The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 25

First housekeeping, as I've a number of new readers.     My name is Lester Spence. This (lightly edited) newsletter now in its fifth or sixth year, represents my attempt to make sense of the world, designed to more or less replace the blog I had for the better part of a decade plus. Make yourself at home. Share with your friends. Write back to me. In as much as some of you are interested in what I'm doing outside of this from time to time I'll note it, if in fact I remember to do so. Wednesday for instance I'm hosting a zoom conversation on the pandemic and racial equity. .....     So in the wake of everything that’s happened over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been deluged with two sets of asks:

Are you ok?

What should we do?

The short answer to the first question is, yes and no. Last week, which began with me attending protests with my daughter and ended with my birthday was difficult. I know a little bit of French, but French, like English, has only one real word for exhaustion I’m aware of.

However, this is the job.

The second answer?

Well, that’s going to take a bit longer.

I’ll begin with the easy part.

What can I financially support?

So even though I’ve in some ways a national remit, I’ve been doing a great deal of my political and academic and intellectual work in Baltimore. In some ways I now know Baltimore better than I ever knew Detroit. Here every month I support two organizations. The Research Associates Foundation—founded when a group of local marxists realized the community center they’d created had outlived its purpose they sold the community center and started giving small grants to organizers and activists in Baltimore. I’ve been on their board for the past several years, and we’ve played a small part in creating a vibrant black and non-black left in Baltimore.

The second organization is Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. A grassroots black nationalist think tank—they used to be technically youth led but its leaders are now in their early thirties—they’ve been at the forefront of much of the anti-/alter police organizing in the city.

There are others, but when I was asked those were the first two groups that came to mind—largely because I put my own labor and capital in them, and I know all the folk involved. If you’re going to donate, donate there.

….

What should we do?

Now part of this ask is kind of a “what should we read?” question.

This question is kind of a tough one.

The first works I thought about were the 1619 Project on the one hand and How to be an Antiracist on the other. I think both are good reads, and powerful in their own way. But to quote my friend Daryl Scott the 1619 project “sucks all of the class out of American history.” And class plays a significant role. For a short read here I’d probably turn to A Short History of Reconstruction.

With How to be an Antiracist this too sucks the class out of politics, however it also sucks the politics out of politics.   

In fact, I think the vast majority of the allyship books—and although How to be an Antiracist is a unique entry into the genre it’s an allyship book, one designed to get whites to understand themselves in a way that would lead them to be more effective in the struggle against racism—have a couple of fatal flaws.

The first is that they root racism, and then antiracism, in individual mind/heart change. There’s struggle here but the struggle is at the individual level and a psychic/psychological struggle more than anything else—once you defeat yourself, then the rest of the struggle is striaghtforward.

I get that. Thirty years ago I don’t think I knew anyone who had seen or was seeing a therapist (or if I did they didn’t tell me), and now it’s hard to find a middle to upper income high schooler who hasn’t had one. We’ve turned to therapeutic methods to deal with a wide range of problems, including political ones.

But I don’t think our struggle is psychic/psychological first. I think our struggle is first a material one. Policing isn’t simply a tool of anti-blackness, it’s in the current moment a tool of social control designed to protest business interests and other segments of civil society against black and brown working class men, a tool of revenue generation for resource starved cities like Ferguson. I don’t think understanding that necessarily requires the proper psychological orientation, but even to the extent that’s necessary I think that happens through struggle over political issues. Through that struggle we change as individuals.

I simply don’t agree with the idea that the first thing we need to do to struggle against the police—is somehow check our privilege, or examine our presuppositions.

The second thing is that the allyship works don’t eradicate hierarchies but rather flip them. To commit to antiracism means to commit to learning at the feet of black folk (now oftentimes, women). Similarly to commit to anti sexism means to commit to learning at the feet of women.

And yes to both. By all means.

But that both places an inordinate amount of responsibility on us to somehow teach you…and then places you in the position where the only thing you need to be is open. The work is primarily in changing your heart and mind to the point that you can be open. I don’t tend to think these positions are healthy ones. And I tend to think the politics that come from this aren’t the politics of structural change, but the politics of elite brokerage. One that sees certain types of black folk, or women, or queer folk, gain power and resources, while the rest tend to struggle.

I do think we need to understand how power functions, and how where we are situated shapes that vis a vis policing and other aspects of modern life.

I mean, it’s not a coincidence that every black man I know has a police story.

So I posted a picture featuring the ingredients of my pandemic drink of choice on FB. I call it a Moscow Mitch. (The drink is unimportant—given that it looks like I’ll spend the rest of the pandemic writing I’m not sure how much more I’m going to be drinking anyway.)

Afterwards I went to the grocery store and while there I get a call from Dre, one of my oldest friends from Michigan. I hadn’t heard from him in a minute, and given the pandemic I thought he was calling to give me bad news, to tell me that yet someone else that we knew had died from the disease.

He didn’t.

He called to tell me that the lime juice bottle (if you can't see it above it's here)? His design. Back when we were in undergrad. I had no idea. He paid off his student loans with the check.

(It really is dope. Fits the hand almost perfectly…..)

Dre has a police story.

I saw this picture (link here) last week attached to a story about a designer who, even though he’d worked for Adidas, created this work of art to honor Air Jordan. I saw the story and then glanced over it—ever since the Jordan “documentary” The Last Dance re-triggering my Jordan resentment I hadn’t bothered to look at it.

The designer is one of my friends, Shane Ward. Another friend from Michigan, my younger fraternity brother in fact.

He has a police story.

I just picked them at random. Could pick a range of other folk.

They all have police stories. Every black professional like me has a Karen Cooper story.

Yet and still.

We have to understand politics as something larger than attitudinal change, and we have to reread class and class struggle back into politics. I wrote Policing Class in the wake of the Uprising and it still fits now.

Which brings up the what do we read question.

In as much as what we’re struggling with in this moment is police, I’d probably start with an attempt to understand the anti-policing project. Alex Vitale’s The End of Police is free and a good beginning. And then something like James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (particularly "My Dungeon Shook") is a good piece to put along side of it.

And if you’re tastes veer more towards the historical instead of something like the 1619 project I’d probably start with something like A Short History of Reconstruction.

I’ve written somewhere that if Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter represented the beginning of the beginning, we’re now in the beginning?

With the White House looking like a military bunker replete with black fencing and Mayor Bowser’s decision to paint a BLACK LIVES MATTER mural pointing straight to the White House, and the Minneapolis City Coucil deciding to actually defund the police the nature of the beginning couldn’t be more stark.

It’s ok to be fearful. To be anxious. To be nervous. It’s also ok to be angry. To be outraged. To be increasingly intolerant.

But what a time to be alive!(p.s. thank you all for the birthday wishes, and for checking in. and a special shout out to my birthday twin.)