The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 37

Grading is pretty much done. And while there’s a possibility I might take a break from writing this to recharge, I figured I’d use the end of the semester to get back on schedule. 

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The NAACP let President Cornell Brooks go a couple of days ago and plans to undergo an “entire organizational retooling” to better combat Trump. News accounts suggest Black Lives Matter activism may have played some role. Brooks himself wasn’t a stranger to activism, having been arrested a number of times while president, but some suggest he didn’t quite do enough. One of the few benefits of middle age is recognizing when we’ve been here before. With the NAACP this type of thing has happened at least three or four times since I was in grad school in the early nineties. I remember the transition to Ben Chavis, then to Kwesi Mfume, then to Bruce Gordon, then to Benjamin Jealous. In two of the four transitions (the transition to Chavis, and to Jealous) the organization wanted to get younger and be more activist-oriented. 

I wrote an essay about Mfume’s exit (for Africana.com—talk about a blast from the past) 14 years ago. I noted that the NAACP had three structural flaws that replacing the president wouldn’t solve: 

1. It’s still beholden to outside donors—which makes its political agenda sensitive to the interests of its donor base. I didn’t realize there was a book just in this statement alone. Megan Ming Francis is working on a project proving that philanthropy was the primary reason the NAACP shifted its agenda in the 1920s from dealing with racial terrorism to dealing with education. In its early years the NAACP relied heavily on the left-leaning Garland Fund, which was far more interested in education than in lynching. As a result the NAACP shifted its internal agenda. This problem bedevils the NAACP throughout its history. Benjamin Chavis is forced out from the NAACP because of personal scandal, but given his actions while in office—Chavis was the first NAACP President to ever attempt to convene a meeting of black radical, nationalist, and liberal leadership—it’s likely donors would’ve forced him out even if he were scandal free (hard to imagine as at least one of you can attest). Corporate sponsors are likely as sympathetic to black life in the abstract as everyone is, but juxtapose black life against the police and you’re likely to hear a different tune. 

2. It’s a highly centralized organization—which significantly reduces local branch autonomy and the organization’s ability to respond swiftly to current events. There are exceptions to this, but the primary exception is a bad one. In 2010 President Benjamin Jealous swiftly moved to condemn Shirley Sherrod after Breitbart published a (fake news) article suggesting the longtime activist was a racist. After realizing he’d been bamboozled, Jealous reached out to Sherrod personally, but the damage was already done as Sherrod was forced to resign from the USDA by the White House. The NAACP was slow as hell to move on the Jena 6, and has been largely absent in the wake of Black Lives Matter, largely because the individual chapters who would be in the position to take the lead on such incidents don’t have the ability to do so. This could conceivably change, but in order to change this, a super-majority of its 64 member board would have to agree, and as the board is older and more conservative I find that unlikely.

3. NAACP membership (like its board) skews old, middle-to-upper income, and “respectable”—which makes it less suitable to deal with a range of contemporary issues black folk face. The organization has become far more willing to wrestle with issues like HIV/AIDS and mass incarceration than it once was, but this doesn’t quite translate to the local branch level. The NAACP has been involved in Baltimore (hell, it’s headquartered here), but although the local branch president is visible enough that I know who she is, I can’t recount a single thing the organization’s done up to and since Freddie Gray was murdered. I know they haven’t engaged in any outreach designed to build its membership base among the type of folk most likely to be victimized by BCPD. 

These three hurdles are baked in. There’s really no getting around them. So when folks talk about “retooling” it seems to me that they’re really talking about a public relations shift more than anything else. 

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Turns out that the biggest reason Trump won, well besides Russia, is not increased working class white turnout, but rather dampened black turnout. 

Part of this was to be expected—Obama wasn’t on the ballot and from the literature on black empowerment we know that blacks are more likely to turn out when a black candidate is on the ballot. But it appears that in some instances, in states like Wisconsin and Michigan for example, we’re not just looking at the reverse of the Obama effect, but at voter suppression. 

Which means that while perhaps we should focus on white working class voters in rural areas—we can’t retake state legislatures and the House of Representatives much less pass left leaning policy agendas without them—we should ask ourselves why more people aren’t talking about black voter registration and capacity building. 

It seems there’s an opportunity there.

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Quick hits:

I got a lot out of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. This is the first critique that gets it right. Although Art McGee disagrees with me, I also appreciate the way Stephens connects Coates’ project to the Afro-pessimistic turn although I wouldn’t call Coates an Afro-pessimist. 

Intent to Destroy. Of all the films I saw last week at the Maryland Film Festival, Intent to Destroy was the one I was most interested in. A documentary about the filming of The Promise as well as an examination of the Armenian Genocide the film examines. I forgot to mention it last week. 

I’ve been meaning to begin Mark Danielewski’s 27-volume project The Familiar for a minute. Finally started to dig into volume 1. Weird, like most of his work, but worth it…not just for the story but for how he uses typography, color, tabs, to tell a hypertext story (about…a cat) using “real life” pages. (And yes, it’s about more than a cat. But that’s kind of how it starts.)

Have also begun Achille Mbembe’s A Critique of Black Reason. I remember when people finally realized that race was a social construct rather than a biological reality. There was kind of an “a ha” moment…and then a new intellectual status quo came into being. I think in about a decade or so, when we’ve finally centered “the modern west” in the transatlantic slave trade, we’re going to look to this text as one of the reasons we did so.

Derek Siedman’s Hidden History of the SNCC Research Department is required reading for folk interested in the types of institutional moves civil rights era organizations made to develop an alternative body of knowledge they could use to effectively contest Jim Crow racism and develop alternatives. 

Kamasi Washington’s got a newish single. The Truth.

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That’s all I’ve got. If you’re around Baltimore next Sunday, a friend of mine is giving the best barbecue on earth and using it to fundraise for various local progressive causes. It’s my favorite day of the year. For more details inbox me. On May 19, 2012, my middle son turned 12, I took him to see The Avengers, and received word that I’d gotten tenure.

It’s been an intense five years. Long to go before I sleep. 

See you next week. 

“You can never lose a thing if it belongs to you.” —Abbey Lincoln