An Open Letter to the Cop Who Shoots Me

            My favorite premonition of a sudden death is on the city streets, caught in a crossfire between rival gangs. That has dramatic possibilities with memorable last words (“What you shooting at, bitch?”) and no worries about in-hospital costs. You may say, wow, that’s really depressing and fucked up, to even consider shit like that. But in the age of pandemic we need to re-define what constitutes fucked up. 

Negritude has made me aware of some of the possibilities of fucking with the police, also on city streets and equally dangerous. There’s not a whole lot that pigs can do other than kill you, right, and they're trying to do that anyway. That’s what my hoodlum muse tells me. This attitude frees my scope of action as a liberated black man in the People’s Republic of Austin, so-called World Capital of Live Music. It has meant throwing off the unseen chains that have bound African Americans since Emancipation—fear of the police. For me it's become a new game, too, "Fucking with the Po-Po”—or more colloquially—Pin the Tail on the Pig. 

The object is to bring a cop just to the point where he wants to shoot you. But no further. Do not try this at home. Do it out on the street where there are witnesses. If you miscalculate, at least your family gets a settlement.

My grandfather killed a Texas Ranger, not to brag or anything. Or so we were told as children. It’s a heartwarming African American family tradition—involving a white woman and Grandfather’s escape to California in an open car, in the early 1920s, the kind of folklore that you are unlikely to see at Christmastime on television. The tale of the Ranger’s demise was passed down to my siblings and me, back in the day, in order to teach black children the dangerous role that the police and white women play in black lives. My own ambitions have never been bloody—not wanting to see a dead pig, no. But a humbled one, oh yeah, big time. And there are a few ways it seems to me to do that. 

Speaking as someone who knows pigs—domestic and international varieties—with tusks and without, again not to brag or anything. The point is that a police stop on a city street is not necessarily bad. Like a lot of other shit in life, it is what you make of it. Those were the modest intellectual beginnings of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig. Knowing the police as an institution and how far to push them before they reach for their guns. My adult experience, btw, includes being beaten and robbed by Romanian railroad cops on the Bulgarian border, how many non-Romanians can say that? This was during the period of my young black manhood, post my perilous black childhood, the interesting part is being able to remember most of the details except what brought me to Romania in the first place and what was waiting for me in Bulgaria. 

The Romanian pigs searched me down to my underwear and took half my money—it was the best professional pat-down in my long experience, and was more thorough, actually, than a stop at the airport in Hong Kong, also back in the day, when a British cop put a gloved finger up my ass in a search for drugs. 

My experience as an African American male is particularly rich in police encounters, not to brag. So, like, this is absolutely true—and the coolest police stop of my life. Stepping off the Trans-Siberian train with a friend, in 1991, at the station in Beijing. To await a train to the southern city of Guangzhou. When suddenly the People’s Armed Police arrived to do a sweep and expel Western hippies who were camping out in the train station. So, like, Beijing was just beginning to appear on the ambitious backpacker’s bucket list of the time and some Western young people were trying to get a desert nomad kind of thing going on in the Beijing station, sleeping on the floor and all that, and the Communist Party was having none of it. 

And me explaining to the People’s Armed Police, who were getting frisky and were ready to kick me and my friend out of the station too—explaining in what was pretty serviceable Mandarin at the time—that we just got off one train from Russia and were waiting for another. In addition, communicating that we had tickets and that, subliminally, we were not a danger to the state. Which we were not. Because Chinese cops are not American cops and, to paraphrase Muhammad Ali when he refused service in the Vietnam War, no Chinese cop ever called me nigger. Yet. In other words there was no obvious reason to disrespect the People’s Armed Police, me and my friend being guests in the country and all, unlike in the U.S.A. where disrespect is my point of departure during interactions with pigs. 

The takeaway on the Beijing P.D. for someone like me who studies po-po? Many Americans think the Chinese are all diminutive but some of those northern Han guys, like from Heilongjiang Province—up there, bordering Russia—the kind of guys who seemed to be common among the ranks of Beijing P.D.—are the size of damn refrigerators. Just like cornfed East Texas cracker deputy sheriffs who you can’t believe that human beings grow that big? 

