The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 no. 13

I write this second to last newsletter of the year in my parents living room, waiting for my children to arrive on xmas morning. Winding down, thinking about the past year, the past two years really, and the year to come. What to do? What to cut? Over the next couple of years I pretty much know what books I’m writing, and I have a pretty good idea, depending on the day you catch me, of the specific form those books are going to take. I’m thinking of them as a two-book series on policing on one hand and on Baltimore on the other.

And I pretty much know what my other major school related projects are. A year long project of some sort on 1968, and then a policing workshop that may or may not lead to a conference in 2019.

What else?

I suspect the projects will find me. They always do.

….

You’re reading this newsletter because of Warren Ellis.

A word about that.

Inspiration is a weird thing. We’re basically sponges with appendages, absorbing information and stimuli from a range of different sources.

Warren’s a British science fiction writer. And he dabbles in comics.

(Kind of the way Derrick May dabbles in DJing.)

I’ve been reading his newsletter for a couple of decades now.

And when I really thought about how simple the mechanics were—get a free tinyletter account. Tell your friends—preferably when they’ve had a few shots—have something to say so your friends will keep reading when they’re sober. That’s it.   

We’re not going to win the world back through cataclysmic events. We’re going to win the world back by building community. By the mundane acts that won’t be covered in the theirstory books fifty years from now. By things like this. Facebook and Twitter are proprietary. Your energy feeds them. Facebook is the Matrix. Here? Not so much.

I’m not going to name names—really I won’t. But I’m thinking more of you should be doing this.

Tell me when you do.

And then I’ll tell my friends. (i.e. many of you.)

….

Cultivating a set of lists for you all, cobbled from my general network. Will send them to you on New Year’s eve or thereabouts.

….

Robin Kelley is absolutely wonderful.

I was at Michigan when he started. I think I was in my last semester of undergrad. I can’t really speak for History but I knew that political science had a large group of black and Latino graduate students but so few professors to provide real training that the graduate students created a disciplinary racial politics syllabus, not for themselves…but for the faculty. They trained the faculty (who didn’t believe race and political science had anything to do with each other) to train them. When Kelley was hired so many grad students approached him, from American Studies, from Political Science, from Sociology, as well as from History, the word was he was on like thirty dissertation committees.

Further, the word was he read them all.

Kelley’s probably the closest thing we have to Cedric Robinson. Brilliant scholar. Radical. And more interested in building bridges than destroying them.

This is Kelley on Coates and West. Note what he’s doing. He recognizes the biggie vs tupac style beef that it evokes (Vibe magazine becomes Vibe magazine in part off of the way it exacerbated the East Coast vs West Coast rivalry that eventually took the lives of both Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie” Smalls), acknowledges its mediated nature. But then traces and resolves the differences between them…and ends with Jackson in order to turn our eye back to the things that matter.

He’s not doing this because he’s got a book coming out—a 25th anniversary edition of Race Matters for example. He’s doing it because somebody has to.

….

On that, my kids just walked in—they still split time between the two sets of grandparents. We're all in Detroit until this Friday or so. If you're around let me know. I’m out.

Focus.

Love.

Build.