The Counterpublic Papers vol. 4 no. 7

Last week someone walked into a Kentucky Kroger, shot two grandparents, comforted a nearby consumer by telling him “whites don’t kill whites”, and was then arrested after a shootout with an armed civilian.

Last week someone sent 13 pipe bombs to enemies of the president up and down the eastern seaboard. None detonated. He was arrested outside of an auto parts store. From accounts he lived out of his van, plastered with stickers from Trump rallies.

Last week someone walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed eleven worshippers after shouting “All Jews must die.” He was arrested, after a shootout with the police.

….

“Stochastic terrorism” is used to describe a phenomenon whereby the mass media is used to insight terrorist actions. An elite or group of elites make speeches, write articles, give interviews, promoting violence against individuals/groups. These signals travel and generates the violence the signals call for. These actions are “random” in as much as you can’t predict what the actions will be, who the actions will target, and who the individual actors responsible for the actions are. But they aren’t random in as much as there is a relationship between signal “size” and violent actions. There’s been a significant increase in domestic terrorism since Trump was elected, and I’m betting that we can go a bit farther to when he became a candidate. I’ve read more than one commenter suggest that our vote is our best option—that in about nine days we can affirm who we are as Americans by casting a vote against Trump and what he represents.

And yes. Voting matters. If you’re registered to vote, vote. If you’re not registered to vote, and can still do so, register. And tell your friends. Make sure they tell two friends. And so on. And so on. And so on.

But.

Just like new journalists should acknowledge that the country is currently governed by a white nationalist illegitimate president in charge of a white nationalist party….we should acknowledge that this is not something that “voting” is going to solve. Voting is necessary, but it is woefully insufficient.

I wrote two years ago that we were in the middle of a sort of cold civil war that might turn hot.

I got that “might” part wrong.

….

It should go without writing that in all three instances the suspect involved lived to tell the tale.

It should go without writing that in all three instances the suspect involved was white.

I’m going to write it anyway.

I agree with people like Adolph Reed and Cedric Johnson that race and racism aren’t transhistorical things that exist in all times and all places in the same way. We can look at police shootings over time and see that they rise and fall, often in response to social, political, and economic dynamics. And again, it’s worth saying that compared to their poorer breathren middle and upper income black folk don’t have as much to fear from police.

And I’m not suggesting that any of the three perpetrators above should’ve been killed.

What happens with these individuals though whereby police don’t kill them? Where police seem to actually use standard operating procedures when interacting with them? Is it that they think these individuals are rational, where black ones aren’t? Is it that they themselves are able to think more rationally when encountering these types of individuals where they are unable to do so when dealing with black suspects? Is it that the police who are called in to deal with domestic terrorists are better trained, hence more rational?

I have no idea.

All I know is that when white suspects like these are killed (because every now and again they are) it shocks the hell out of me.

….

One of the commonalities i’ve seen in the works I’ve assigned in my Black Political Thought class is that almost all of the writers open their work with some type of personal narrative. Du Bois opens up The Souls of Black Folk with an account of how he came to know race was a social fact, a childhood account in which he sought to exchanged cards with a classmate only to be rebuffed. Martin Luther King talks in Strength to Love about one of the first times he experienced racism as a child, watching his father discriminated against in a store, then as an adult as he had to tell his own kids that they couldn’t go to the amusement park they wanted to go to because it was for whites only.

I even did something like this myself in the beginning of Knocking the Hustle, beginning the work with a personal account of some of the struggles I faced when I first moved to Baltimore with my family.

I was thinking about this as I read a couple of things over the past few weeks. The first was Reginald Dwayne Betts’ story about how he went from being a prisoner to passing the bar. The second was Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. Both are powerful, and while I’m not yet finished with Heavy I would easily put it in any best books list of the year. But I’ve seen more than one of my friends tout one or both works as being, in effect, America savers. Betts writes of the effect that a story had on him—when he was beginning his bid in jail, his mother shared a story with him about a prisoner who, while in prison, ended up becoming a lawyer. That story, which actually ended up having a tragic end, had an effect on Betts—to hear Betts tell it, he wouldn’t have even imagined such a thing being possible had he not read the account. And while Kiese’s book has only been out a few weeks, I’ve already seen the impact it’s had on people’s lives. And I get it. Kiese does more to convey what childhood was like for southern born black American men born somewhere between 1969-1975 or so than any other writer I’m aware of. Both accounts are Baldwinian in that they both evoke a deep sense of joy and love of and for black people, and a deep sense of sorry and melancholy when it comes to the American project.

I just don’t think that the memoir saves civilizations though. And they won’t save us from white supremacy renewed. I hesitate to suggest that we need sterner stuff, because both men are telling truths that most wouldn’t say outloud much less put on paper for thousands to read. But alongside of this, we need different stuff.

….

And yet.

I’ve known Rita Walters for about a decade now. With the creation of Facebook comes a new form of writing: the Facebook post. I think Rita’s mastered it. Here is a passage taken from a longer response she wrote about the tragedies of the past week:

     Instead, we will fight.