Based upon wide experience with puercos, it’s my thesis that the changes that we’ve seen recently in public attitudes toward the police did not begin with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis or even the murder of Eric Garner in New York before that. The first cellphone videos were already coming out before those cases, after all, as technology developed, making clear that the police version of events is often doubtful. Something that black people already knew, historically, but white people have needed to learn repeatedly. In my own experience closer to home, in the World Capital of Live Music, there have been two police encounters, one with a high-ranking officer and one with a killer cop that have led—you could say—to the refinement of my game, Pin the Tail. Think of it like Russian Roulette but someone else is holding the gun to your head. 

Art Acevedo is a CNN commentator on all things porcine but he is also former police chief of Austin, Houston and very briefly, Miami—where he fell into trouble trying to navigate intense politics in the Cuban-American community. He was longest here in River City, almost a decade. Acevedo is my second favorite police chief in River City, btw, after Frank Dyson who was in office back in the Seventies and Eighties, a white guy and pure Texas cracker who was chief in Dallas before being chased out by the police association, that called him anti-cop. To set the scene. 

In Austin the troops called the chief “Days-Off Dyson” because of his frequent suspensions of officers who faced complaints from the public. Days-Off was originally from Rotan, Texas—wherever the fuck that is. He was the first chief to put female officers in patrol cars in Dallas, back, back in the day, and even though he was a cracker down to his very DNA, Chief Dyson realized—even long ago—that there are problems with policing in this country. 

As does Chief Acevedo. My favorite easy listening, btw—soul or R&B—is not the Temptations or Marvin Gaye but a recording from late in Acevedo’s tenure in Austin, apparently at police show-up, in the proverbial pig pen down the street from my crib. In the recording Chief Acevedo is heard reaming a group of officers, basically calling them thugs, music to my ears, actually. It was recorded surreptitiously and leaked with the thought that it would get Acevedo fired, but what it really did was make him a hero to black people. 

So, like, one afternoon here in our bucolic River City, me and Chief Acevedo just chilling up in his office in the pig pen, not to repeat myself, because in California Chief Acevedo knew my sister, back back back in the day, while Acevedo was Highway Patrol internal affairs. To set the scene again. My question to him—person of color to person of color—black man to—well, jefe de los puercos, what would you call him? 

My query was what to do if one feels in danger in an encounter with a cop? 

Acevedo who is a thoughtful guy—for a cochino—said, and this may sound like common sense but is common sense that has not been heard often enough, “Ask to speak to a supervisor.” Which was something that did not actually occur to me up until that point, a decade or so ago, despite my extensive experience with pigs. 

Ask to speak to a supervisor sooner rather that later, yeah, that would be my additional advice. If you're already doing the chicken because the pig has you by the windpipe, or you're bleeding out from a bullet wound, you might as well forget the request to talk to a sergeant entirely and save as much breath as you can until the ambulance arrives. Although Chief Acevedo didn’t say any of that. But what he did add, apparently as an afterthought, apparently not wanting to get me killed, obey all lawful orders. Which is where me and the chief parted ways, as a black man liking the ask-for-a-supervisor part but not liking the obey-all-orders part because that’s the whole fucking issue, bro. In a nutshell, isn't that what it'a all about, for the noble black man? 

Do you allow the illegal search or the rough handling—or the profiling that the whole stop is based upon—because it’s a “lawful” command by a pig? What the order really is—is an illegal act, intended to demean one's black manhood. If one looks through a revolutionary lens. 

It's a crime, committed by white cops, under color of authority. 

You may be asking yourself, is this Negro crazy, words to that effect. Because non-Negroes still don’t understand that a black man (black women less so, sisters are more practical, like, someone has to be alive and have a job and pay rent/buy groceries.) White people don't understand that an African American warrior male will die for some principles. With the single caveat—that we take one or two crackers with us. So, like, it seemed to me leaving Chief Acevedo’s office that there must be a better way than following unlawful orders by cracker cops. Because not everything that comes out of a pig’s mouth is legitimate, you know? This was the genesis actually of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig. It only takes two to play. And my first game was won by the team in black and was played with a killer-cop. 

