The Counterpublic Papers vol.4 no.1

Welcome to the fourth volume of The Counterpublic Papers, my attempt to make sense of life, the universe, and everything in newsletter form, published more or less weekly during the school year. If you want to tell your friends about it and have them subscribe, they can do so here. 

Had a chance to go to Boston last week for the American Political Science Association meeting, which looks more or less exactly what you think a gathering of 6700 political scientists would look like. We tend to divide security modifications into pre- and post-9/11, but I remember the last time we were in Boston. John McCain had just nominated Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential candidate, and a number of us were talking in the convention center about how crazy the pick was. That was seven years ago. Between 2011 and last week they installed security checkpoints. The likely flashpoint here was the Boston Marathon bombing. It wasn’t invasive—on the surface all it created was a bit of a logjam. But we always move towards more security rather than less. I guess the closest thing to the reverse event would be something like a fire that somehow caused more deaths than were saved because of the checkpoints, something that might cause us to revisit them. It seems inevitable.

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I’ve refrained from taking first day of school pics, because if I did so I’d be trying to coral five kids into pictures every year and one of them has an active plan to make sure that his internet footprint, picture wise, is about as small as his hands were when he was six months old.

But this year I decided to do it.

(Got you.)     My youngest son transferred back into the neighborhood school after a year or so of being homeschooled. I had to get there a bit early to make sure his schedule was taken care of. While I waited in the office, a baltimore county police car rolled up and parked. I asked the administrative assistant (an older black woman) whether they come to campus everyday. “Why yes,” she said, almost happily. They’re here everyday. They’re here to protect us. In this day and age wouldn’t you want them here to protect us and you?”

If I were a better teacher, a more thoughtful teacher, I’d have taken this to be one of those teachable moments. And I would’ve asked her something like “who do you think they’re protecting us from?” Or maybe “what’s unique about ‘this day and age’?” I did neither, as I stewed.

I looked at her, unblinkingly, and said “No. I do not.”

I do not consider myself a police abolitionist. Particularly in large cities my imagination isn’t quite big enough to imagine successfully scaling the various conflict resolution practices neighborhoods sometimes create to serve police-like functions to cover entire cities. I do believe, however, that their footprint should be far smaller. I also believe though, that for most people on our side—that is, for most people who believe police represent a certain type of threat to certain types of populations—it isn’t police they don’t want. Like the administrative assistant they can hold two opposing opinions in their minds—on the one hand they can believe that people like Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray were victims of police gone awry, and on the other hand they can believe that the things they want policed can and should be policed. I figure if I did ask the administrative assistant (and I’ll be back at the school soon enough—if she didn’t put a check next to my name identifying me as a troublesome parent, I’ll be able to pick this up with her again) she’d probably identify one of two sets of people as those deserving of policing. She’d either think about the gun toting school shooter/terrorist, or she’d think about the kids (the neighborhood school had such a reputation for violence—although we sent one of our kids to that school and never witnessed it—that they changed the name and the curriculum in order to try to get around it). And if it isn’t police that we want, it’s policing logic that we believe in.

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My friend Melanye Price wrote a piece in The New York Times in the wake of yet another solid liberal incumbent defeated at the polls by a young liberal-left woman of color (as an aside the legacy of the phrase “colored woman” looms large—it’d be so much easier to simply write colored woman). Although the case that caught her eye was, interestingly enough a Boston case, who won in a district that had a large non-white population but not a substantial black one, she drove home the intra-racial politics of it. There was a moment in the seventies when a significant number of black congressional representatives were involved in the labor committee, because blacks in rustbelt cities tended to be members of some combination of public and private sector unions, and unions represented a powerful political force in these places. By the mid-nineties I don’t think the labor committee had a single African American on it. Somewhat similarly, the first generation of black mayors had to make a variety of compromises with capital in order to try to stave off capital flight (much less white flight), but they were still largely liberal on political issues. The second generation, the one elected during the nineties, not so much. Although some aspects of the neoliberal turn were forced on them—the austerity a city like Philadelphia underwent wasn’t something X necessarily asked for—other aspects they bought into and sold willingly. Even though blacks were far more liberal than their white counterparts on issues outside of the social arena (where on issues like gay rights they were more or less the same as their white counterparts), they had become far more conservative than they were a decade or two previously. Katherine Tate captures this dynamic pretty well in What’s Going On? I think that what we’re seeing is a shift “back” so to speak. The question is, will it have an institutional core…that is to say will there be some institutional force that cements the change in a way that creates long term changes in governance. I was reminded by the internets that five years ago I posted the following quote by Albert Murray—someone I wanted my students to read in Black Political Thought but I didn’t have enough weeks in the schedule:

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I wrote a piece about Sorry to Bother You that may or may not see print, after I heard about what happened to Geoffrey Owens. Owens, best known for his role as Elvin, one of Bill Cosby’s son-in-laws on The Cosby Show, was photographed scanning groceries at a New Jersey Trader Joe’s, and was basically job shamed online, until Black Twitter made an intervention. Interviewed by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America, Owens said the following:

Films like Black KKKlansman, Get Out (which I finally purchased and watched), Black Panther, even A Wrinkle in Time, have exploded black filmic possibilities. Yet and still the one thing none of them trouble, is labor. None of them wrestle with the politics embedded in the point of production. This is what Sorry to Bother You does so effectively. If our labor politics were as woke as our police politics what happened to Geoffrey Owens would’ve never happened.

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    Finally.

    The last time I was in Boston, I was there for…reasons. I knew that I’d been to Boston (more than a couple of times) since the last time I was there for APSA. But, like a number of things, I put it aside. It didn’t hit me until I really took it in that I was staying in the same hotel I stayed in, walking the exact same streets, that it all came back.

    There’s a couple of panels in Grant Morrison’s Invisibles where he tries to represent this idea in comic books. In fact, Alan Moore’s The Watchmen tries to wrestle with this as well (in fact one way to read Morrison’s attempt is as a direct response to Alan Moore). Comics are a particularly powerful medium for expressing ideas about time.   

 I thought about this as I passed the restaurant, seeing myself there a few years ago, the library remembering the second floor, the oyster bar remembering the whisky. Almost but not quite seeing remnants, pieces.

    (This is what getting older means isn’t it? Glad that for the last few years I’ve been doing it one way or another with all of you. Happy to be back. See you next week.)