The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 no. 10

December 05, 2017

A group of us are thinking about doing something big about 1968.

Why 68?

In no particular order:

The Tet Offensive

The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy

The birth of Black Studies

The Assassination of Martin Luther King jr.

The Baltimore Rebellion (and dozens of others like it)

The 1968 Olympics (Tommie Smith and John Carlos)

The first real climate change report

The Democratic National Convention

The Rodney Riots in Jamaica

The Troubles in Ireland

The Paris Student March

And that’s for starters.

I’d argue—and there are folk reading this with a better handle on this type of thing than I—that 1968 was the most important year of the second half of the twentieth century. And given what we’re dealing with, I think revisiting a year like this will do us well. A course, a series of pop-up lectures, movies, bigger lectures, concerts. If the world were right…well if the world were right we wouldn’t need to commemorate the year like this…but if the world were right we’d be doing all these things and more.

….

1 trillion.

So we know that the tax cut won’t generate a wave of productivity that will pay for itself. This will put the nation even further into debt. And up until now that supposedly matter to the GOP. Now, not so much.

But in the future? When all of a sudden someone proposes revisiting the cuts (and no one’s even going to have to really propose it given the triggers that’ll cause aspects of the cut to expire), the deficit will matter.

Which makes this not only a pure cash grab sending money up the food chain to folks (and entities) who don’t need it, it makes it a two fold brilliant political move. It further keeps the government from moving in a progressive direction by hamstringing its ability to go further into debt and then keeps the government from moving in a progressive direction by increasing the animosity people have towards government in the first place.

(How Sway, How? You reduce spending on government you reduce the services it provides as well as the quality of those services. When people see the service cuts, a significant portion of them won’t think “we need to spend more money on this”, but rather “this is why government shouldn’t be in the business of providing X in the first place.” Which will then reduce support for even getting government back to what is now the status quo, much less increasing government resources. That’s how.)

They’re coming after entitlements next. Whether Trump stays in office or not doesn’t really matter. This, plus the judges, may make his presidency a success to his folk.

…

A few weeks ago I stumbled on this article about Ava Duvernay (director of Selma and the upcoming A Wrinkle in Time) and Ryan Coogler (Creed, Black Panther) about race, film, and their upcoming movies. Quotes:

“I have a niece who is the real Meg,” said DuVernay. “I want her to see all that’s possible for her and to show her that she doesn’t have to wait until she’s 32 years old to figure it out. She should be able to know that she can walk through any door — even if the door is not there. If you start walking towards it, it will appear for you. And it’s not only for black girls but all kinds of girls — and boys too. A hero doesn’t have to be defined so narrowly.”

Coogler:

“We got to do our part to keep pushing things forward. To see a movie where somebody looks like me that is a king and knows their ancestry and has an army of incredible folks around them and who believe in them? I don’t know what that would have done for me when I was 10 years old.”

I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was probably 8 or 9 years old. Was about as formative to me as The Hobbit (which I’d read when I was 6 or 7). I still have Christopher Priest’s run of Black Panther. So on the one hand I get it. Trust.

But I still maintain that seeing people of color on the big screen does more for whites than it does for people of color. Duvernay didn’t need Duvernay’s A Wrinkle in Time to “become” Ava Duvernay. What would seeing Black Panther on screen have done for the ten year old Coogler? Maybe it’d have made him…I don’t know….an award winning film director?

These two films taken together may be the blackest thing since the secret White House ankle breaking Soul Train line. And I’m all about creating art our kids would enjoy.

We shouldn’t get too carried away though. (Particularly given the likely effect these tax cuts are going to have on black and brown families.)

….

My friend Jelani Cobb was on Slate’s I Have to Ask, talking Trump, Obama, and the nation.

It’s not The Dig or New Dawn, but it’s worth listening to. He gets a few things wrong, particularly about Obama—it’s worth noting that the GOP didn’t just deploy a scorched earth strategy against Obama, it deployed one against Clinton. Further before Trump there was George W. But he gets a lot right. We should start referring to the GOP as the white nationalist party. That’s a fact. Listen to it with the following in mind:

Prior work suggests that the way politicians talk about race affects the power of racial attitudes in political judgments. Racial priming theory suggests that explicit racial rhetoric—messages overtly hostile toward minorities—would be rejected. When race is cued subtly, however, the power of racial attitudes on issues is significantly enhanced. Replication attempts have recently failed. We identify two historically related shifts that lead us to expect that the effective distinction between explicit and implicit racial rhetoric has declined in recent years. Four nationally representative survey experiments strongly support our predictions: regardless of whether political messages are racially explicit or implicit, the power of racial attitudes is large and stable. Finally, many citizens recognize racially hostile content in political communications but are no longer angered or disturbed by it.

In “The Changing Norms of Racial Political Rhetoric and the End of Racial Priming” (forthcoming), Nick Valentino (also a friend), Fabian Neuter, and L. Matthew Vandenbroek empirically show what we’ve all pretty much suspected. There was a time when the best “racist” rhetorical tactic would be to use symbolic terms (“welfare queen”, “carjacker”, “illegal immigrant”, etc.) that would somehow evoke racism but could plausibly be defended as “not racism”.  And that time was a product of politics. Well, that time is over. People can and do still use symbols, but increasingly eschew symbols for what could be called “real racist talk”. And a large swath of citizens no longer care. Some suggest there’s no difference between these two periods. Those some are wrong.

Work to do. My name is Lester Spence. This is The Counterpublic Papers. As always, lightly edited, and kind of timely. If you know folks who want to be intellectually hazed once a week or so, send them here.