So, like, downtown Austin is my neighborhood. Roughly north from the Colorado River to the far side of the University of Texas campus, that is my 'hood, from my actual crib on Lavaca Street east to Interstate 35 and west to the MoPac Expressway. More or less. To set the scene. 

The far side of MoPac is the serious-money and politically influential West Austin where white people who run the city mostly live, unless they're farther west, out on the lake. Or out on the ranch. To set the scene again. That’s all the geography you need to know. So, like, my crib is right in the center of that rectangle, on Lavaca Street, up near campus. Which happens to be the most patrolled sector of River City! 

You dig? 

You name the infraction, in my neighborhood we have multiple law enforcement agencies ready to arrest you for it. We got APD, UTPD, and state troopers, there are pigs everywhere you look, because Governor Abbott and the members of the Texas Legislature are my very close neighbors, too close if you ask me. They attract so much damn heat. Right behind my crib runs Guadalupe Street which leads, just a few blocks away, to the Travis County Courthouse and jail, which means Guadalupe is traveled by the sheriff’s people and by other local "jurisdictions" that are dropping off prisoners, even the damn FBIs keep peeps there, at County Jail. Anytime you look up practically there’s a puerco driving by my crib, which makes me nervous, actually. 

Recently—this is so invasive—state troopers on bicycles riding through the alley behind my building! So, like, it was on Guadalupe Street behind my crib where the killer-puerco appeared. This was a year or two pre-pandemic at a time when marijuana may have played a part in my life. The circumstances were not a drug deal but a drug delivery, which all reasonable people can agree is a different thing. To set the scene finally. 

So, like there’s a convenience store on Guadalupe at Martin Luther King Boulevard behind my building, the Peach Tree Apartments, older than dirt but a cool place to live. You’ll see the apartment building if you’re in the hood and the bulldozer hasn't arrived yet to make room for condos. So, like, one afternoon, me leaning against a railing in the parking lot of the pizza joint next to the 7-Eleven convenience store, minding my own black business like the Constitution says a man has a right to do. Waiting for a delivery that was not pepperoni. Does that make sense? 

So, like, the pizza joint manager came out and told me to leave his premises. 

My first thought as an often-profiled black man in America—would he say the same thing to a white chick with blond hair and big tits leaning against the railing in the shitty little parking lot, instead of a proud African American Warrior? And the answer was clearly no. 

My measured, reasonable response was to tell him to go fuck himself. And he went back inside. Unknown to me at the time, the white guy went back in his business establishment and called 911 to say that he suspected a drug deal was going down. How racist is that? What a fucking Karen with a dick! Merely because a black male was waiting in his parking lot, that he only shares with 7-Eleven, how discriminatory is that? 

Let me tell you why he was wrong. This was not a drug deal, it was a drug delivery. See the difference? The shit had already been paid for, like a week earlier in fact. 

It’s my belief, call me naïve if you will, that what makes a drug deal unwholesome and dirty as in “a dirty drug deal” that cops like to talk about is not the weed but the money. And by separating the herb from the payment this became merely a delivery, literally as if the herb just appeared, like from Amazon, or like manna from heaven, not to get all religious or anything. So, like, leaving the parking lot shared by the convenience store, to return to my crib, at the already mentioned Peach Tree Apartments, out of the corner of my eye came two police cars. Two puercos got out, one Chinese guy and one white chick, and—stashing my just-delivered shit in a bush at the law office next door—my feet turned back, almost by instinct, to do battle with the forces of American racism. Call me noble if you will. 

My reasons were actually more practical than pure. A source of good, reasonably-priced weed in this town has to be protected at all cost. No matter the sacrifice. So, like, the female piglet got out of her car pulling on blue latex gloves and went straight at a black family in a minivan who were in the parking lot of the 7-11 next to the pizza place. How is that for profiling? The fact of the matter is that the black family in the minivan did deliver the weed to me, but the little piglet didn’t know that, did she? 

