The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 18

In relatively recent news the College Board (responsible both for administering AP exams and determining which schools are eligible for AP classes) let go an executive responsible for pushing anti-CRT legislation while Speaker of the Indiana House and made the decision to strip the AP status of any school that ban certain concepts and ideas.

This is an interesting development because it further provides support for what I’m calling an Afro-realist (as opposed to pessimist) approach to American political and social life. If racism and anti-blackness was so genetically essential to the American state, the move to ban critical race theory (a ban without a real program—critical race theory is barely taught in universities much less in high school) would spark pushback, but primarily from black educators and their allies (which would presumably be small), and this pushback would be perceived to be self-interested. That is to say, blacks would be seen as pushing back not because banning CRT was a kind of universal bad, but because banning CRT would harm their interests. Any attempt blacks made to articulate an anti-CRT project as a project that was simultaneously anti-black AND anti-American would likely face significant pushback.

That’s not what we see here. One of my fraternity brothers is a political scientist at Jackson State University and he’s been working with the college board for years, part of a larger group of black academics the college board has turned to in order to vet (and grade) their AP exams. From what I remember they’d fly the professors out, put them in a hotel somewhere, pay them for their time, and have them grade exam after exam, for eight hours a day for….the better part of a week? I am pretty sure some of them stayed on to become higher-level consultants--in fact I remember participating in a College Board conference in Chicago years ago. I imagine that this process ended up integrating the college board staff just enough to generate the ideational push against the CRT dynamic.

Now there are a number of schools to be fair that don’t have AP programs. And that’s a big part of the problem in the first place—when we gutted the idea that we had some type of responsibility to provide a robust education to a broad part of society in favor of the idea that each individual parent was responsible for their own child’s education, we increased the gap between urban and suburban schools but also between the rural and the suburban schools. A program like this will generate important pushback, but in the absence of a broader push to make school systems truly public again I’m not sure this pushback will be anything other than symbolic. But it does constitute evidence. Perhaps evidence of the persistent power of a certain neoliberal type of racial politics, but evidence nonetheless.

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After a tweet from a colleague I started watching HBO’s Station Eleven. Kind of like Counterpart, which lasted for two or three seasons, it hits pretty close to home, dealing with the after-effects of a pandemic. Unlike Counterpart (and today), Station Eleven’s pandemic was world-destroying as it was both incredibly contagious and 99% lethal. Within the space of a year most of the world’s population is gone, and within the space of twenty the population has reverted to a mid-twentieth century mode of existence (if that). It moves back and forth through time and characters but centers on an acting troupe that travels around a 900 mile “wheel” of towns around Lake Michigan, performing once/year and moving on. (Here's a good review.) When I grew up nuclear devastation was the setting for most of the post-apocalyptic movies and television shows—in fact even though the term “apocalypse” simply means “end times”, I can’t even type the word without thinking about nuclear war. There were the early quasi-realist attempts to show the results of nuclear war in the early eighties (my mother punished me JUST so I couldn’t watch The Day After), then there were the tentpole action films like the Mad Max series, as well as movies like The Postman and Waterworld.

But somewhere maybe after 9/11 it seems like we shifted. I came across this top-15 list of 21st century post-apocalyptic films. Take Mad Max out because it’s a remake. Only one of the resulting 14 deals with nuclear apocalypse—the rest are a combination of biological threats, “unspeakable horrors”, and climate change. I imagine that we may see more pandemic films, and as we’ve lived through one I imagine those films will get right what shows like Station Eleven got wrong—fully stocked grocery stores won’t last a week in, even if the flu is 99% deadly. But I wonder given what’s going on in Ukraine, if we won’t see a return of the nuclear imaginary.

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Around the time I finished Station Eleven I began playing Kentucky Route Zero. I am at a loss for words, but maybe this picture will do.

The game isn't about medical debt, it's about....well here's a review.I’ve been playing video games for almost 45 years and I can say that I’ve never quite played anything like it.

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About a week or so ago former US Ambassador Michael McFaul compared Hitler to Putin, noting that “Hitler didn’t kill ethnic Germans.” The hell? I think MSNBC (I originally typed MSNBS) ended up deleting the clip…but we are re-entering a period in which the ethnic-racial distinction (which in many ways is always already fraught) is becoming far more fraught.