The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 12

 More on the I-95 traffic jam of four weeks ago. I write about mundane political activity below…but as many sf stories have been written about this moment, I’m thinking that few of them begin with stories like this. But they should have.     So Breyer finally does it.

Rather than rehash what’s happened over the last several years in the Supreme Court I’ll suggest what I think should happen but won’t. Biden should nominate Sherrilyn Ifill.  In her capacity as President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund she’s done more to generate political support and legal arguments for the protection and extension of voting rights than most drawing breath. And given what’s coming we’re going to need someone with that specific skillset. Now the reason he won’t is that doing so will likely generate a challenge. The Senate Democrats will likely try to use the same process to confirm a candidate as the Republicans did when Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. I can both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema taking consensus building approaches to either the candidacy itself or to the process of confirmation. The consensus building approach will likely tank any outside of the box candidates, and may tank the more liberal candidates of that bunch.

So this is why he won't, but it is actually why he should. We need to double down on the politics—to make the choice as stark as possible. We need a candidate who will fight for a very specific reading of The Constitution and who has the capacity to make it painstakingly clear in the hearings what type of struggle we face. Ifill wouldn’t fix the most glaring gap in SC nominations (we haven’t had a single nominee from a public law school since 1970), but she’d go some way towards truly replacing Thurgood Marshall.

(I don’t think I’ve talked about this here, but one of the things I’ve been involved in is creating a MasterClass about black struggle. I’ve known the CEO of MasterClass since he was an undergrad at Wash U. As the entire world protested the murder of George Floyd, he reached out with the idea of creating a class that could have the capacity of getting the world to wrestle with the concept of racial justice. I agreed to help in whatever way I could and the next thing I know I was roped into the Black Love project. I bring this up because of all the people involved, Ifill brought the most to the project., and while I didn’t go into the project expecting to learn anything other than how to work on these types of things in the future, she taught me something.)

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I’ve been having problems sleeping for longer than I’d like to say. I know this time last year I could chalk it up to the insurrection. But it took a different shape during the Fall semester. On days I’d teach I’d wake up like 1am or so and then stay up. The best I could do was get a nap in in the late morning. Turns out that it isn’t me, it’s…modernity. Who knew? This idea of a “second sleep” really speaks to me.

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Last week a Tennessee school board decided to ban the graphic novel Maus—the work that’s arguably done more in the modern moment to teach children and adults alike about the Holocaust. This thread (which doesn’t give Corey Robin’s response to it a fair read, although I do think that Robin is wrong for the reasons Heer mentions) gets at it. I suggest you read the minutes for a couple of reasons. First because we need to get back into the habit of this type of mundane political participation. Second because you really do see what very well may be a simultaneous desire to teach the Holocaust and police what 8th graders should be exposed to just so happen to lead to a political conclusion that just so happens to fit within a much longer history of book banning. (Oh, and third? Read the link itself—Amazon hosts the site that contains the minutes. I don’t know the logistics here, but this seems to fit within a broader pattern of Amazon attempting to rule the world—complete with Bezos wanting to not extend human life as much as extend his own.)   

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More than two decades ago I had a column at Africana.com, one of the first two or three sites created to feature black content. That space ended up becoming Blackvoices.com, and eventually became what is now TheRoot.com. While it was black owned at one time, it was purchased by G/O Media years ago, probably around the time the web ad revenue exploded. As a result of BLM protest in general and the George Floyd protests more specifically The Root, like other black content creators, saw it’s revenue skyrocket as corporations bought ads in order to speak to black audiences and virtue signal.

Turns out that, surprise surprise, the revenue didn’t go to the workers. And over 90% of its staffers left. (As an aside the story gets the history of the site wrong—Gates owned both Africana.com and TheRoot…) I’m teaching Black Politics II this semester and I’m probably going to lead with this story on Tuesday because it powerfully captures what is both distinct and problematic about the field.

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Finally (and I haven’t gotten to the Affirmative Action Supreme Court case, that’ll have to wait) I want to chime in briefly on the Neil Young Spotify issue. Neil Young in an effort to get Spotify to choose between truth and lies forced Spotify to pick between him and Joe Rogan. Spotify picked Rogan. In response more musicians have joined Young with some suggesting that the problem comes from the fact that Spotify isn’t a music company and hence doesn’t care about music.

This is both right and wrong. Right in that yes, Spotify isn’t a music company, it’s a content company that happens to provide music. Wrong in that music companies don’t care about music either. They care about profit. It isn’t clear to me that Spotify would’ve behaved any differently if it were a “pure music company” (if such a thing can be said to exist). Spotify was never about the music. It was about the profit. Music was simply the delivery system.