And the pizza guy couldn’t have known either because the minivan was parked out of sight of his business, around the far side of the convenience store. Again, merely to set the scene in an unbiased and non-judgmental manner. Clearly this was profiling. 

The piglet had heard on the radio there was a drug deal and she walked up to the closest black people, pulling on her latex gloves as she approached, ready to rumble. That is so inappropriate and is part of the centuries-long intimidation of the black peeps by so-called “law enforcement.” Would she do the same thing in white West Austin with some fucking Caucasian soccer-mom, with coke in her yoga bag, not the spirituality-cleansing weed preferred by the noble black peeps, that would be my question actually. So, like, me walking up to the Chinese cop and saying, “It’s me you’re looking for,” something noble like that, because one will go to great lengths to protect a good reasonably-priced source of weed in Austin, Texas, not to repeat myself, with all the rich fucking hipsters and high tech assholes coming to town and driving up prices. 

Don’t get me started on the human cost of gentrification that is not just high rents and mortgages. So, like, the pigs at the 7-Eleven kicked loose the minivan family and concentrated on me. That was the whole purpose of my noble effort, to save a good connection for weed.

The little piglet went off to talk to the pizza guy while the Chinese cop stayed—me feeling pretty good, actually, because the shit was not on me, it was in the bushes of the law office next door. A fact which significantly widened my scope of action as a revolution-minded Black Male, ready to play Pin the Tail on the Pig. 

The Chinese cop talked on the radio to his partner and then he asked me to step over to the pizza place with him, but forewarned is forearmed, you feel me? What they were getting ready to do was serve me with a civil trespassing citation which doesn’t get you arrested this time, it gets you arrested the next time, after you’ve been warned off the premises and told not to return by the property owner. But APD’s protocol requires bringing the trespasser face to face with the property owner, in this case the pizza guy, who would tell me with the pigs as witnesses, even though they're really pigs, not to come to the parking lot again. Following the protocol would require my cooperation which would not be forthcoming, me refusing to step back on the pizza joint premises, that is. 

And my response to the Chinese-American puerco was, “I’m not going anywhere,” said like a proud Black Man, actually.

And then my finest moment that afternoon, working up a plan to rag this Asian cop, not that there's anything wrong with that, and starting by telling him, “Get your supervisor.” And him looking down and hesitating but he had obviously been trained, which is not something that you can say of many River City pigs, and he turned away and spoke into his radio. Long story short, the piglet returned from the pizza joint and asked me for identification, and me telling her, “I don’t have any,” even though my i.d. was hanging on a chain from my neck in clear view. 

Now it was my turn to ask for i.d. Asking for full names, the Chinese pig refused but the piglet was already looking nervous and she complied with this lawful order from the Black Man. Score one for the Colored Peoples of the Earth. 

Both these puercos were already on my short list for Asshole of the Year, the chick because of the gloves thing with the black family who drove miles out of their way to drop off my weed, without a surcharge, and the Chinese guy because of my suspicion that even though he was probably U.S.-born, his family was Taiwanese, for the simple reason that mainland Chinese don‘t come to America to join the Austin police force. 

Me standing there waiting for the supervisor to arrive, complaining about how long it was taking and trying to think of a way to work the phrase, “Taiwan is merely a province of mainland China” into the conversation in order to piss the Taiwanese guy off? And then—hope of hopes—get the chance to call him a "capitalist running dog” like Chairman Mao used to say about the Taiwanese? The People’s Armed Police would have my back on that, actually. In a showdown with a pig, when you're playing Pin the Tail it’s no holds barred, you feel me, down to what the pig’s sister looks like and she is always an ugly ho, whether you’ve seen her or not. So, like, long story short again, the supervisor arrived, a corporal—and the name on the corporal's uniform was “Coffey,” which pushed every button on my personal keyboard. 

And, like, tact having never been one of my strong points, blurting out: “You killed Sophia King!” The pig eyes kind of rolled back in his pig head, not like he was busting a nut but more like he was saying to himself, oh no.

