The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 1

September 06, 2021

Michael K. Williams died yesterday, on Labor Day.

In October 2020—when we were still mostly closed down with only a few weeks of Fall left, someone posted a clip of Williams dancing to house music in a New York City park. When we have enough distance to reflect we’ll look back at moments like this, to get a sense of how people were able to carve out moments of joy in what was a walking, breathing, shitting, horror.

I’d met Williams once. Peter Beilenson (former Baltimore City Health Commissioner) taught a course on The Wire at Hopkins and I sat in on a guest lecture Williams gave. He was humble, warm, open, and engaging.   

When I’d heard about Williams’ death, I thought about Richard Iton’s thick/thin distinction. Iton suggests two different types of black solidarity come from the attempt to wrestle with the post-1965 era.

The first refers to those sensibilities that accord a strategic value to black solidarity while anticipating the transcendence of race and its supportive structures (i.e., the modernity/coloniality complex with its related hegemonic and suppressed conceptual fi elds). These projects also seek to challenge and disrupt conservative constructions of the relationship among the properties of race, sexuality, gender, class, and nationality. Performances of black interiority, according to this perspective, provide an opportunity for the articulation of solidaristic commitments that contain within them always the thickly cosmopolitan, aspirations toward the convivial, and means by which private spaces might be rendered usefully public.

In contrast, thinner conceptions of black solidarity, operating as a sort of default position, are promoted in response to the realization that blacks continue to be marginalized on the basis of race and tend to be defensive (if not simply accommodationist or overtly opportunistic). For those committed to this second matrix of practices and performances, black solidarity entails the containment or exclusion of those invested in the substantively deliberative, and the suppression and derogation of black interiorities that reveal the possible means by which postcoloniality might be imagined, mapped, and realized.

This second tendency correlates with the circulation and promotion of respectability discourses and attempts to represent black community as a closed, coherent and manageable text. (Iton In Search of the Black Fantastic p. 149)

There was a moment where respectability played a critical role in shaping black politics. I think that moment’s long passed—if anything I think we’ve moved to a moment where productivity and responsibility play more important roles. That moment passed in part because of larger political shifts and in part because of technological shifts. But it also passed in part because of actors like Williams. As problematic as The Wire was (there’s nothing in any season of the show that came even close to unpacking how corrupt the Baltimore police department was and continues to be) it thickened our understandings of urban life in general and working class life more specifically, particularly as shaped by industry (and the increasing lack of it), education, and politics. And while it did this in a variety of ways, it did this through Williams and his character Omar. We’d never seen a character like Omar on screen before. Omar was as ruthless, as ethical, as soft and hard, as Williams himself was vulnerable and joyful. In part that’s David Simon’s writing, but I think that’s Williams, as evidenced by his larger body of work (particularly in Lovecraft Country where he played Montrose Freeman). Williams brought all of his passion, his power, and yes his challenges to these characters.

A friend posted a video in Williams’ honor, a video where Williams was frank about his addictions and about what he felt created them—he was too dark skinned in a city that wanted its black boys lighter, and too gentle and introverted in a city that wanted its kids to be rah-rah. But I think as he himself noted it’s a bit more complex than this.   

I know that you have a unique, awesome story behind your first big break as an actor, so I’ve got to ask you to tell it if you’re willing…

[laughs] Pac — Tupac, the late, great Tupac Shakur — had seen a Polaroid picture, you know? ’Cause in the city back then, you know, you would do these music videos, and when you auditioned you’d go in the room, go up against the wall, they’d Polaroid you, “Next!” So, at this point, I had, like, tons of Polaroids of me around the city at various different production companies, and he was shooting this movie called Bullet, with Mickey Rourke, out at this particular production company, and I know the picture that he saw. It was a dark Polaroid. I hated Polaroid ’cause you could never see me and I had this dark purple sweatshirt on that had the word “gravy” on it, and he saw that, and he said he could see my scar, and he said, “Yo! Go find this dude — this dude looks thugged out enough to play my little brother!” And he had Julien Temple’s production company, like, look for me all over New York, and then, you know, I got a call to come in, and I read for it, and, yeah, the rest is history. (Source: Hollywood Reporter)

(“‘cause you could never see me.”) Tupac saw Williams when Williams himself thought he was invisible.

By the end of his life, he’d not only created the space in which the world could see him, he’d helped create a space where a bigger slice of that world could see the tens of thousands of people like him.

With all of this said, I want to come back to the political question and Iton’s thick/thin distinction. Respectability is no longer the thing. However responsibility and productivity are. We loved Williams in part because of his work ethic—the reason Tupac saw him and was able to reach him was  because by the time Tupac was shooting Bullet Williams had already hustled his way into dozens of productions. As thick as our representations of black life are on screen and on paper and on wax, we haven’t gotten to the moment where that thickness translates politically. To do Williams justice, to do ourselves justice, we have to get there.