The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 no. 12

A couple of more of these to go perhaps before the New Year.

A favor?

Around now we’ve got a range of “best of” lists….best music, best books, best games, etc.

Could you send me some of your best ofs? What’s the best fiction book you read this year? The best non-fiction book? The best pure academic book? What’s the best album you heard regardless of genre? The best genre album you heard? What’s the best sf/fantasy book you read? The best game you played?

That type of thing.

I know a number of you actually READ this…at least half of the 300 or so folks subscribed. So yeah, send me your bests…I’ll then send it out to the rests….

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Kites Laymon wrote a longish piece about Ta-Nehisi Coates worth copying and pasting:

"I picked up Ta-Nehisi Coates and his editor Chris Jackson from the train station in Poughkeepsie, New York one damp November night in 2011. After reading every word Ta-Nehisi had publicly written and every book Chris edited, I invited them up for a public conversation on “Autobiography and the Fictive Possibilities of Black American Nonfiction Writing.”

I don’t remember many details of the night, but I do remember Ta-Nehisi and Chris being extremely generous with my students and colleagues. I also remember both of them looking at me like I had a purple confederate flag flying out of my forehead when I asked what, if anything, they would change about Ellison’s Invisible Man.

I want to say I had no idea three years later, that Ta-Nehisi would obliterate the game with a lean percussive book called Between the World and Me. But that would be a lie. I knew the nation’s backlash against Barack Obama and black folks would intensify. I know Barack Obama’s backlash against black folks making loving critiques of him would also intensify.

Most importantly, I knew there was so much Ta-Nehisi had yet to read in 2011, and he tended to turn newly read books into blistering essays every few weeks on his blog. Ta-Nehisi’s two writerly superpowers had long been his desire to craft bombastic, but never too dense, political prose, and his ability to write through what he was currently learning within the pocket of the piece. When writing about his relationships with his father and brother in The Beautiful Struggle, it became clear that Coates’s hadn’t read or remembered Baldwin’s Notes on a Native Son or The Fire Next Time. In many ways, Ta-Nehisi was writing up a storm without a firm foundation in James Baldwin, the greatest essayist and storm-chaser in our nation’s history.

Though I’ve learned a lot about how to synthesize heavy political claims into satisfying prose from Ta-Nehisi, I have never been drawn to his takes on American politics, his lack of faith in black folks, the breezy attention paid to what black men bodies do to the bodies of black women, or his inclination to engage with woeful wack white writers not anywhere near as talented or evocative as he is. I was and will always be drawn to how he uses prose to actually pose questions that matter. Many of us spent years watching, hearing and seeing Ta-Nehisi write brilliantly and curiously through what he learned about The Civil War, jogging, presidential power, emceeing, white folks insatiable desire to plunder and white folks’ music. I don't know that there is another American writer who more effectively models writing as learning and discovery than Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I like to teach Between the World and Me as Ta-Nehisi writing through what he learned while reading and rereading The Fire Next Time in the age of our first black President. The election of President Obama presented us with the question of how should black cultural workers hold a black president, a white heteropatriarchal nation and ourselves accountable for the ways we all fail to radically love black people.

The night Obama was elected, my mother, a political scientist at Jackson State University, did not celebrate. She said that white Americans would punish Obama, punish us and punish the country in spite of his love of them. "There's a price to pay for publicly loving Black folks,” she said. “And I don’t think that most Americans, and any American President, are willing to pay that price.”

I watched Obama’s last State of the Union address the same time I was teaching Between the World and Me. I hoped his final State of the Union marked the end of young black folk ever wanting to be President of this country. Of course, I wanted the most benign person in that position because Federal and Supreme Court appointments determine life, choice, and death. But I was raised to never believe any viable candidate for President could govern with a sustained commitment to compassion, justice and a love of black folks. Barack Obama was hired to clean up a mess white Americans made, a mess that violently shaped the lives of vulnerable black folk here and abroad. He was elected to do that old black work. Obama did his work, as black folk tend to do. Then he failed to ever place blame for the mess where it belonged while deporting millions of our Mexican family.

