The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 36

So yesterday I was at the gym watching pickup basketball when I got a text from my brother.

Call ASAP ASAP.

That type of text usually signals the worst, so I called immediately.

My brother and sister received phone calls within minutes of each other from someone looking for me. A financial agency of some sort. They figured it was a scam, but they’d done enough searching to find their contact information, but somehow not enough to get mine. And evidently they reached out because they’d found out about the award I received, which came with $50,000 in research money….and thought that the research money was given to me in cash. 

Hilarious. 

….

So here’s the thing about that award.

About two years ago Hopkins experienced a black faculty exodus. We’d already lost a faculty member to retirement and then another to a deanship at another university. Then we lost three more. Because Hopkins’ numbers are so god-awful, losing five black faculty in a short period of time was a crisis moment. Particularly because each of them argued that the lack of black faculty was one of the reasons they left. 

This exodus overlapped with the uprising. Which put Hopkins and its senior administrators in a tough spot. The black faculty exodus, combined with growing black student frustration and activism, created a certain type of internal crisis, and the Freddie Gray Uprising generated a region wide external crisis. 

Hopkins has taken a number of steps in response. It created a roadmap of sorts that it plans to use to increase the number of black and Latino faculty, it’s created a series of workshops designed to deal with implicit bias in hiring, and it’s created a lecture series focusing on race and racism.

This award is one of those steps. I read it simultaneously as the direct result of student protest and activism and as a drop in the bucket compared to what Hopkins and institutions like it need to do to transform themselves into more humane institutions of higher learning. I will gladly take the research money—I have a general sense of I plan to do with it, including using a portion of it to try to get more—but I do not believe such a thing is deserved. And if it is, it’s definitely not deserved by one person. 

I’ll go back to the Cathy Cohen Conference I attended a few weeks ago. Cohen is a singular person. But at every point in time she’s been working with collectives for projects that would benefit collectives. 

I am not Cathy Cohen. I am not Errol Henderson. I am not Chuck Wynder. I am not Tracye Matthews.

But like all of them, I’ve consistently tried to work on behalf of a project far bigger than I am. 

Almost five years to the day I received word that I got tenure, it’s time to put a lot more labor into that project.

….

Oh. If you get a chance to check out any of the following films, do so: 

The Hero. (if you like Sam Elliott. Even if seeing yet another movie with a seventy year old actor finding love with a forty year old actress makes you ill.)

The Human Surge. (Pretty experimental. No plot. No character development. More like an extended video essay in human connectivity among young adults on the edge of the formal economy.)

Motherland. (Documentary about a maternity ward in one of Manila’s public hospitals. Powerfully edited and shot.)

Tell Them We Are Rising. (Documentary about the rise of HBCU’s. As my friend Abigail notes it is hagiographic…but in a context where Trump would suggest that perhaps HBCU’s violate the Constitution I don’t know how you create a critical documentary consumed by a mixed audience on this subject. No that’s not right. I know how to create one. I wouldn’t want to.) 

Whose Streets?   (Documentary about the Michael Brown murder and resulting protest. We’re going to see a number of documentaries like these over the next few years. I know at least one person creating one about Baltimore. Does an excellent job of laying out the context and combining found footage, tweets, and more professional shots. Could’ve done more to distinguish St. Louis from Ferguson—they really are two different places. But I’d like to bring it to Baltimore again.)

I saw all the films above at the Maryland Film Festival. The festival itself is a microcosm of Baltimore development politics—Johns Hopkins and the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art (MICA) have put significant resources into redeveloping what we now call “station north”. Part of that revitalization project included building two new theaters (one primarily used for teaching classes on film, the other—the Parkway—a 102 year old movie theater that had been shuttered for decades), one of them opening just in time for the festival. The process is, like most similar processes, uneven. So between the Parkway and a renovated mid-to-high end pizza restaurant sits a McDonalds that's been there for decades. In between films I went to the McDonalds to eat (I’ve been told I need to eat more fish and I believe the McDonalds Fish Fillets count!). Everyone there was black. I was probably one of maybe five festival attendees to eat there. 

We get movies. (And a black faculty member gets an award.) The rest of the city gets McDonalds. 

….

I don’t know what’s going to happen in Washington. Things are occurring far too fast for me to track, and I’ve been leery of social media lately. I do think it’d be interesting to compare the sort of crisis this represents…a crisis of legitimacy, to the crisis generated by the response to the September 11 attacks. I think the September 11 one was…”worse”. If you were to take a bit of a breather from social media and from the news, I bet you’d agree.

On that note, I’m off to the doctor. Was told that I had the cholesterol levels of someone who never works out and only eats greasy food. Which definitely isn’t me. 

Even with those Fish Filets. 

See you soon. Be good to your loved ones. Let your loved ones be good to you.