The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 15

Last week I took a big section of this newsletter and pasted in into Facebook, as a favor to a friend interested in thinking through the connection between politics and pop culture. And as a result I’ve got a few more readers. Most of you know me, and some of you “know me know me” so I don’t need to do the “allow me to introduce myself my name is…” Jay-Z thing (although I have to admit, I thought about it.) But I do need to say a bit about what you’ve signed up for. So what I decided to do is reprint the first newsletter…published a shade over six years ago.

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“There are not as many of us as we’d like, but there are more of us than we think.”

I ended Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics with this sentence. It wasn’t a throwaway. Writers are often asked who they write for. What audience do they have in mind? In my case I tend to write for…me. Or perhaps more accurately, someone like me. To fill a gap that person needs to fill, academically, politically, intellectually. I wrote Knocking the Hustle because I was looking for a nice neat book that detailed the effect of neoliberalism on black politics, and responded to what I felt were two problematic intellectual trends—with folks on the left focusing on neoliberalism but ignoring racial politics except in its problematic ally-ship/white privilege/micro-aggression form….and with folks in black communities focusing on racism but ignoring neoliberalism and political economy in general. Obviously given the large number of folk who examine neoliberalism from one perspective or another but don’t really take racial politics seriously and the large number of folk who focus on racism from one perspective or another but don’t really take political economy seriously, there weren’t a lot of us. But I knew there were more folks than just me. And that group of folk needed something that spoke to them. That helped them build and grow. That helped them think through what my colleague Bill Connolly calls “the contemporary condition.” That group isn’t dominant. But I know it exists.

In the mid-nineties a group of young scholars came together in a special issue of Public Culture to write about what they called the Black Counterpublic. The concept of a “counterpublic” had been used to explain how women developed political ideas that in some cases contested and in other cases served as an alternative to the ideas proposed by and in the general public sphere which was (white, upper class) male-dominated. Certainly we cannot understand the development of feminism without the development of spaces in which women came together to discuss their interests as women and how those interests stood in deep contrast to that of their male peers. Similarly though we can’t understand the development of something like the Haitian revolution or the various attempts at slave rebellions in the United States and elsewhere, much less more recent phenomenon like the Civil Rights or Black Power Movement and its counterparts abroad without granting the fact that blacks created the same types of spaces that countered those of the general (white) public.

They called this space or these spaces, the Black Counterpublic. Whether through the black press, or through black churches, or through black organizations like Delta Sigma Theta, black men and women gathered together to make sense of themselves as well as the force we’d come to call white supremacy.

But here’s the thing.

The more I thought about that idea, the more I thought that there was something missing. Yes there were a number of organizations and spaces in which people who found themselves on the wrong end of society’s boot came together to think about how that society could be constructed, and to contest the ways they felt they were subjugated. But how often were these spaces truly “counter” publics?

What you’d find, whether you focused on black fraternities and sororities like my own (Omega Psi Phi), or black professional organizations, or black churches, is that with very rare exceptions, they fought against racism in various and sundry ways but took the framework of society for granted. Political scientists have been studying racial attitudes for decades, invested in examining the extent to which black and white attitudes differ from one another. And yes, on a range of issues, blacks and whites have very different racial attitudes. And these attitudes shape their public policy preferences, these attitudes shape their political behavior. But if you track these attitudes across time they rise and fall at about the same rate as their white counterparts. The gap exists, yes, and on a contemporary (to whites) issue like anti-black police brutality that gap is very large indeed. But in general the slope tends to take the same general shape.

In other words what we’re talking about is not necessarily a counter public but a parallel public. A public that exists along side of the main one. In the black instance, this public is deeply anti-racist and believes that most forms of negative racial discrimination are wrong. Further this public is deeply supportive or at least more supportive of aggressive government intervention into the economy for the purpose of assuaging the effects of racial discrimination.

But this public isn’t “counter”.

Here’s where a recent work like Black Silent Majority (Michael Fortner) becomes important. If we look at attitudes towards dealing with crime we’d see that they’ve become a lot more punitive over the course of the past several decades, going back to around 1970 or so. Where once the general societal attitude about crime was that it was the product of large societal forces that required some type of rehabilitative framework to problem solve, around the neoliberal turn this attitude shifted, and crime was viewed as the product of individuals who for whatever reason were so maladjusted that it wasn’t cost effective to try to fix them. Indeed they couldn’t be fixed.

Better to throw away the key.

And throw away the key they did, starting with the infamous Rockefeller Laws in New York state and culminating in the Bill Clinton-supported omnibus crime bill of the mid nineties on the federal level and three strikes legislation at the state level (this piece of legislation was so nasty it had people sent to state prisons for stealing pizzas, no lie). Anyway the line on the growth and spread of this punitive approach is the New Jim Crow line and its variants. This increased desire for punitive approaches to crime comes from a racist structure that responded to black economic and political gains in the wake of the civil rights movement.

Yes. And we can see this in white attitudes. In fact not only can we see this in white attitudes, we can pretty much see the influence of racial attitudes on these white attitudes.

But we also see this in black attitudes. Just as whites are becoming more fearful of crime and more supportive of punitive approaches blacks do too. Again there’s still a gap, it’s not as if black attitudes and white attitudes are the same. However black attitudes rise at almost but not quite the same rate white ones do.

This public isn’t counter.

What to make of this?

In my own case I look at this as a political project. What we think of as a black counter-public doesn’t quite exist, at least not to the same degree the parallel one does. What we have are snatches, pieces, of a counterpublic. Now like The Iron Giant these pieces have the potential to come together as if drawn across the seas by some type of ultra-magnetic pull. But this requires action.

Now I’m not suggesting a newsletter is that action.

But in as much as  require we need as many venues throwing off ideas as we can get. And while I never put too much stock in blogs I do think they’ve a diminished capacity to build community.

So here we are.

I don’t expect every single one of these letters to go in on black politics. I don’t expect every single one of these letters to spend over 1200 words dealing with a concept like the black counterpublic. And as much as I’m waiting on Batman vs Superman and Civil War as much as the next geek I don’t even expect each of these letters to deal with something as serious and weighty as crime.

I do though expect these letters to reach people like me. People trying to make sense of what’s going on around them and not quite finding their people, not quite finding the ideas that resonate. In these letters you’ll find photography, you’ll find music, you’ll find what I’m up to in general, you'll probably find a typo or two, and every now and then hopefully you’ll find something that sparks, that crackles.

Let’s go.     

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(This still about sums it up.)