The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 11

I just found out that M.A.N.T.I.S. is on Amazon. The show, which aired during the 1994-95 television season, featured a black conservative scientist who’d become paraplegic after being shot by a police officer while attempting to rescue a child. After finding out that the police were engaged in a conspiracy against the black community he built a supersuit to take them on and fight crime, taking on the secret identity of M.A.N.T.I.S.. (Becoming far more radical in the process.)

Most of what I just wrote above I’d forgotten about.

What I DO remember is that the characters in the pilot were almost all non-white, and that the superhero had a team of African scientists who were tasked to help him with suit design. I taped the pilot—I probably still have it lying around somewhere—because I thought it was so radically different from anything I’d seen on tv before.

And what I remember after that was that when the show premiered…they got rid of the African scientists and almost all of the non-white characters (save the superhero). Further, I recall reading a newspaper article where one of the producers explicitly stated that he didn’t think the idea of “African scientists” was plausible.

I couldn’t find that article, but this article gets at some of the politics.

I bring this up because apparently the Harriet screenplay had been shopped around since the early nineties and allegedly a Hollywood film executive suggested Julia Roberts for Harriet Tubman.

Yes. That Julia Roberts.

I’d be very surprised if the executive making that suggestion had a long storied career in the business.

But given what I know about the racial politics of cultural production, I’m not all that surprised.

….

Barack Obama’s been making the news lately for a couple of reasons. First he’s argued that the current focus on “cancel culture” is deeply problematic and won’t garner political success much less the change we want to see in the world if we allow this to continue:

This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids. And share certain things with you.

My point is that even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision, we also have to be rooted in reality and the fact that voters, including Democratic voters and certainly persuadable independents or even moderate Republicans, are not driven by the same views that are reflected on certain, you know, left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party.

This is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement. They like seeing things improved. But the average American doesn't think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it. And I think it's important for us not to lose sight of that.

Ta-Nehisi Coates chimed in a few days ago on the cancel culture issue, noting that “cancel culture” isn’t really a new thing at all….it’s just that it’s been democratized.

A brief accounting of the illustrious and venerable ranks of blocked and dragged Americans encompasses Sarah Good, Elijah Lovejoy, Ida B. Wells, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Robeson and the Dixie Chicks. What was the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, but the cancellation of the black South? What were the detention camps during World War II but the racist muting of Japanese-Americans and their basic rights?

Thus any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it.

Coates, who spends the bulk of the article writing about Colin Kapernick, is absolutely right. Getting cut on Twitter (I’ve had it happen) isn’t the same thing as death threats, isn’t the same thing as corporate collusion (in the Kapernick case and long before him the cases of Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf among others), and isn’t the same thing as government policy (much of American history). However to the extent that real world organizing still matters I’m not sure how we win if the only forces organized are the ones who agree with us and support our causes 100%.

Any conversation Obama engages in about cancel culture has to be leavened by looking at the political results of the Obama years, which brings me to the second quote. Under Obama’s leadership the Democratic Party lost the Senate, the House, 816 state legislative seats, and 13 governorships. Arguably these results (I don’t include Trump here because of Russia and Clinton’s horrible campaign) occurred because Obama understood that politics is about the act of constructing a world as much as it is about responding to the world as it is but almost always applied that understanding to constructing a world open to the Obamas, the Carters (Jayz and Beyonce), and the Smiths (Jada and Will), rather than one open to the rest of us. In fact, you can pretty much draw a straight line between Obama’s approach to governing and JayZ’s approach to the NFL with regards to Kapernick.

….

About the Carters.

Turns out the embedded link in the tweet takes the reader straight to a UK voter registration system.

Which is funny as hell…except.

For people like Harrison, apathy is a sign of a particularly type of working class cultural dysfunction (“people” care more about Jayz and Beyonce than they do about “real” politics). People aren’t smart enough or duty-bound enough to pay attention to politics so the best way to get them to do so is to fake them out. In fact, the reason something like Brexit passes in the first place is because of these people.

I’d suggest instead that perhaps the best way to get people to participate in elections is to actually give them a government that responds to their clear needs in a way that makes their lives better. Which is what Labour’s manifesto (PDF HERE) reads like.

When I first heard about this, I just knew this was another example of the Obama “Pookie” rhetoric…and it is. But what strikes me here is that this logic is being used in the UK rather than the US. Which means there’s something transnational about this that I’ve been missing.

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Finally, last week former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh plead guilty to four federal felonies. Pugh, who won her first election campaign against Sheila Dixon by a scant 2 percentage points, basically waged a shake down campaign, pressuring a number of prominent organizations to purchase her “healthy holly” books. Many of us thought that Pugh won the majority of Baltimore’s white vote because of concerns about former Mayor Dixon (who was herself removed from office for corruption). We weren’t wrong about the concerns. But perhaps we were wrong about the nature of those concerns. Certainly given the reality that Pugh had been basically extorting since 2011, it can’t be that they were concerned about corruption per se. More likely they were concerned about the possibility a Dixon mayoralty would offer to Baltimore in the wake of the uprising. Whereas Pugh turned her back to almost every single progressive platform she’d agreed to during the campaign, it isn’t clear Dixon would have.

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On that note I’m out. For the first time I’m going to actively try to quit my lifelong support of the Detroit Lions (maybe more about that next week), which means that I’ve got the whole Sunday ahead of me. If it’s too cold to go outside, make a cup of hot tea in a nice mug and breathe.