Sophia was a mentally-disturbed young black woman who was shot dead by APD, indeed by the puerco-supervisor standing in front of me at that moment, almost two decades earlier. He capped her in the backyard of the Rosewood housing project in East Austin when East Austin was still mostly black. Sophia was holding a knife at the time, getting ready presumably to attack the white property manager, when Corporal Coffey who was then Officer Coffey hit her once in the chest with a bullet from his forty cal. 

He said later that he attempted to shoot her in the shoulder of the hand holding the knife, but he missed and took out a ventricle of her heart instead. To set the scene. Still standing in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, Corporal Coffey looked like it had been a rough couple of decades. 

He was promoted to corporal right after the killing, as APD circled the wagons and tried to pretend his actions were justified, but it was interesting that he was still a corporal now, so many years later, although a “senior” one. The only practical effect of the Sophia King killing on Coffey’s career was that he was transferred out of black-and-Latino East Austin into the central district where my crib is located and where he had apparently been ever since he trimmed Sophia's sails. Sending Corporal Coffey to sort out a profiling/racism complaint was like dropping napalm on a brush fire. 

And you have to know something about black male culture. You can be in the middle of some kind of really dodgy or dangerous behavior and instead of common sense whispering in your ear, or what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our mercy, it’s your inner Bad Nigger telling you to keep doing what you’re doing or escalate and fire off a few caps instead. That was what it was like for me in the parking lot of the convenience store with these three puercos, me trying to draw out the stop and punk these bitches if possible, ragging them about racism and profiling or whatever. It got good to me. To quote the late philosopher Richard Pryor. 

Because (1) clearly they weren’t going to shoot me and (2) everybody was wholly uncomfortable after my indiscreet mention of the late Sophia King. A few minutes later we were done, the pigs wanted to be gone, they said there were no charges and kicked me loose. 

Waiting discreetly until their cars were out of sight, and making my way to the lawyers office’s bushes and picking up my shit? It had been a day well spent and would end with a few well-deserved tokes. 

You know how you feel when you’ve had a constructive day or, like, in my case, done all my laundry, or gone to the gym and had a good sweat? A sense of calm and accomplishment suffuses one's being. And that’s where, if you had to name a place and a time, that’s when Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig was born. Almost as much fun as pickleball but not everybody can play. So, like, through trial and error, through subsequent games, the cop who will shoot me has been identified, at least in terms of his law enforcement agency. He is almost guaranteed to be a state trooper.

The Austin pigs do have a long history of violence as noted above. And their training has historically been poor. Austin puercos are said to be the best-educated in the state, meaning that a higher percentage of our pork has some college or a college degree than p.d. in, let’s say, Waxahatchie. But education is not the same as training and traditionally the guys and girls of our local p.d. have been my greatest fear—although the black man fears nothing. But if he were afraid, it would be of APD, because they are so quick on the trigger. That dynamic has changed in the last year or two however—post George Floyd, if my interaction with the Austin bluesuits is any guide. These guys and girls don't want any trouble. 

Because now that they know they’re actively disliked by the general public, if not genuinely feared and loathed, and they realize that a bad shooting is not likely to lead to a promotion anymore, a la Corporal Coffey? Traditionally my belief has been that state troopers, employees of the Texas Department of Public Safety, or just DPS as the agency is called in the Lone Star State, were the least likely to put a bullet in me but that too has changed. 

Historically the troopers have had much lesser educations than APD—DPS includes a lot of high school graduates and a lot of good old boys and a few good old girls from Shithole, Texas. But the state's training has been much better than the local pigs. If you watch the troopers do a traffic stop for example, the first thing you notice is the pig turning his or her gun side away from the driver, good form so to speak, in order to avoid having the Glock grabbed and used by a mean-spirited driver. We should be so lucky! 

Also, the troopers are courteous because at the Department of Public Safety being rude to the public can get a trooper suspended while at APD being rude has traditionally been a requirement of the job. My concern, btw, ratchets up with a white officer, naturally, it ratchets down with a Latino. Call me a dreamer, but it is my belief that Latinos may not like white guys any more than black people do and the Latino guy or girl has only taken a law enforcement job as a stepping stone into the middle class. Is that a fair generalization? It’s a lot to bet your life on but in my experience it’s largely true. 

