It turns out that Cape Girardeau was just in the news, in a Guardian report on rural racism in America. A lodging house in town was once included in the Green Book for Negro Travelers, a historically important guidebook telling black people where they could safely travel in the United States. But Cape Girardeau is nonetheless a highly racist place.

In the latest Guardian report, it becomes emblematic of the experience of driving while black:

For younger African Americans, racial profiling by police has become the new frontline in their experience of driving while black. Marshall Egson, whose family owns a large colonial-style house in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which was listed in the Green Book, likens the cumulative effect of being stopped over and over again by law enforcement to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“Every time I go out in my car I worry: am I going to make it home?” he says. “Over time it gives you PTSD. The way I see it, most every black man in America has PTSD.”

As the road miles of my tour of Missouri pile up, past and present seem to elide. When did the Green Book end and the present begin? Has there ever been a break?

I kick myself as I read this for not having had the political consciousness to have even looked into race in this town before writing about it. The stories are there to find.

For instance, in 2005 there was a rally against racism at the local hospital, which was reported on IndyMedia:

In July 2004, I lost my mother, my best friend to blatant discrimination and negligence from a very oppressed and racist hospital. After several attempts of trying to resolve this matter peacefully with the hospital, all efforts where ignored. So on March 26, 2005 my family along with the National Alliance of Black Panthers gathered in front of St. Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau, Mo to protest in a peaceful manner. We wanted to shed light on the past events of racism and unfair treatment of African Americans, as well as Minority Medicaid recipients.

According to Holli Wrice, who wrote the report, the city police rapidly tried to halt the demonstration:

During our peaceful protest, a police officer came to our demonstration and told us not to use the bullhorn, and stated this was against city ordinance. Sistah Shazza and myself demanded to see the ordinance rule. (Allow me to mention that The NABP as well as myself had contacted the Police Department prior to the demonstration, to see what measures we can take for such usage of the bullhorn, and obtain a permit and etc). The Officer told us if we continued to use the loud horn, he would lock all of us up.

The protesters were also subject to acts of overt racism, on Wrice’s account, beginning with a threat of vehicular homicide by the KKK:

Several hours into our peaceful protest, the Ku Klux Klan drove a truck as close as they could to us repeatedly coming very close to the curb in which we were standing. They yelled niggers; all the while they drove their pickup with a huge confederate flag waving from the rear of the truck. Some of my family went to a nearby restaurant and they were called niggers. Employees from the hospital showed their nametags and gave us the middle finger.

Wrice eventually concludes that “Racism still exists and is very thick and blatant where I reside, here it is 2005 and you still have white supremacists sporting Klan uniforms, Man, I need to tell them that is played out now, times are changed. America is still ass backwards, its up to us to keep the dream alive and going.”

A few years later in 2012, the KKK (defended by the ACLU) won a court case against the city to gain the right to leave flyers on people’s cars.

The racism that affects a town is of course almost certain to affect the local university. So it’s not surprising that the local college, Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO), is associated with similar dynamics. (I’m not, of course, claiming to be an expert on SEMO or to be giving an exhaustive analysis of it. What follows is just what I can find out with a bit of online research.)

A recent analysis of language use on Twitter named SEMO #1 in the nation for frequency of “derogatory” speech, based especially on frequent use of the word “bitch.” The survey was methodologically controversial — and denounced by the college itself — because it consisted purely in a statistical analysis of the spatial proximity of derogatory language to the campus, without considering context or verifying that students were the ones doing the tweeting. But while the data is obviously a very indirect measure of campus climate, if you ask me, it definitely says something about local prejudices.

Local reporters in any case readily corroborated the findings. One Twitter user commented that “SEMO is super racist”; another person showed that students from the campus were advertising a “slave auction outside the university center.” Meanwhile, about two years ago, one student started an online petition (with 81 signatories) to denounce his teacher’s “hate filled racist rant blaming people of European ancestry for the plight of those of African ancestry.” (What specifically was said?) A 2016 Black Lives Matter exhibit was defaced with a pro-police message. And in a Facebook group “Living at Southeast,” efforts to discuss racism were shut down by school administrators.

A few years earlier, in 2013, an online forum discussion about whether SEMU is racist generated this response from someone in Cape Girardeau named “Nazi pride”:

“Black women r disgusting and mostly bald lol even black men kno white women are way more beautiful that’s y there always trying to bag one the white race is the apex of beauty and knowledge we tought u how to read write your welcome btw without us ud be wearing loin cloths chucking spears at elephants.”

In a remark like this, the level of racism and white supremacy is so extreme, it’s hard to even notice the exceptional stupidity that goes with it.

Meanwhile, liberals wrote to the newspapers in the wake of Ferguson with thoughts like, “As a lifelong Missouri resident, I’m sad that our state has gotten a racist reputation… I know most of us aren’t racists and are sad that Missouri has been labeled as a racist state.” As if racism was just an image problem and not about contesting white supremacist discourse and practice on the ground.

This brings me to my mea culpa as a scholar of higher education. When I went to this town in 2011 — admittedly I was just passing through, but still — I didn’t ask the right questions or look in the right places. And I completely missed the racial and racist dynamics that hang over this town, and over its local university.

It’s an analytical mistake I don’t plan on making twice.

Edit: I see that some people from SEMO are perhaps reading this post! I’d welcome additional commentary, corrections to my impressions, or any other feedback.

For example, since I finished my doctoral dissertation in 2014, I’ve published (or am in the middle of publishing) five papers about French university politics. But I’ve published nothing about French philosophers’ daily lives, even though something like half of my ethnographic fieldwork was about that topic.

