The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 no. 4

Just getting back from Durham for two Duke-Sponsored talks, one a conversation on The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (now fifty years old) and another on neoliberalism. The first conversation ended up being a manel with Joseph Winters (Hope Draped in Black) moderated/led by Mark Anthony Neal (now perhaps best known for Left of Black). It’s been some time since I read Crisis. What really stands out on this last read is how much he missed. The book is really not so much about the crisis of the Negro intellectual as it is about the crisis of the Negro intellectual in Harlem.

Harlem doesn’t mean anything in the sixties. And I’m only kinda sorta being hyperbolic.

The three most important cities politically, culturally, and economically at this point are Chicago, Detroit, and Atlanta. Harlem as a borough and New York City in general doesn’t really mean much, at least as not as far as black people are concerned. By focusing so much on Harlem he ignores what people like Barry Gordy are doing in Detroit, and here I am thinking about Motown but I’m also thinking about his more radical work—along with Diana Ross and the Supremes Gordy put Malcolm X’s Message to the Grassroots, King’s Detroit delivery of what becomes the I Have a Dream speech, as well as some of Albert Cleage’s speeches on wax. The reason we even know what the blues sound like is because Chicago had both a large market and a number of black producers…this combined with a small black business class and a black elite tied into Chicago’s political machine. Now what’s happening in both of these places are problematic black politics wise (to get a sense of what I’m talking about check out Preston Smith’s Racial Democracy in the Black Metropolis) but there’s far more to mine in these cities than in Harlem (which again, isn’t even a city but a borough). For all of his talk about a new institutionalism, which I do think is important, the intellectuals he analyzes are the ones largely unable to think through what a new institutionalism can/should look like. And here’s where a city like Atlanta becomes important—with not one but five black colleges (Morris Brown, Spelman, Morehouse, Clark, and Atlanta Universities) they at least have the theoretical capacity to think through what a new economics could look like for black communities.

Harlem not so much.

Given this, it’s worth thinking about why people took Cruse so seriously then and even though the nineties with the growth of black studies 2.0.

….     

So a group of us have been plotting and planning about what to do with the Center for Africana Studies. And part of this is really an institutional question—what institutions should black folk have or have access to now, what type of institutions do we need? For all the strengths something like Black Lives Matter brings to the table, one thing it doesn’t have is the type of institutional framework that enables it to continue to do the work long after the impetus and the affect is gone. In the Duke conversation we spent a lot of time talking about the generation of the academic star system and what Cruse might have thought about that. One of the consequences of that star system is that it’s now possible for an academic to use the threat of exit to get a center or institute. Now usually this center/institute is really nothing more than a shop for the individual and his/her folk. In a moment where simply teaching a class on black/gender/queer life can be viewed as a political project of some sort it isn’t hard to see how such a center can be plausibly argued to be part of a grander political scheme for black/women/queer folk. I made it so we made it.

Duke has almost double the resources Hopkins has (Duke’s endowment is 6.8 billion while Hopkins endowment is 3.34). This means that in the right hands, there’s more potential there to take those resources and use them in ways to serve the broader public. In fact, I’d write that a bit differently. In ways to construct a broader public. I might have more to say later, but I was glad I got a chance to see what a real center can look like—the Forum for Scholars and Publics had its own (beautiful) conversation space as well as the capacity to hold and promote events with barely a weeks notice. Given how quickly events turn—the NFL protests are already old news in some ways—being able to do this alongside having a robust group of scholars to dialogue with are essential.

….

So the first night I was in town I happen to run into the Black Wall Street folk. For the last few years a group of black creatives have been holding a conference in order to honor the long history of black entrepreneurialism in Durham (Durham is the home of one of the oldest and most storied black businesses in N C Mutual Insurance) and the Forum for Scholars and Publics reached out to them to see if they’d be willing to co-host an event on Friday. (I’ll get to that in a second.) I ended up running into some of the founders of the event in the bar and talked my way into the first night’s afterparty.

