The Counterpublic Papers vol. 6 no. 7

I drove to DC on Saturday. Even before the insurrection (even before the insurrection, what a fucking sentence) I planned to go down to the capital before the walls Trump erected were taken down, but there was a different type of urgency this time. I figured I wouldn’t be able to get to the BLM-Plaza era erected wall (I was not, there’s now a security perimeter around that security perimeter and then a series of choke points outside of that). But I still wanted to see and take pictures of it myself. I was in Baltimore when the city declared Martial Law. But this was nothing like that.

Baltimore was in lockdown but there were seams. They didn’t lock down the entire city, just chunks of it. And some populations had more access than others—Hopkins administrators talked to city officials and cut a deal that enabled Hopkins students to be given a bit more latitude, and on one occasion I was out later than I was supposed to be and given the equivalent of a pass (likely because while I was black and male I was too old to be of concern). Because of the nature of the event, and because of the threat—the threat Black Lives Matter posed was and is at every point more existential than real, as blacks constitute a minority of the American population—there were no seams.

The area outside of the capitol was still populated and pretty much going on about their business. I had dinner and drinks in the broad DuPont Circle area and it was as if the only thing that was going on was COVID (the eating area was outside on the sidewalk). But the capital was a ghost town.

In 2009 one of my best friends, his girlfriend, his niece, and my daughter got to the Mall around 3am. We didn’t have tickets but we wanted to be there and get as close as we could to the actual swearing in ceremony. There were already well over 200 or 300,000 people there at least. We waited, for four or five hours for daylight, then another four or five hours for everything to start, and then because it was hard as hell to leave after the swearing in, another several hours before we got back to my friend’s house. I remember the sister who was so excited about seeing Obama inaugurated she literally came to the Mall straight from the club—in her club dress, with her club heels. She spent pretty much the entire time having people huddle around her to provide heat. I remember seeing the high school class and the students with tears in their eyes.

In 2011 my fraternity celebrated its 100th anniversary, and as it was founded at Howard University, we all congregated in DC. I’d turned in my tenure file the day before. We were a little bit of everywhere—I remember dozens of us breaking into song on the metro. A group of foreigners from Europe were there for a sporting festival—I could only imagine how they saw a group of about a hundred or so black men in purple and gold burst simultaneously into song…and then seeing hundreds more at the stop burst into song as well.

I carried those layers with me as I walked walked around the empty city, dotted with marked and unmarked security vehicles, populated primarily with men and women armed to the teeth, preparing for war.

I wish I could write that this is going to be the only time I’m going to get this type of photo opportunity.

I cannot. More than likely, this is the first, but not the last.

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I finally saw the post on increased black male votes for trump that made me pull out my virtual calculator. Using NBC exit poll data from 2020 and 2016 it does look like the increase in black male voters are statistically significant. But it turns out that the increase for black women is statistically significant as well, and had the same percentage point increase. Given this it isn’t a gendered dynamic at work—if it were we’d see more growth among either men or women. It’s likely a reflection of religious shifts—it’s anecdotal but of the five black friends on FB I know as Trump supporters three of them rail against the “homosexual agenda” and consistently use their pages to promote biblical readings of current events, another one never rails against homosexuality as far as I can see but also consistently promotes a combination of Trump conspiracy theories and the Bible. They, like their white counterparts think of this as a christian nation that’s being stolen from them. Unlike their christian counterparts they don’t think of this as a racial project. (Although it is.)

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I’m one film from finishing Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series on Amazon Prime. McQueen is a great filmmaker and I’m so glad he was able to bring his vision of Jamaican British life to the screen. If there was one critique it’d be one I’ve levied against a range of US black popular culture—it’s a deeply middle class, straight rendering of Afro-Caribbean life, and with a couple of exceptions it’s primarily conceives of racism as exclusion, and articulates the response to racism as a certain type of cultural knowledge. I think I may come back (again) to Lover’s Rock in particular.

On the other hand combine something like this with Hazel Carby’s recent critique of Isabel Wilkinson’s work, and you’re made even more aware about how transnational black politics is, and to an extent how here in the states we’re consistently cutting the politics off at the border.

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One more layer. Just last year for MLK Day I went to the 18th Street Lounge to hear Sam Burns. I drove there, parked, but was so frustrated at waiting in line that I was about to turn around—I’d heard Burns before and didn’t have a problem driving back. My friend argued against it and won.

I’m glad she did. The next time I’d be at the 18th Street Lounge would not only be the last time I’d be there—it shut down as a result of Covid—it was to commemorate Burns, who’d passed away.

Grace. Gratitude. Joy.