The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 no. 5

October 21, 2017

I’m semi-roped into Amazon’s ecology—my mom bought me a cheap Amazon Fire a few years ago, and I ended up buying one for my middle son, and then last christmas my mom bought me an echo dot, and I ended up buying dots for my kids and a regular echo for myself when they got cheap. Anyway, as a result I fell into three subscriptions—the Washington Post (which I probably would’ve gotten after the election anyway), Wired (which I used to read religiously when it first started, but stopped when the world cannibalized it), and Fast Company (which is probably the closest thing we now have to what Wired used to be).

So i’m on the plane to Minneapolis and I’m using my Fire. Watching season 2 of Mr. Robot (I haven’t really watched tv in years—the last show I watched was The Flash a few years back—but Mr. Robot is a brilliant examination of the pre- and now post-Trump world) and reading Fast Company.

And I end up coming across two profiles that bear thinking about.

One is a profile of Color of Change and its Executive Director Rashad Robinson. (The other is a profile of Jared Cohen. Might come back to him in the future.)

Before Trayvon Martin and Oscar Davis there was the Jena 6. A group of 6 black youth in rural Louisiana were convicted for beating up a white youth. They’d all attended the same high school and there’d been a recent (and likely much longer) history of racial intimidation. To name just one instance, after black kids had been “caught” sitting under a tree where only white kids at the high school traditionally sat, nooses were hung from it. The black kids were charged with attempted murder and conspiracy—charges that could’ve carried 100 year sentences. In response 15-20,000 people from all over the country descended upon Jena (population: 3,398) in protest, and conducted similar protests across the country.

Color of Change ended up proving essential to the movement, helping raise over $200,000 for the defendants. It’d been created two years previous to help raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims, but this was the case that ended up showing and proving so to speak. In comparison to organizations like the NAACP who’d been largely invisible and had no internet presence to speak of Color of Change could swiftly organize and mobilize dozens of groups across the country. And as they mobilized journalists began to learn of the story, which seemed like a 1960s throwback. Next thing you know the city had to deal with six times more protestors than they had residents.

And Color of Change becomes a thing.

As can be clear from the brief profile, Color of Change distinguishes itself from old civil rights organizations like the NAACP as well as leadership models represented by Martin Luther King   jr. and then Jesse Jackson. And in a way this is absolutely right. Color of Change is more nimble—it has no chapters and no dues paying members—and has no identifiable “leaders” (I’d bet that most people who knew what Color of Change was couldn’t identify its executive director).

But.

While Robinson might not be a household name, Color of Change’s current model bears a striking resemblance to the model pioneered by civil rights leaders:

Fast Company: Even as you engage the larger public, how much are you also working behind the scenes with the companies you are planning to target?

Robinson: Our goal is to get corporations to do the right thing. So just hitting people out of the blue with a bunch of signatures and a petition is not necessarily good organizing. Ninety-five percent of the time, we reach out to them before going public. We often share with them the language, the visuals that we’re planning. We give them the opportunity [to respond]. What often happens at these organizations is that there are people inside who are on our side, that are arguing [our case to their colleagues]. We want to make those people as powerful as possible. Then at some point, gif a corporation doesn’t do what we’re asking, we engage the public.

(“Power is the Ability to Change the Rules” Fast Company November 2017)

There’s no substantial difference between this and Jesse Jackson negotiating with corporate leaders (and increasingly the Democratic Party) in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, between this and Al Sharpton negotiating with corporate leaders (and increasingly the Democratic Party) in the eighties, nineties, and early oughts. They’ve taken the broker model developed in the Jim Crow era and brought it kicking and screaming into the Internet age.

…..

Randall Woodfin is the second left-leaning black mayor elected in the deep south over the last couple of months, the other being Jackson mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba. Their elections represent a positive thing as it suggests pushback against the long list of black neoliberal mayors. But particularly in Woodfin’s case there’s been a tendency to attribute his victory to some combination of technology and Bernie Sanders.

If we were to believe Al.com the reason Woodfin won was because he was far more tech savvy than his competitor:

In 14 months, Randall Woodfin went from a city attorney with little name recognition to Birmingham's mayor-elect. And he triumphed by running a campaign for the digital age, using strategies never before seen in the Magic City.

Woodfin's campaign pooh-poohed traditional campaign tactics like blanketing neighborhoods with literature and paying uninspired volunteers to knock on doors in favor of an analytics-based approach that helped the campaign target potential voters who were most likely to vote for the former school board president. The campaign did use some traditional methods like campaign sides, but they were not the focus of the campaign.

Nothing about the policies he promoted—like having Birmingham adopt a human rights framework, like making corporations that do business with the city “ban the box” (i.e. refuse to explicitly discriminate against the formerly incarcerated by removing a question on employment applications asking applicants to note whether they’d been convicted), like creating an Office of Reentry Services to help implement a range of other programs for the formerly incarcerated, like establishing a civilian oversight board for the police, etc. etc. By focusing on the technological platform the piece ends up lauding software over the hard work of political organizing. Woodfin doesn’t appear to have something like a Malcolm X Grassroots Movement backing him, so we should be wondering how sustainable Woodfin’s project is, but the last thing we should be looking to in wondering whether Woodfin’s model is replicable, is the software package he purchased.