And saw a group of 20-somethings crowded around this as soon as I walked into the door.

Beautiful isn’t it?

Anyway, the needle was at the end of the record (something from the Rolling Stones)…and the young folk didn’t know how to start it back up. They’d never seen an actual turntable before. So I actually ended up giving three lecture/discussions. One on The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Another on Black Life Matters and the Market. And a third (which ended up being the first) on turntables.

(Because the record itself was silver, they thought the entire slab—both the record itself and the platter you put the record on—was one thing. They literally asked me… How would people carry those around? How do you know what song to play? How do you get to the good part? I swear to god sometimes I don’t know what type of life I’m living.)

….

For real for real I didn’t know how the Black Wall Street talk would go, as it was the first time I’d really given the talk to a group of young black entrepreneurs. During the Q & A session one brother asked me (and i’m paraphrasing): how should I go about dealing with my folk….we all recognize how much black people are struggling and how we’ve got to be about more…but at the end it’s always “but we got to get this money though.” how do you deal with that?

And that’s the crux of the matter.

One of the reasons Cruse believed that the cultural arena was so important was that he recognized the growing power of the cultural industry (as i’m typing…why if the cultural industry was so important to him did he focus primarily on the theater when the cultural industry was moving swiftly towards film, music, and television??) as well as the deeply integrated function black people played in it. He thought that at best black people could harness the power of the cultural industry in ways that would enable their communities to “get this money” even as it radically transformed black people’s image of it. This was wrong. This is wrong.

Yet and still, money’s required. CAS is woefully understaffed—one real staff person not only covering the Center for Africana Studies but also the Program for Latin American Studies the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship program and at least one other center I’m forgetting—and underfunded. I received more money for the Provost’s Award than CAS has in a calendar year. We’re going to have to get that money somehow. But there are ways to do it, and then there are ways to do it.          

….

Finally, this from Dan Slater:

1. White racism cannot explain the entirety of the Trump phenomenon, George Packer and other smart critics of @tanehisicoates rightly argue.

2. But thinking COMPARATIVELY, almost a year after Trump's win, white Christian nationalism is the BEST explanation for why US stands apart.

3. Nowhere in Western Europe have nativist candidates gained Trump-like support. Despite similar woes of inequality and massive immigration.

4. So what makes US different? Any explanation must begin with slavery & religiosity, which make us stand completely apart from West Europe.

5. Only in US have race, Christianity, and patriotism fused into the kind of nativist cocktail that best explains Trump's RELATIVE success.

6. This suggests we should be comparing US to countries in EASTERN Europe where race, religion, nativism are fusing into 'populism' as well.

7. Poland and Hungary didn't have slavery. But they have white Christian nationalism rivaling our own. This shared ideology is prevailing.

8. Of course in US, white Christian nationalism gets a major assist from gerrymandering, voter suppression, and EC. It loses but still wins.

9. But focusing on ideology best explains WHAT is prevailing, and why US looks more like Poland & Hungary than France, Germany, or Britain.

10. Adding religion to race also helps explain the Poland/Hungary parallelism, and can make sense of the sexism that so clearly hurt Hillary

11. So yes, more than race explains Trump in US alone. But COMPARATIVELY, racial/religious identity/ideology is the core causal factor.

Yes to all of this.

On that note, I’m out. My name is Lester K. Spence. This Thursday I’ll be in discussion with Chris Lebron on his book about the philosophical underpinnings of Black Lives Matter….and then in the evening I’ll be onstage with Son of Nun at a fundraiser for Research Associates Foundation. If you’re around and want more information please let me know. There’s not a single radical organization in Baltimore that hasn’t directly or indirectly benefited from the work RAF is doing, so if you’re interested in contributing to RAF let me know that too.

(Don’t let me know if you leave. Or if you’re somewhere in the area drinking Mezcal.)