A Latino cop will shoot a black person, it seems to me, but only because of real fear, or it’s been a really bad day, but not to enforce a system of racism or of privilege. Unless the guy that the Latino cop shoots is Latino too and all bets are off, those people! They have class and color issues of their own, don't get me started. You have to know the pigs, in other words, as only an African American male can. Like the prey knows the predator. How the jackals hunt. We know what they’re really like, because we’ve had the interaction, we've been the suspect at the stop. So, like, for a lot of reasons it’s likely to be a Caucasian state trooper who cancels my ticket. 

First, there are so many of them hanging out around my crib these days, DPS guys and girls, in my hood. The feeling is like your privacy is being invaded actually although we won’t go into that here. 

Because of fear at the state level, worries by the Speaker and Governor for example that the nutjobs who took over the U.S. Capitol will try the same thing in River City. There are now troopers everywhere downtown and it’s theirs to patrol because it's the “Capitol District,” the few blocks on all four sides on the State Capitol, including my home actually. My neighborhood, shared with a lot of Republicans, is under the Governor’s control—technically—not City Hall. The local pigs are still coming and going all the time, however, along with the University of Texas PD idiots, many of whom are former APD idiots, btw. 

And if you’re accustomed to going into the Capitol and you see a lot of black or brown state troopers—or a lot of women troopers—let me guess the season. It’s the legislative session and the Department of Public Safety creates the illusion of diversity to improve its image, because the Department is almost exclusively an old white boys club. The DPS Colonel orders what few minorities and women are in the ranks across the state to come to Austin, the Live Music Capital of the World, to make DPS appear more diverse—to lawmakers who are writing the appropriations bill. That's really what is going on. But suddenly now with the surge of law enforcement on the border, any trooper who speaks Spanish is likely to be deployed to the banks of the mighty Rio Grande, arresting “I.A.s,” illegal aliens, or what the rest of the world calls refugees. To set the scene.

There’s been a kind of natural selection evolving among the state troopers stationed in Austin, they’re almost all crackers now, small-town white guys from some shithole county in East or West Texas, who are disoriented by the lights and moods of River City, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It does raise the chances of me losing a game of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig, though. Which is why you need to be very careful playing, especially outside the People’s Republic of Austin, because if you’re in an East Texas shithole like Navarro County, for example, home to Corsicana—and home of the Texas Klan? Where that deputy sheriff who stopped you is both poorly-educated and poorly-trained—a complete knuckle-dragging Neanderthal? You could lose the game before you’ve had any fun at all. 

Which is what almost happened to me, trying to start a game of Pin the Tail with three state troopers a few weeks ago, just down the street from my crib. You be the judge. 

So, like, late afternoon, me coming around a corner onto Lavaca Street at 16^th, between Twins Liquor and El Mercado restaurant which just closed and has been sold to be condos? Walking north, towards my crib, which is about to be razed for condos too, and across the street from me there were three black-and-white SUVs and three white male DPS troopers. 

The first pig had stopped a car and him and the black motorist were on the traffic side of the sidewalk, talking, more like a lecture by the pig, that would be my guess. Another two DPS idiots were out of their cars and hanging back at a bus stop, maybe 15 yards away, apparently backup for the first idiot talking to the black driver. So, like, this chapped my scrotum, big-time actually, on any number of levels. 

Living in this neighborhood you see a lot of troopers in traffic stops because they’re all over the fucking place, the Governor’s Mansion is just down the street, the Capitol is around the corner, not to repeat myself. The trip to Department of Public Safety headquarters from the Capitol involves driving up Lavaca past my crib, up the University of Texas Drag, actually, which we’ll consider Ground Zero for this discussion. So, like, this is my neighborhood, a block or block or two-block radius around The Peach Tree Apartments. To repeat myself and to set the stage, for you to determine if my actions were provocative or justified. 

