The Counterpublic Papers vol. 6 no. 1

October 10, 2020

I wrote an earlier version of the newsletter you’ve in front of your screen right now, but didn’t send it. When the semester started—and this is the first time I’ve taught in over a year—things got away from me, and from us. So much to write that it took me a bit to get my bearings. (I’m glad I didn’t send it—spent way too many words on Jessica Krug, which if you have to google her proves my point.)

And to be frank it’s not like all of a sudden I have my bearings. But in as much as writing in general, and writing this specifically is a means not just of telling folks what’s on my mind but also a way of keeping sane, I figured if I didn’t just get back to it in the midst of everything then sooner or later it’d bleed out in one way or another.

So here we are. About two weeks plus from the election that represents a continuation of the beginning. For those of you who were around four years ago I thought putting Trump in the White House would be something like putting the Joker in charge. I wasn’t too far off. What I got wrong in that election was the white republican female vote—I didn’t properly consider the way conservative patriarchy is basically bolstered by conservative women, so I just knew that college educated republican women would walk into the voting booth and either cast a vote for Clinton or not vote. I got that wrong. I thought that Clinton would spend resources like she actually had to campaign for votes in midwestern swing states. I got that wrong. And I didn’t really get how the Russian disinformation campaign worked—in hindsight I’ve at least one black colleague who before exiting facebook posted more than one story that was pretty much written by the Russian psyops campaign (evidently having a phd and being a tenured professor does not make one immune to disinformation campaigns….who knew) and that type of thing had to have had an impact who had just enough skepticism about Clinton to not vote for her.

Now I don’t think this election is going to be shaped by any of the above dynamics. 220,000 dead because of a still a raging pandemic and US-style capitalism, and a thwarted campaign to kidnap/assassinate a sitting governor, combined with the possibility that Trump is a super spreader tends to do that. The GOP now fully understands that the only way they maintain power is to (re-)establish a minoritarian Herrenfolk democracy. No. The biggest concern is going to be whether he leaves, and what type of violence we will face between November 3 and January 20.

(I was on a panel sometime last year, and I said that the biggest challenge won’t be the election itself, but whether he’ll leave once voted out. The person who invited me on the panel, a friend I’ve known for 25 years, kind of laughed it off. She thought I was “just being Lester.” She doesn’t think that anymore.)

Along these lines, I think you all should read and share this. Ten Things You Need to Know to Stop a Coup. I’d write more here, but this really gets outside of my purview and I wouldn’t want to mistype. I’d simply suggest that if you live in a state like Maryland that is comfortably “blue” you might want to consider voting in advance in order to assist efforts in states within driving distance that might not be comfortably blue….and if your risk tolerance is higher you might want to consider investigating plans in Washington DC.

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I’ve been watching Lovecraft Country with interest. In an earlier issue I talked about where the ideas for Lovecraft Country came, so I won’t talk about that again. What I will say is that to a certain extent it builds on the trend established in Watchmen (the HBO series) of really taking advantage of the television maxi-series medium to tell a certain type of story about racial politics in America. Unlike Watchmen the story is a bit more episodic. I’m reminded a bit of Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series, which tells the story of a mid level bureaucrat working at an intelligence agency tasked with managing Lovecraft level horror. Stross uses each novel (approximately ten so far) to comment on a range of popular genres (including several sub-genres of spy fiction and superhero fiction among others). Lovecraft Country basically takes on a different genre of horror/speculative fiction every episode. So far, there’s been a body horror episode, a pulp adventure episode, and an Afrofuturist episode. It runs into the problem that much modern day anti-racist work does—in more than one instance it drives home the direct connection between today and yesterday by using contemporary music. But it’s worth seeing. Can’t wait to buy the blu-ray when it becomes available. There’s a book to write about the powerful role black popular culture defined broadly plays in this particular moment.

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I wrote the last issue of the last volume a couple of days before I started teaching again.

One of the classes I’m teaching, Black Politics, is a straightforward graduate level class, but what I’m doing a bit differently this time around is enveloping the readings into a broader narrative about political science itself. There’s a moment when most high tier political science work about black politics is basically survey research involving black respondents. Michael Dawson’s first two books for example were books written using data from the National Black Election Study and the National Black Politics Study respectively. Neither Ismail White and Cheryl Laird’s Steadfast Democrats (even if you can’t necessarily read statistics it’s worth picking up) nor Davin Phoenix’s The Anger Gap is written without Dawson’s work (and the work on black survey attitudes). This moment is a partial byproduct of two different dynamics. First the behavioral turn in political science which begins in the fifties. Second the student movements of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, which saw schools like Michigan increase its black faculty (Michigan hired Dawson in the mid-eighties—Dawson taught me in undergrad and helped get me into grad school…I was this close to following him to Chicago when he left) and its black and Latinx graduate students. When Michigan, a behavioral powerhouse, begins training black graduate students (including me), the questions we ask tended to be behavioralist. This wasn’t true in all cases, but in enough cases that it ended up shaping the subfield of black politics/racial politics itself.

The types of questions we ask and attempt to answer, are not just the byproduct of our interests, of what we want to study, but also of the ideational and institutional context of the moment. Getting students to understand that, I think, is critical going forward.

The other class I’m teaching is Urban Politics.

There’s a group of people I’ve been working with over the past several years, trying to develop what we call The Baltimore School. Before the school year started we had a social distance picnic in Baltimore to talk over the possibilities that this moment presents us. If we’re all teaching via zoom, on the one hand it means we can’t really do the field trip thing with our students much less see them in person. However at the same time because zoom dissolves spatial constraints, we can now teach together in ways we couldn’t before. We all knew that we wanted to give our students something that wasn’t simply a normal course only zoomed, we wanted our courses to prepare them for the world they were going to be tasked with constructing.

So what we did was kind of combine our courses. Four courses (Urban Politics, Resource Extracting, Police and Policing, Non-violent Philosophy and Practice) in three universities (Hopkins, Towson University, and Goucher College). Each course has its own requirements, but the final project is a group project with the groups consisting of individuals from all four courses. You’re probably familiar with the story of the blind men and the elephant? The blind man touching one of the legs thinks he’s touching a tree trunk, the blind man touching the trunk thinks he’s touching a snake of some sort, etc. We’re calling this the elephant project, with this story in mind (each course emphasizes a part, while all four together better get at the whole) as well as the idea of the “elephant in the room” (Covid-19, contemporary racial politics, the neoliberal turn).

From what I understand there are political scientists co-teaching electoral politics courses with an eye to the election, but no one doing something like this. We’re in week five now and planning to have a zoom session with all four classes this week. We’ll see how it goes. If any of you are doing something similar, or even hosting virtual reading/writing groups let me know.

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Stuff I’ve done that you might have missed:

I’m scheduled to participate in events about the election as well as a panel on Astra Taylor’s wonderful new book on debt.

My article on Ella Baker (Ella Baker and the Challenge of Black Rule) is going to be published in the next edition of Contemporary Political Theory. Pretty happy with how that turned out.

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One more thing before I go. My friend Bonnie Honig is thinking about what comes next. She’s thinking we need some type of Truth and Reconciliation program to hold people accountable and begin to reconstruct something that gets us to (I don’t want to write “gets us back to” because that isn’t quite accurate) a better place. If any of you have suggestions of how it should function or look like, let me know? I’ll put it here.

This is the first issue of the sixth volume of The Counterpublic Papers. Lightly edited. My name is Lester Spence.

Gratitude. Grace. Joy.