The Counterpublic Papers vol. 6 no. 4

I’ve been reading Kim Stanley Robinson off and on for a few decades. I appreciate his work because it usually forces me to wrestle with big questions. Further, it’s both hard sf and hard social sf. Finally, it’s ideologically left.

A couple of years ago—and I just found this out a few minutes ago, really—Robinson wrote a piece for The Guardian. “Empty half the Earth of its humans. It’s the only way to save the planet.” A literally killer headline. Robinson’s argument here is pretty straightforward, if seemingly Malthusian—he’s not suggesting we, Thanos-like, kill half of the planet’s population, but rather that we concentrate the human population into the metropolitan areas we’re already beginning to migrate to….and leave the rest of it. Still a tall order, mind you, but a different type of tall order.

One that is hard to effectively communicate in an essay, but can be effectively communicated in a novel. The novel works here, better than a standard non-fiction work or its more academic counterpart, because it allows for a rich examination of the various political, economic, social, and environmental forces and how they interact…while also situating the decisions within this dynamic in particular beings (most but not all human) who are flawed in all the ways we tend to be flawed.

The first fiction novel I read at the beginning of the pandemic was Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (and its sequel). Although technically I’d read both before, given the moment I thought I’d return to them. Reading Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future represents a tonic of sorts. In fact I’d argue that Robinson’s work reads as a two-fold response. For Butler, the cities were places to flee, as by Parable’s 2020s they’d become hellholes. For Robinson they, with all of their flaws, are the central sites of transformation. For Butler, the only way to bring the people of Earth together was to create a new religion with the primary purpose of fleeing it. For Robinson, “there is no Planet B”—the thing that should bring the people of earth together is saving the earth.

At what looks to be the close to the halfway point of the pandemic, and perhaps close to the worst of it, it’s a good read.

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One of the things that a long drive will give you an opportunity to do is listen to podcasts. I ended up settling on Questlove Supreme, with a bit of a Busta Rhymes interview thrown in for good measure (he released a new album and I caught a glimpse of him talking about it that made me interested in more—when Rhymes was at the top of his game there was no one better). I’m combining both of them not just because they’re both hip-hop, but they’re both hip-hop and men of a certain age. Which allows for a pretty rich reflection on history, as well as on the relationship between popular culture, politics, and economics. Some of this requires reading between the lines a bit. When Busta Rhymes talks about Reaganism for example, that’s really short hand for his days selling drugs up and down the east coast, embedded within a structural critique of the mid-eighties. When Questlove talks to DJ Jazzy Jeff about Philly and ends up bringing up MOVE, you’d get a sense of Philly’s (black) politics, but wouldn’t really know that a black mayor called the bomb strike.

However, through Quest’s interviews you can also get a sense of how transformative hip-hop as a cultural and economic force was (almost up until he joined Will Smith’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” Jeff’s life goal was to get a job at one of Philadelphia’s public utility companies—he never thought in a million years he’d not just DJ for a living but become a millionaire off of it) how material pop culture was/is (hearing Quest nerd out about how specific equipment and even specific production studios produced specific types of sound as well as hearing figures like Jeff and other artists talk about the economics was fairly eye opening to me even though I write about this stuff) as well the rich and complicated nature of American black life in the seventies and eighties. I can think of much worse things to listen to for ten hours straight. But I’m not sure I can think of many things better.

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About two weeks ago news broke that Johns Hopkins owned slaves, approximately 3 dozen or so. This goes against the narrative we’ve been given of Hopkins as an abolitionist. At least on first read—the reality is that being a committed abolitionist in the 18th and 19th centuries was probably as hard to pull off as contemporarily committing to live in the US as an anti- or even post-capitalist. It’d be like me saying I only wanted to buy goods from people/institutions that didn’t profit off of labor power. I could, for example, only buy foods from food co-ops who themselves purchased food from the farmers who owned their own land and worked it themselves (or in co-ops with others). I could conceivably buy clothes from people who made clothes (or in co-ops with others). But even here we’d run into problems—where would they get the material from?

So while I do think there’s a moral issue here—Hopkins’ slave owning history was likely erased on purpose and replaced with a narrative that emphasized his abolitionist bonafides—I’m not interested in that.

I am interested in what this means going forward, for Hopkins as an institution, and then for Baltimore more broadly. Bringing the ideas of The Ministry For the Future to bear on this question, it seems to me that if other institutions are taking their slaveholding histories seriously by putting resources into some sort of commitment to racial justice, that Hopkins can and should do the same…but with an eye towards building a more sustainable future than with an eye towards solely or primarily helping us understand the past. Just this week alone I’ve been contacted twice about job opportunities elsewhere, from folks at institutions that are fiscally committed to some combination of more black faculty and anti-racism. I turned them down, not because I love Hopkins (I don’t hate it but I don’t love it) but more so because as the longest tenured black faculty member in the social science and humanities I feel an obligation to spend at least the next few years trying to drag Hopkins into the present and then push it into the future.

(Yes. You read that right. I’ve only been here fifteen years. And I’m only 51. To be fair, a big chunk of this is the fact that black faculty who come from the right schools and persist a bit aren’t that big in number, and the way many of us interpret “racial justice” is in stark individual terms, which often preclude us from committing to places that don’t commit to us. Yet and still.)

It’s hard to do so when the best the institution can do in the wake of that knowledge is something like a press conference and a history project. But this is what I have. I’ll likely be writing more on this going forward.

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When I hear or read the term “small axe” up until about a month or two ago I thought primarily of the journal on West Caribbean intellectual life edited by David Scott.

Using the same title and reflecting the same ethos Steve McQueen (director of 12 Years a Slave)  released a five film series on Amazon. In the films (Mangrove, Lovers Rock, Red White and Blue, Alex Wheatle, Education) McQueen charts decades of London’s West Indian community, with the films ranging from the individual (Red White and Blue, Education, Alex Wheatle) to the social (Lover’s Rock) to the institutional (Mangrove). I haven’t watched the individual stories yet, but I saw Mangrove and Lover’s Rock. The series is a bit time bound I think, ending in the eighties with the semi-autobiographical Education (which deals with McQueen’s real life experiences with England’s education system), but I kind of wish it could’ve started with Mangrove and ended with Lover’s Rock as they work in a way as book ends, with Mangrove examining both the explicit anti-black politics faced by England’s growing West Indian community and their explicitly political response and Lover’s Rock capturing both the Lover’s Rock musical genre and the house parties that sparked it. With both McQueen was able to capture both the transnational and longitudinal elements of anti-black racism and the response to it and its specificity.

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A lot more to write but that’s it for now. Only a couple of more weeks to go. Hold on. And then get ready to do it all again.