The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 21

It just dawned on me this morning that this week is the fifth anniversary of the Baltimore Uprising. What did we learn that applies now?

I’ve written about this before (here but not really elsewhere)…but it points to the powerful role disinformation plays in modern society. There’s been a lot written about misinformation—I just watched a covid-19 conversation on anti-blackness (I’d link to it but it isn’t available yet)—but we haven’t written enough about disinformation. It probably isn’t possible anymore for someone to send a fake meme suggesting Baltimore kids were going to try to enact a Purge. But we’ve got so many lines of tension between segments of society, between those segments and institutions, between those segments and elites, that it no longer takes a fake message. All it takes is a nudge.

(Liberate Michigan!)

The Baltimore Police Department had a long history of killing black kids. The term “rough ride” already existed, was already commonplace. The police officers, the communities they policed, all deployed the term. Smartphone surveillance was relatively new, but it isn’t as if communities didn’t already have the means of communicating quickly. But in part because of what had already happened to Michael Brown, Darren Wilson, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and others too numerous to mention, and in part because of the radical institutions Baltimoreans had already developed, Gray’s death became a clarion call. And for shorthand I usually point to the late 00’s Occupy Baltimore and the organizing around the proposed jail for youth charged as adults, but even those moments required a pre-existing set of institutions. Those institutions helped to take a routine police killing (yes. a routine police killing.) and make it a catalyst.

It felt like a great deal was possible in that moment. The French philosopher Ranciere makes a distinction between “police” and “politics”. It’s more complicated than this—my colleague Sam Chambers writes about this—but for Ranciere the term “police” does not refer to the individual members of police departments nationwide, but rather to the overarching system of rules, regulations, policies, and laws that seek to surveil and constrain human behavior. Politics occurs when that overarching system is disrupted.

The Baltimore Uprising was, although it’s possible to go too far with this, a moment of politics in the way Ranciere writes of it. The mayoral election was the following year. Then Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was going to have competition—from what I recall her staff had conducted focus groups to see how she would fare against writer/philanthropist Wes Moore—but she likely would’ve won a fairly competitive race on traditional terms. How to bring more business into Baltimore? What to do about crime in Baltimore neighborhoods? How do we retain more middle class families? After the uprising she decided against running for another term. The platform the resulting candidates ran on was the most progressive platform the city’d seen in more than 40 years. Similarly we saw a range of institutions connected to Baltimore have a similar moment—Hopkins was more open to a range of policies than it had been.

WIth that said, that moment didn’t stay open. Politics in the Rancierian sense, like democracy in the sense many of us write about it, isn’t something that—once created, stays. It’s a flash and then it doesn’t disappear so much as it dissipates. After the uprising Catherine Pugh was elected mayor of Baltimore—and now we know that a significant reason she was elected was because she had an illegally funded slush fund—and soon went back on many of the progressive promises she made. She’s in prison for three years. Police spending increased even during a fiscal crisis—more than one of the current candidates speak of doubling down on policing rather than easing up. And entities like Hopkins have also doubled down on policing in their own ways.

Analytically speaking perhaps the most exciting turn in black studies has been the afropessimist turn. Indeed just last week Frank Wilderson’s memoir received the New York Times treatment (if that doesn’t tell you that we were/are in a weird moment where it’s possible to be woke and paid I don’t know what will.) But what we recognized after this moment was that even as it was difficult if not impossible to talk about what happened to Freddie Gray (and to Baltimore writ large) without talking about race and racism. Further, without talking about the specific anti-black nature of police violence. Yet and still, anti-blackness wasn’t sufficient. We had to talk about political economy.

Influenced by Questlove I’m thinking about doing a live lecture on all of this sometime this week. I imagine most of you follow me through some other medium (facebook, twitter, instagram). Be on the lookout. As I type this, I’m having a conversation with one of my high school friends who can’t imagine us not opening the economy back up. The astroturf “movement” seeking to force governors to do so (Liberate Michigan!) is growing. I think Occupy and Black Lives Matter represented the beginning of the beginning. I think what we’re seeing now is the beginning.

But the beginning of what? That’s really the question.

….

Four years ago on April 21st, Prince Rogers Nelson died. As soon as it happened, my people in Detroit turned bars and nightclubs into funeral processions, hosting wake after wake. I waited for folks in Baltimore to do the same, only to realize that Baltimore didn’t have the relationship with Prince that Detroit did.

So after waiting enough, a group of us decided to do it. I got another professor/dj to assist with the dj’ing.

(Funny story. So we set everything up. I start off the first hour with the prince related stuff. And he’s waiting. I then go into the prince stuff. He’s still waiting. He finally asks me….”when are we going to play house?” Now the thing is that there weren’t that many house remixes of Prince’s work because Prince was pretty anal about his intellectual property. So I love and live for house music, but there wasn’t going to be any house music that night. I looked at him quizzically. “House? This is a Prince Party.” “I know. But I thought at some point we’d play house…” That right there is the difference between Detroit and Baltimore vis a vis Prince. A Prince party to US means all we play is Prince, or Prince-adjacent work. But to my man? It meant….maybe a set or two. Anyway, I convinced him to DJ anyway, and he was dope.)

The party went off without a hitch. (Thanks to Tiffany Defoe and Carla Wills and Jessica Lewis and Baruti Kopano and Larry Cohen and Theresa Kiel). Shed a lot of tears that night.

I thought I’d written about the party here before. I did. Here’s a quote I forgot:

“Professor Spence, that was without a doubt the blackest thing I’d ever done in Baltimore.”

I’m doing it again on Saturday. The plan is to go from 1pm EST to 6pm EST. We’ll see.

….

We’re swiftly coming to one of the first make or break moments as the number of astroturf movements designed to force the economy back increase, testing our resolve. I cannot reiterate this enough. Hold fast to the extent you can. Speaking personally I know that this week I’m going to have to have hard conversations with my children, and maybe one or two with my parents. We can get through this. But we have to speak the truth. If we can’t speak the truth and then live based on that, then what we have isn’t worth living for.

And I believe that what we have is worth living for.

On that note—if you read this before 3pm EST Sunday April 19, go to IG if you can and listen to the last day of Questlove’s four day Prince DJ set.

If you read this tomorrow?

Sailor’s Prayer performed virtually by (alumni) members of Washington University’s Mosaic Whispers Choir.

Hey Hey performed pre-corona by Meute.

My name is Lester Spence. This is the Counterpublic Papers. As always, lightly edited.