(As an aside a few days before I visited Durham they had a primary election. they had a young progressive woodfin type in the race but he didn’t make the run-off, leaving an older bernie sanders type and a kasim reed type to fight it out. 13% turnout though. incredibly difficult to build enough support to contest durham bulls style development with 13% turnout. we really need some type of entity able to push turnout and registration numbers much higher.)

….

Although I’m almost as tied into Amazon’s ecology as it’s possible to be, I almost missed this. Amazon is looking for a second North American HQ and put its request for bids on the web. According to its own research, Amazon’s Seattle HQ has generated some 53,000 jobs in addition to the 40,000+ jobs the company is directly responsible for, $43 million paid into Seattle’s public transportation system by Amazon employees and guests, and a $17 billion increase in non-Amazon employee income as a result of Amazon investments.

That’s nothing to scoff at.

As the trio of Amazon, Apple, and Google are to this era what GM, Ford, and perhaps IBM were to the last era, cities scrambled to submit their bids in before the Thursday deadline. New Jersey political officials (Republican Governor Chris Christie, Democratic Senator Cory Booker, Democratic Mayor Ras Baraka) offered $7 billion in tax incentives to entice Amazon to come to Newark. The city of Baltimore which actually submitted two bids, one official, and one not so official has the backing of Republican Governor Larry Hogan. It’s not clear what their proposal looks like—they didn’t make it public—but they’re suggesting it’s the largest offer the state’s ever proposed.

The Detroit bid caught my eye for a few reasons. Like Baltimore it’s already sunk a lot of public resources into downtown development.

(The Detroit Red Wings began the season in their new stadium last week. Now I’m probably one of the few card carrying black scholars with a not so private hockey jones. Been watching since I was a kid. Interesting transnational story here. Before cable we not only had the three major channels plus the not-so-major channels, we also had the Canadian Broadcasting Channel. I not only watched The Friendly Neighborhood Giant and Mr. Rogers on CBC, I also watched a lot of Canadian hockey and curling. So much that I routinely root for the Canadians during the Winter Olympics, and have been known to stay up extra late to watch the curling finals. While Detroit was dealing with bankruptcy and the state was telling Detroit and Detroiters to fend for themselves, they gave the Illitch family somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million to build a new Red Wings stadium. While the previous stadium deal gave the city a significant portion of stadium profits. This one not so much.)

Second there’s this promotional video. “Move Here Move the World.” The voice you hear? Jessica Care Moore. After Naomi Long Madgett she’s arguably Detroit’s most important poet. Bad ass. In just three and a half minutes she hits almost every note that should be hit in a poem about what makes Detroit work.

Except.

You don’t talk about union labor when you’re pitching to Amazon. You don’t mention the fact that the Shrine of the Black Madonna was founded in Detroit, that Malcolm X’s Message to the Grassroots was delivered in Detroit, that one of the first black power manifestos was written in and about Detroit, that the aesthetic embodied in Wattstax was developed in Detroit, that…well, you get the picture.

This doesn’t keep my spine from tingling when I hear Jessica’s voice, when I see the images of Detroiters (except when i ask myself where the black men are). This does, though, provide yet another datapoint in my overall project of examining post-industrial urban shifts. Cities like Detroit and Baltimore have to remake themselves, in this case not so much for the FIRE sector but for Silicon Valley (the new Detroit). And in the case of Baltimore, Detroit, Newark, and probably a few dozen other cities, this ends up becoming the end of their political imagination. I write this because in reality neither of the three cities above have the ability to really attract an entity like Amazon, largely because they’ve been so damaged by the neoliberal turn. Unlike Seattle huge swaths of their population don’t fit into the global economy, except vicariously through popular culture and the carceral state, and unlike Seattle they don’t have a public transportation infrastructure (because few suburbanites want the unwanted population to have access to their neighborhoods). I could be wrong, but their mayors are more likely to win the lotto that they probably don’t play than they are to be picked an Amazon finalist. Yet they hope.

This is what stands for political imagination. In fact, this is what stands in for radical political imagination. They can easily offer the state’s tax coffers for a pie in the sky corporate project. But extending that political imagination in another direction? That’s crazy talk. And they can easily imagine Amazon helping the entire city, when in each of these cases and many others, the benefits Amazon bestows are only directly felt by a thin slice of the city’s residents. There are two reasons why you only see one black man in the Detroit Amazon pitch video. One reason is because black men generate a very different type of affect than the one marketers intend. Another reason is because they are the population least likely to fit in the modern economy. It’s not black people that suburbanites don’t want to have access, it’s young black men.

After the RAF fundraising talk I gave at 2640 Saint Paul an older brother asked me what we could do to bring more jobs in. The more “jobs” represents the horizon of our imagination the more we’re going to be kept hostage by entities like Amazon. We have to think bigger. I have more to say about this, but I think I’m going to use another venue.

(oh. a question. what if we swapped “hope” out for “enthusiasm”?)

…

I’m in Ann Arbor from Friday to Sunday for Homecoming. The University of Michigan Black Alumni Association honored me with one of its Making a Difference awards and I’m going with the family in tow to receive it. If you’re around reach out.

I’m typing this last sentence with Abby Lincoln in the background looking out at a beautiful and brisk Minneapolis fall day. I didn’t know a day like this was possible given the last several months. But every now and again, the world winks at you.

Be good. Or be good at being bad.