The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 28

Last week the internet was abuzz about a letter, signed by several public intellectuals writing against cancel culture.

I know a couple of the signatories, but I didn’t care about it. Don’t really care about it.

In fact, when I saw people writing about “the letter” I really thought they were talking about this one.

THIS one interested me for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s an attempt to change how Princeton functions as an institution of higher education designed to generate new knowledge about the world and to educate its citizenry (well, really a thin slice of its citizenry). In as much as Princeton’s endowment as of 2019 stands at 26.1 billion they’re talking about an attempt to significantly reorient its budget. Something much more extensive than renaming a policy school.

Second, we can see this as an extension of recent protest activities. Princeton did decide to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its policy school. NASCAR has banned the use of the confederate flag. Last weekend the Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder decided to finally change the name after years of protest. Statues of Christopher Columbus were removed in Baltimore and other places around the country. Mississippi removed its racist state flag.

(The Redskins story was particularly interesting—it turns out that the corporations were the prime mover here—Nike decided to stop selling Redskins gear, and Fedex informed the Redskins that they were going to ask them to remove their name from the stadium if they didn’t change the name. Money really was the issue here.)

Yet and still.

A document as robust as this is written, and rewritten, and rewritten again until people think it’s good enough to be used to garner signatures. We see a robust suite of policies designed for students, for faculty, and for graduate students….policies that call on Princeton to increase its hiring of black faculty, to better integrate black history into Princeton’s curricula, that call on Princeton to acknowledge its own history, that calls on Princeton to increase the resources it offers to black undergraduate and graduate students.

With all that said I find it interesting that the one body of people we don’t see addressed is likely the largest body of black folk directly affected by Princeton policies—the workers. Princeton has approximately 8300 employees. Both of the private universities I’ve worked at directly or indirectly (through subcontractors) employ disproportionate numbers of black (janitorial staff, cafeteria staff, security) and brown (landscaping) workers. In three pages we don’t see their interests referenced once.

And while I can say with a great degree of certainty that those black workers love seeing people who look like them, talk like them, maybe even come from the neighborhoods they grew up in, that black faculty and students have an appreciation for them their other colleagues and classmates likely don’t have (with the possible exception of the students who grew up with black nannies), the benefits that flow from such an arrangement only reach those workers symbolically.

Which is and has been the argument against anti-racism for a few decades now.

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One of my former students is a Rabbi in the Miami area. Her synagogue has an activist history going back almost seventy years and she herself worked relentlessly on issues like Amendment 4 (which, thanks to the Supreme Court will likely not be in effect come November). She asked me to give a Zoom talk on racism. One of the blessings and curses of the current moment is that it isn’t that hard to construct a lecture in a way that will not only speak to what’s going on in the country but to what’s going on in specific locales.

With Miami for example, it isn’t that difficult to go back to the redline decisions made in the twenties and thirties and to the Jim Crow policies connected to it, trace those policies into the decision to plow a freeway through its most prominent black community, and then trace those policies into a range of contemporary governing decisions, from the ones that built stadiums for the Miami Heat and the Miami Marlins, that created a new downtown center that post-pandemic will likely be a bust, and then to policing.

With classes less than 6 or so weeks away I have to think more about how to translate this into the virtual classroom working on the assumption that some combination of students will likely be zooming from home.

….

John Lewis was a giant.

But learning about his passing late Saturday night this 2016 quote made about the Bernie Sanders campaign came back to me:

The article then goes on to note that Americans must “learn the value of hard work.”

Up until the Georgia primaries, John Lewis supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. After his district went overwhelmingly for Obama, Lewis switched, not wanting to be on the wrong side of history. Talking about that moment he noted that something new was afoot, a new movement. I wish I could say that over the entire course of his life he supported the same movement I did.

I cannot.

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This week Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderburgh’s I Got a Monster tracing the life and death of the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force is released. It reminds me a bit of The Shield (an underrated early 2000s FX television show featuring Michael Chiklis as the leader of a corrupt LA police unit) now that I think of it, only it’s real. Members of the Baltimore Police Department routinely robbed high and low-level drug dealers for decades.

(Although I don’t know if this was their intention, but Monster further removes much of the luster of The Wire—as much as I loved the television series, if we could just focus on one thing that David Simon got wrong it was the level of police corruption.)

Red Emma’s is hosting a virtual book launch event and I’ll be participating. Check it out. I wish I could say I have no idea, given what they’ve written, how someone like Brett Stephens can basically argue that we need to double down on policing in the wake of increased crime, using Baltimore as the prime example.

But again, I cannot.

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I had a conversation with my friend Bryan Alexander a few days ago about COVID, social justice, and higher education, as part of an experimental class offered at Georgetown. I didn’t think about it this way until he brought it up this way, but we’ve known each other since the Cold War. If you’re ever in a place where you need to sober up immediately, have someone tell you that.

(A number of us have used this moment as an opportunity to create different types of dialogues. I started to DJ “in public” again, mixing some of the lectures my friends have given. Bryan’s been giving readings. Maybe about a month or so into the shutdown he read Ray Bradbury’s 1943 short story The Scythe. Riveting.)

The link for our conversation isn’t up yet but among other things Bryan gave me the opportunity to think about four different scenarios arrayed along two dimensions—getting the disease under control vs not, and trump getting the boot vs not—and then thinking about the impact of those different scenarios on higher education. Now when I write “higher education” I know that there’s a difference between places like Georgetown (where Bryan works) and Hopkins, schools with endowments over $1 billion (and then within this group differences between schools like Princeton and Harvard and the rest), and those with smaller or no endowments (by way of comparison Mississippi Valley State University has an endowment of 1.95 million).

All of the scenarios are bleak. In fact, oddly enough, even the scenario in which Biden wins election and the disease is brought under control isn’t rosy—in this scenario there’s a risk that finance capital regains control and puts the brakes on the leftward move in the name of “getting things back to normal”. This is the scenario all of us want—but it’s one that brings its own unique risks.

When the link is up I’ll post it.

But for those of you interested in light reading, check out his pandemic reading list.

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The last two weeks have been rough, rougher than usual. Love one another the best you can, in the best way the folks you love deserve. If you can’t, figure out ways to make up the difference. We’ve a long road ahead of us.