Ultimately, Ta-Nehisi found a hope and belief in Obama that many of us wish he’d found in vulnerable black folks at large. In Ta-Nehisi’s final rumination of the Obama years, he granted an understanding to Obama’s deployment of his biography as a reason Obama couldn’t lose faith in white Americans. One cannot argue with another's biography. One can argue and indict the way one chooses to employ that biography. Obama, with all his white loving family and presumptions behind him, knew what he was doing when he called our young people "thugs" while failing to ever call white folks responsible for our suffering "thuggish" or "racist." That was not a choice guided by biography. That was a choice guided by anti-blackness and cowardice, as was his Libyan decision. I cannot co-sign his deployment of a white loving biography as shield from loving black people deeply, especially in the face of the waves of unconditional love we shared with him and the absolutely murderous contempt spewed at him and our people during his reign.

I wanted Ta-Nehisi Coates, our nation’s most influential writer, to actually hold the first black President accountable for what often appeared to be a lack of love of black folks in their last public conversation. I wanted him to talk to him the way we should always talk to folks who refuse to reckon with the harm inflicted on black folks. Instead, we watched the American President mesmerize and ultimately woo a brilliant writer, as Americans presidents, and American men with more power than moral principle, are all prone to do. Still, I am convinced that Ta-Nehisi’s public critiques of Obama actually saved some black lives. I can no more substantiate this claim than I can flap these fat-ass arms and fly, but I believe it is true.

I marvel at how Ta-Nehisi has literally made monuments out of the essay form. His words are both born and bond. This, in many ways, is the paradox of Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is the most influential writer of our generation, so he is treated as the most influential writer of our generation, but he is equally and obviously a curious black student publicly reckoning with the weight of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and imminent empire at his own pace. I am thankful I learned from a black student from Baltimore brave enough to show us what he’s learning. Even as the titillated whitened parts of our nation beg Ta-Nehisi Coates for answers they already know, we will remember that it is the work, the questions, the reckoning, the organizing and a belief in black folks that will ultimately get us free. More than Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, Ta-Nehisi has intentionally and unintentionally helped some of us get closer to that "free" in this manically unfree nation obsessed with our labor, our gratefulness and our death by inviting the world to look at provocative drafts of his White American History homework."

-- few months ago, someone doing a volume on Ta-Nehisi asked me to write a 800 word afterword about the usefulness of his work. this is a draft. i hope i was fair in the little space i got. you can steal it if you want. i did the shit for free.

Laymon doesn’t lie. (Don’t ask me about the West piece or the Cobbs response. I’m pretty sure I’ve already talked about how much I hated the fact that the week of the Baltimore Uprising The New Republic saw fit to put Dyson’s hit piece on Cornel West on its front page as if a beef between two intellectuals was more important than martial law in Baltimore.)

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A couple of weeks or so ago John Conyers resigned. A few days ago I woke up to my friend Stephen Henderson being let go from the Detroit Free Press (his statement here). I was on his show just last week. Someone remarked that we’re entering a bloody period. That isn’t right, even metaphorically. We’re entering an incredibly disruptive period, yes, but bloody? No. Bloody may come but we’re not there yet. I’m still holding out hope that we turn our gaze towards institutions, and towards institutional change, and away from individuals. A big part of that change means having more women in positions of power—because women are more likely to take harassment seriously. A big part of that change means taking women seriously independent of that (while still acknowledging fallibility). A big part of that change means something more than sexual/racial harassment training—which I believe has gotten better. A big part of that change means creating institutional level punishments of some sort.

Probably more to come.

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Haven’t seen the new Star Wars yet. I probably won’t ever get over Jar Jar Binks. Won’t ever get over the racial politics that made Lucas see fit to use James Earl Jones’ voice, but not his body. And definitely won’t ever get over the fact that the series consistently asks us to root against empire….even as we ARE the empire.

But I’ll take my kids tomorrow—cheap movie night!

And read How to Watch Star Wars Like an Insurgent before I do.

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Less than two weeks to go before 2018.