The fact is that political activism comes to me, for the most part, pre-packaged. It divides itself up into little groups (or big groups) that usually have names and mission statements. It produces political events that have fairly clear forms, boundaries, starting and ending times. This is most obvious when you write about something like a single protest event (like my paper on the Ronde infinie des obstinés), but it’s true too for my paper about precarity politics, for instance, since precarious work is not just a social phenomenon, but a defined political cause.

In contrast, in spite of a considerable body of research on everyday life, I find it harder to write about. These spaces where people are bored. Where nothing happens. People chatting casually. Going to and fro. Eating sandwiches. Consuming, producing, exchanging. All the spaces of capitalist ordinariness — and universities are also spaces of capitalist ordinariness — are hard for me to write about ethnographically.

Now, one might object that ethnographic observers have a lot of latitude in how to construct their objects of inquiry. One isn’t given an object: one makes the object. As if everyone just had the power to make an object! But OK, it’s true: objects only become objects under inspection, subject to a conceptual grid that you bring with you as a perceiving subject. Objects aren’t accessible all by themselves, they are actively posited.

But without denying the role of conceptual activity in object construction, the fact is that the world already comes to us in a series of pre-given forms, which are never purely individual constructs. It’s not just ethnographers who create form by objectifying the world. “The locals” do that too, and their forms are often more durable, more institutionally viable, more solid, than ours. Natural processes create form too: the flow of wind or water erodes the rocks and soil and gives the landscape its form.

Of course it’s fair to say that anthropologists, collectively, have created some durable forms too. The very idea of “culture,” for instance. But I don’t think most of us are doing that when we do our own research. (Alas, much social research is not participatory action research — which at least supposedly leads to more durably institutionalized outcomes.) And as an individual, lone researcher, I don’t think my own research activity has created any very durable social forms.

So once you get past all the caveats, the interesting question becomes: how is one’s thinking, one’s research, affected by the fact that some parts of the world come to you pre-formed, as if pre-made for analysis, and others come to you messily, vaguely, or not at all?

Here we rejoin a standard topic of professional discussion, since lots of anthropologists have tried to find “new objects” the past twenty or thirty years. Kathleen Stewart suggested recently that precarity is a key condition of new forms:

“Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) cleared a field for an attention to emergent forms. A new object of analysis became legible, took on qualities, trajectories, aesthetics. Writing followed it, pulled into alignment with it, becoming tactile and compositional. Culture was reconceived as an assemblage of disparate and incommensurate things throwing themselves together in scenes, acts, encounters, performances, and situations. Writing became an attunement, a response, a vigilant protection of a worlding. Both writing and culture became potentially generative and capacious. A writing might skid over the surface of something throwing itself together or it might pause on a strand as it moved with other strands or fell out of sync, becoming an anomaly or a problem. Writing could be a way of thinking. What follows here is a brief composition of precarity. I take precarity to be one register of the singularity of emergent phenomena—their plurality, movement, imperfection, immanence, incommensurateness, the way that they accrete, accrue and wear out…”

But this raises a new question. Under what conditions are new objects possible? When can one perceive emergent phenomena and when are they illegible? (I have a very different view from Stewart about how to analyze precarity, but let’s leave that aside.) And why privilege emergent phenomena in the first place (aside from reasons of disciplinary strategy)?

Or rather: Isn’t the question of how to apprehend an “emergent object” secondary to the question of how the spectrum of possible objects already organizes us as researchers? The work of social form precedes us (as Stewart would no doubt agree), and for me, doing self-conscious social research involves trying to become conscious of all the unconscious forces that predetermine our work.

I’m imagining here that other social researchers are like me: they have a lot of ideas for research projects, but only some of them come to fruition. Here are some of mine:

• Interview project on the personal experience of people applying to graduate school in English and Physics. (It got started, but didn’t have a successful strategy for subject recruitment.)
• Interview project on student representatives to university Boards of Trustees in the Chicago area. (I got started with this, but didn’t have the time to continue.)
• Historical research project on what I hypothesized was a long-term decline of organized campus labor at the University of Chicago. (I only ever did some preliminary archival poking around.)
• Project on faculty homes in the Paris region. (I only had fragmentary data about this, and it was too hard to collect more, and never the main focus of my work.)
• Discourse analysis project on “bad writing” in the U.S. humanities. (I did write my MA thesis about this topic, but it needed a lot more work to continue, and for now it just sits there, half-dead.)

One might even argue that my dissertation research project in France was a sort of “failure,” in the sense that I never really did what I set out to do, methodologically. The original project was going to be a multi-sited, comparative ethnography of French philosophy departments. But it took a long time to really get accustomed to the first department where I did research (at Paris 8); and although I did preliminary research at a couple of other departments, after 18 months I was just too worn out to throw myself into them. So I made my dissertation into a study of a single department instead. Most ethnographers wouldn’t call that a failure, exactly — it felt more like pragmatism in the face of fieldwork. But at some level, it wasn’t what I originally wanted to do.

This reminds me that failure is one of those ambiguous, retroactively assigned states. How do you know something failed? Because it never “succeeded”, so eventually you did something else, or stopped trying. You don’t have to classify as “failure” everything that doesn’t succeed; my dissertation research evolved into something different and more doable, and its very criteria of success shifted along the way. Some things are neither success nor failure, they just morph. Or sit in limbo, somewhere between failure and success. Maybe I’ll revive some of my failed projects someday.

But failure’s ambiguity doesn’t entail that there is no such thing as failure. And my point here is that, even though academics live in a world where they are supposed to constantly project success, it would be better if failure was treated more openly. I suspect a lot of us have failed projects. I think they should be something you can list on your CV. They’re a barometer of your ambitions, a diary of how you became a better researcher, a set of unfinished paths that someone else might want to follow. In short, failed projects are a kind of (negative) knowledge. As such, it strikes me that they ought to have a more dignified existence.