The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 no. 16

First off I’ve folk in Hawaii, and at least one reads this semi-regularly. I’m glad you’re ok and cannot imagine what those 38 or so minutes were like. I wish we lived in a world where something like that could be easily blown off. But we don’t and wishing in the absence of work won’t get us far.

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Shithole.

So one of the responses to Donald Trump’s statements about Africa and Haiti last week was to post pictures of card-carrying Haitian and continental immigrants who’ve made something of themselves. Blacks throughout the diaspora have used respectability politics of one sort or another at least since the end of slavery—though the term doesn’t come into use until the twentieth century, there’s some evidence that black communities in places like Detroit employed something like respectability in the 1870s.

Here’s what we know about Haiti.

The sugar mined by enslaved men and women in Saint Domingue (what became Haiti) during the 18th century provided the mobility for French citizens to go from broke to wealthy in a single generation. This mobility in turn helped foster the climate in which the French Revolution took place.

(People often suggest that the French revolution created the context for the Haitian revolution, but don’t often ask where France got the wealth to make the French revolution possible in the first place….)

Napoleon spent so much money trying to take the state back, he ended up having to make a few land deals to keep France afloat. One of those land deals was the Louisiana Purchase.

The United States banned the transatlantic trade of slaves in 1808. Why that year? Was it that a wave of morality suddenly swept the slave-holding states? No. It was Haiti.

Haiti was the first anti-racist republic.

This is 101.

No.

This should be 101.

I’m not saying that if it weren’t 101 a significant number of Americans wouldn’t have placed a racist madman into the presidency.

I’m not saying that at all.

I’m writing it.

(It bears noting that Donald Trump made the comments as part of a conversation about immigration. A couple of days ago a 39 year old landscaper and father of two was sent back to Mexico by immigration. He’d been here for thirty years.)

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A couple of weeks ago tomorrow Baltimore school children were freezing in their schools. Local officials pointed at the state. State officials pointed to the city. I wrote a piece in Jacobin suggesting urban development priorities were at work. In an earlier draft I calculated that some 7.4 billion in public money had basically been transferred to private sources over the past few decades. That figure was a bit off—I basically took the figures from this United Workers report and converted the figures on pp 15 and 16 into 2017 dollars—3.7 billion (at least) is nothing to shake a stick at. Baltimore’s entire budget this year is something like $2.9 billion. The one thing I wish I’d done in hindsight was connect this to infrastructure spending in general. Because private sources play such an overdetermined role in development priorities we’ve got to spend a few trillion dollars just to get back up to speed, and there’s no sign that type of commitment is coming down the pike anytime soon.

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I mentioned that I’d held a conversation with a group of young progressive mayors as part of 21st Century Cities 2017 neighborhoods conference. Here’s a link to the conversation. I wish I had more time, particularly with the mayors of Compton and Jackson, but I suspect we’ll be hearing more about them soon.

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We know the King we celebrate, is not the King we need to celebrate—assuming we need to celebrate a single individual. (Well, we know….but then again see Haiti above.)

But I don’t think we focus on love enough even as we focus on the radical King. It’s not enough to recognize that winning is more important than being right—the type of righteousness that usually comes from that position leaves us standing alone in that righteousness—it’s not even enough to recognize that we have to move towards a new type of institutional thinking…we have to rethink what it means to love. And if there’s anyone we can turn to in order to help us rethink that, it’s King.

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I knew 2018 would be hard. Including christmas, I’ve lost two friends, and found out at the second funeral that another friend is in hospice. She may be forty. Barely one month in. I now have to figure out how to get to Rochester before classes start.

I’m not alone. You aren’t alone.

Tell the people you love that you love them.

My name is Lester Spence.

You’re reading the Counterpublic Papers.