reading and watching will have to wait.

Next week.

Love the ones you love.