The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 14

January 19, 2020

Six years ago this week, according to my rarely used FB account (I still use it to advertise but since I’ve been on leave have significantly decreased my use of it) Northwestern announced its plans to hold a conference in honor of Richard Iton, whose last book In Search of the Black Fantastic remains the best book ever written on the relationship between politics and popular culture. I was thinking of Iton on this cold as hell MLK day for a few reasons.

In 1966 a couple of years or so before MLK was to be assassinated in Memphis, Star Trek aired. Although it was pitched as science fiction, a better term for it in hindsight would be social science fiction. Well, not quite, as Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison both used the term derisively to describe the way social science research on race, often presented as indisputable fact, was in fact over-burdened with racist ideology. I’m not using the term with this meaning in mind. What I mean was that Roddenberry used the show as a commentary on then dominant politics. And not just the content, but the structure of the crew itself. The crew was a veritable United Nations—featuring a Scot, a Russian, a Canadian, a Vulcan, two Americans (one from the Deep South, the other from San Francisco), and an African—and this was done on purpose. In fact Roddenberry attempted to decenter the United States by placing the Enterprise under the command of the Canadian, James T. Kirk. The African, Nyota Uhura, was played by Nichelle Nichols. After the first year—the show would only have three seasons interestingly enough—Nichols wanted out. Not only did she feel she wasn’t given enough to do, the show coincided with the apex of the Civil Rights Movement.

During an NAACP fundraiser in Beverly Hills she was informed that someone (“her greatest fan”) wanted to meet her. That someone ended up being Martin Luther King jr. Nichols was in shock. She told King that she was thinking seriously of leaving the show—in fact she’d already told Rodenberry she wanted out in order to return to her roots in theater. She didn’t think her work mattered. King:

And his face got very, very serious. And he said, what are you talking about? And I said, well, I told Gene just yesterday that I'm going to leave the show after the first year because I've been offered - and he stopped me and said: You cannot do that. And I was stunned. He said, don't you understand what this man has achieved? For the first time, we are being seen the world over as we should be seen. He says, do you understand that this is the only show that my wife Coretta and I will allow our little children to stay up and watch. I was speechless.   

Nichols would not only decide to stay, she had at least one direct effect on public policy—NASA used her to recruit astronauts of color. Among those recruited were Ronald McNair (who would perish in the Challenger in 1986), and Sally Mae Jemison (the first black woman in space).

Fast forward.

Shonda Rhimes has, in many ways, transformed the television drama by creating a series of television shows that center on the lives of professional women. With Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder she’s put the lives of black professional women front and center. Now the moment in which Rhimes came into her powers was not the moment Roddenberry came into his. That moment (which is also, given shows like Watchmen not quite this moment) was one in which for the most part a lean-in project in which women in general and black women in particular were expected to change capitalism by doubling down on it rather than critiquing it, by running away from solidarity as opposed to embracing it.

Yet and still.

There’s a moment in How to Get Away with Murder that ended up showing the raw possibilities even in Rhimes’ project. Annalise Keating, the lead character (a defense attorney/law school professor) played by the wonderful Viola Davis, finds out that her (white) husband is intimately involved in the case she’s working on. The college student who’d been murdered had a NSF picture of her husband in her phone. After confronting her husband, Keating returns to her room.

I disagree with Phoebe Robinson, who calls this the single greatest moment of television history for black women—I’d say the moment Uhuru appears on the bridge the first time would be the first, the moment Julia first appears on screen would be the second. And if we confined our view solely to television made after 1990, I’d put that up against Charnele Brown’s performance as Kimberly Reese in A Different World here.

I do agree though that the moment was powerful.

Ayanna Pressley (D-MASS) is one of the “squad”—a progressive group of legislators that include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. In many ways I see the four at the forefront of the first major attempt to move the Democratic Party leftward in decades—an attempt arguably begun by the CBC in the early seventies and picked up again by the Progressive Caucus in the early nineties.  Last week she announced she had alopecia, and as a result is now bald.

As my colleague Kimberley Johnson notes there are very real politics involved in black hair. Pressley gets at some of it in her revealing. It strikes me though that as powerful as Pressley is, I don’t think this moment is possible without Keating’s moment in How to Get Away with Murder. How to Get Away with Murder has an entirely different political project at its core. But the relationship between politics and culture is messy and complicated.

….

My Spring 2020 schedule.

I’m participating in a panel honoring the late Walter Rodney (scholar-organizer, and author of among other things How Europe Underdeveloped Africa) at Red Emma’s in Baltimore in a couple of weeks. Should be an interesting conversation given ongoing work in Baltimore and at Hopkins. I plan to use my comments to reflect on the development of what I call the public-private intellectual.

The first week of February I’m delivering three lectures on voting rights to Dallas-area community colleges, all on the same day. Under other circumstances I’m not sure I’d have done it, but a dear friend asked, and the moment we’re in calls for it.

The third week of February finds me back in Ann Arbor, delivering a keynote at the “Emerging Urbanisms” Symposium. It’ll not only be a homecoming of sorts—I’ve given lectures at Michigan before but every moment is still special to me—it’ll give me an opportunity to see the new Trotter House (Michigan’s multi-cultural student center, named after William Monroe Trotter). Given what I was able to do with the DJ lecture form last semester, my plan is to create an accompanying soundtrack.

I’ve a seminar on neoliberalism at Bard College on a week yet to be announced. I plan on participating in an April conference on Black Studies at Amherst. And I plan to participate in the upcoming SNCC Conference in DC.

If you’re around any of these spaces please let me know.

See you soon. In solidarity—one of the most important keywords of 2020.