The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 22

Summer starts in a few days.

But for me, I’m already thinking about the Fall and Winter.

A big part of this is about getting far enough ahead teaching wise that I know I’ve done all I can to not struggle the same way I did this past year (particularly this past semester). I can’t control the pandemic, but I can control my response to it.

A bigger part though is that I’m juggling a lot. Over the past decade plus a large group of us here in Baltimore have been organizing using the idea of The Right to the City. Last year Robbie Shilliam and I received a Sawyer Seminar grant from the Mellon Foundation for a project called “Rethinking the Right to the City through the Black Radical Tradition.” While the Sawyer Seminar, as articulated at Hopkins has had a straightforward academic seminar structure (monthly scholarly panels on campus)  we’re trying to do something a bit different, something that brings it closer to the Mellon remit while pushing that remit a bit farther. We’re going to use the seminar to develop a set of broad intellectual conversations inside and outside of the university (and through the hybrid format bringing in folks from across the Atlantic and in the Global South) coupled with related events that to create alternative spaces in Baltimore in which to think about what a radically reimagined right to the city might look like. Alongside this project I’ll be teaching two Right to the City courses, one a class for first-year students and another a graduate seminar. Building on the Elephant Project of Fall 2020 (four related classes in three universities with students working across classes and universities on Baltimore related projects) the first year course will be taught alongside similar courses at three other universities (Hopkins, Towson University, University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Goucher College).

As you might surmise there are a lot of moving parts to navigate.

And not as much time as I’d like to navigate them.

….

The twentieth anniversary of The Wire occurred alongside the new David Simon show We Own This City. Based on the investigative journalistic work of the same title, We Own This City deals with the rise and fall of the Baltimore City Police Department Gun Trace Task Force, the notoriously corrupt police unit that played a significant role in the Freddie Gray Uprising. When I moved to Baltimore one of the first things I did was purchase DVDs of The Wire’s first one or two seasons (writing this sentence makes me realize how long ago technology wise this really was—watching the season was the first time I’d binge watched a show) and the entire run of Homicide: Life on the Street (which was based on Simon’s non-fiction work). Although at the time I did it to get a sense of how pop culture depicted Baltimore (through the police procedural) I now realize there’s the opportunity to do something a bit bigger and more important.

I’ve written before, in response to the publication of the other book on the Gun Trace Task Force (Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderburgh’s I’ve Got a Monster) that as brilliant as The Wire was, the one thing it got horribly wrong was police corruption. The only major forms of police corruption we see in The Wire and in Homicide (although my memory isn’t as strong here) is the standard form of police taking justice into their own hands in order to “do right”—there’s nothing that even hints at the corruption we actually see in Baltimore’s police. This is largely because the authenticity that makes the shows so powerful comes from Simon’s status as a police reporter working for The Baltimore Sun alongside his collaborative efforts with them—Ed Burns, his collaborator on both The Corner and The Wire, is a retired police officer. Placing David Simon’s Homicide, The Corner (also based on Simon’s non-fiction), The Wire, and now We Own This City in dialogue with one another tells a powerful story about the police procedural in general and the influence of “copaganda” and about the role in plays in the construction of Baltimore as a site specifically.

(Ron Cassidy’s article on Simon and the two series—accompanied by JM Giordano’s photography—and Michael Gonzalez’ article on the complicated relationship between the show and black Baltimoreans are required reading.)

….

In the late eighties and early nineties my friends and I would sometimes drive from Ann Arbor to East Lansing to visit our friends at Michigan State. Whenever we did so we’d make sure we had a full tank, largely so we wouldn’t have to stop in Howell, Michigan, known at the time as one of the state’s KKK headquarters. I don’t exactly know how we knew not to stop in Howell—there were no newspaper accounts I was aware of, no incidents that I can recall. But we knew.

Howell was a Sundown Town.

In an effort to create a robust archive documenting these sites, The History and Social Justice Project created a Sundown Town database. Note how most of the towns aren’t in what we’d consider the South at all—they’re concentrated in the midwest.

Howell is there. Take a look. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the towns many of you drove (and drive) through for one reason or another may be in the database as well.

….

I’ve a piece in a special issue of Democracy on Black America. It’s called “Past and Present: Dueling Constitutional Visions.” But I think of it as The Ballot and the Bullet—the 2nd Amendment now effectively functions as the core of a constitutional vision dedicated to White Liberty (the notion that now routinely requires child sacrifice). Let me know what you think.

And for the fathers among you….Happy Father’s Day.