The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 16

This week three men were convicted of violating Ahmaud Arbery’s civil rights. It’s worth emphasizing two aspects of this that I’m not sure are being given the attention they deserve—although given where we are at the moment it is utterly understandable as to why. The first aspect is that the case took place in the Deep South. Relatedly there was only one black juror. Now given these aspects, I can imagine a guilty verdict….but, say, ten years ago (when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin) I think this would’ve only happened if the black juror mustered a combination of reason and affect in order to basically change many of the other juror’s minds.

From what I understand there was little to no deliberation at all.

The facts pretty much spoke for themselves. This suggests what American Political Development scholars call a “durable shift”, brought about by Black Lives Matter protests. We should not think of this as the same thing as, for instance, changing the law to make it harder for police to use deadly force. But on the other hand we also shouldn’t think of this as symbolic.

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If it was hard to imagine three white men being found guilty of violating a man’s civil rights in the Deep South with only one black juror on the jury….it is even harder to imagine going back to 1984-era nuclear threat conditions. I went to high school right across the parking lot from an assembly plant that was allegedly on the Soviet strike list, so while I do remember a couple of nuclear war fallout drills I probably only remember a couple because at a certain point administrators had to have figured that given our location, if we needed the drills….we wouldn’t need the drills. There are three specific dynamics about this moment that caught my eye as someone with interest but limited expertise. All are, given what’s going on in Ukraine, minor.

I’m going to begin by asking you to take a look at these clips from a combination of English and French speaking media (for those either too busy or without access the clips show a range of individuals juxtaposing the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine against conflicts in the Middle East). We know that race is constructed domestically as a way to order populations within the nation-state. But this project is and always has been transnational as well. It’s just that the transnational elements only appear so viscerally as we do here in moments like this. In each of the clips we see a linguistic string connecting Ukraine refugees to Europe to civilization and then to race, with a few of the commenters being explicit. In the first clip featuring a Ukrainian civil servant it’s possible that he’s trying to garner support for Ukraine rather than evincing his true thoughts, but given pre-existing white nationalist sentiment in Ukraine one can’t be sure. Whatever the case, when he says “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blonde hair and blue eyes being killed” it doesn’t take a racial politics scholar to get the argument he’s making.  In every instance we’re not seeing regular everyday people using this frame, rather we see experts.    

Another aspect I find interesting is the language used to describe the conflict. Because of the history of the term “post-colonial” I tend to think of post-colonies as being a part of the global south. But this doesn’t make a great deal of sense when you really think about it because both the United States and Canada are technically post-colonies as well.

Post-Soviet states are all post-colonies. Ukraine is Jamaica is Kenya.

We really have to change the way we think and write about this.

Here’s a great thread about the role of disinformation in the current conflict, articulating this as the first Great Information War. The 2016 election was noted as just ONE of the ways Russia attacked the US. Another? Black Lives Matter protests—I’ve written about it in the newsletter but it bears repeating that the Baltimore Uprising takes the form it does in part because of a Russian meme that led to police cutting black school aged children off from public transportation because they thought the kids were going to generate a “purge”. (Read this story to see how the frame worked on a CNN reporter.)

Finally along those lines, I think there’s a segment of the American left that simply doesn’t have the toolkit to render sound analysis and prescription. I believe we’ve already seen this domestically in regards to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Biden election—a few folk on the left I usually learn a great deal from were simply wrong in large part because their frame of reference didn’t allow them to properly interpret what was happening on the ground. I’ve been seeing this now with Ukraine and Russia. Rather than pull examples of bad analysis what I’ll do is link a couple of pieces that I think get it right.

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Biden delivered his State of the Union address this past Tuesday. I think Biden had a chance to take our domestic crisis (which is political, economic, and cultural) and connect it to the growing crisis in Ukraine. They have the same roots (institutional decay and growing right wing authoritarianism as a partial byproduct of the neoliberal turn) and to that extent the same solution (building out a new more robust multi-racial democracy that includes a thicker welfare state and aggressive checks on capital—I wish the mass media would stop using the word “oligarch” when the term “billionaire” works quite nicely). Biden is closer to this position than any of us would’ve imagined he’d be (as a result of protest) but because the forces that pushed him closer are still separate and distinct from the Democratic Party itself, Biden wasn’t able to forcefully connect the dots in a way that established a new common sense. We don’t have a sane path forward without that new common sense.

I was on Black Work Talk last week talking about the future of the Black Left. We taped it before everything happened so we don’t talk at all about current events, but it’s worth a listen.

See you next week.