And what’s super-interesting is that this is not a black neighborhood, in fact there are very few black people in the area, a few students coming and going from UT, African American families arriving from whatever Texas shithole come to see their kids at college, few though they be at the University of Texas, or drop them off, and black people who work at the university or whatever. Yet in half of the trooper stops seen—by me—it's been a black driver. Isn’t that a coincidence? 

This is absolutely true. So, like, one morning walking from my crib down to Clark-Caven exercise field, on campus near the stadium, maybe five years ago—it was at least a couple of years pre-pandemic or P.P. as they say. And that day there was a state trooper on a motorcycle who had stopped a black family on Martin Luther King Boulevard across from the Blanton Museum on campus. You know the scene if you know River City. Did my run on campus—came back the same way, headed home, and this very same moto-pig had a different black driver pulled over. Isn't that a coincidence? It's purely circumstantial—maybe it was just cracker chance. Or maybe the trooper was an East Texas peckerwood and he was doing what East Texas cracker cops know how to do, harass black people. Not to be judgmental. 

So, like, seeing these three puercos now, the three DPS guys, across the street from El Mercado restaurant, more or less, it didn’t start to get good to me. Instead it started bad and stayed that way, you feel me, as a black man in America? Like at the 7-Eleven with Corporal Coffey. Because black men feel injustice so deeply, sometimes we almost lose our cool. Walking over to fuck with these pigs without a game plan was not ideal. 

The question in my mind was what verbal mayhem to perpetrate on these guys except my feeling was, instinctively, not to rag the trooper standing with the black driver, that pig looked like he was lecturing the brother, in what was obviously an overt attempt to de-masculinate a black male. You didn’t want to approach a cop at a time like that because you can’t “interfere” in police business even if the business is nothing more than harassing black men. They can bust you for dat. Or cite you. Or focus their attention on you instead of the other poor unfortunate brother or sister. That's not ideal either. 

So, like, the first pig had these two wingmen who were just standing there chatting, like they had the other guy’s back with the dangerous African American male who was dressed like an ordinary state officeworker, two blocks from the Capitol Complex. So, like, going up to these two backup idiots, the first words out of my mouth were, “Get your supervisor!” 

No please or thank you, actually, no kiss, no dinner, no nothing—just right away trying to fuck them. No "I know you have a hard job to do, Trooper, but..." 

And they both looked at me, like where is this coming from? And then they kind of knew. This is Austin—the People’s Republic that they had been warned about by their granddaddy who attended UT, back, back in the day. Or the troopers themselves had heard when they got transferred here from whatever shithole is their home county, in East Texas where they like to hunt coons. 

One of the troopers looked harmless but the other guy, with the name “Maier” on his uniform, looked like he was starting to get pissed off real quick which was my goal, actually. 

One’s hope is that the cochino or cochina will go through all the stages of anger before reaching for the Taser or the old reliable .40 cal. At DPS they are well-trained, after all. The first response will stop just short of anything physical. Me walking over and preparing some shit to talk—on the fly, not really having my act together? My first idea was to tell Trooper Maier, who looked like a small-town Texan, which DPS is full of, actually, “You’re not in Potter County now, motherfucker.” Words to that effect, something kind of welcome-to-Austin like that. 

Potter County of course—county seat Amarillo, btw, up near the Panhandle? For those who are new to Texas. 

Mostly just to make sure that he knew that he was a cracker wherever he came from. 

But you need to be careful about profanity because it can be against the law too, if it’s really grossly inappropriate like “motherfucking pig”? Or threatening. My main concern was trying to think how to casually call the guy an “asshole” instead of a motherfucker, actually, call me Gandhi-like if you will. Again the object of the game is to make the trooper want to shoot you—but not make any overt movement in that direction. You know what happened? 

Out of the corner of my eye it seemed like the first idiot, who had stopped the innocent black driver, was cutting the guy loose and as this same pig walked back to his car he shouted at me, unaware of the situation with me and his colleagues, “Get out of the street.” Which was inappropriate—me, not him. My feet were off the sidewalk during my attempted ragging of the two backup idiots. 

First rule of ragging cops is take your act to the sidewalk so that they cannot cite you for blocking traffic. And that was a lawful order, we could all agree, just like Chief Acevedo talked about, the result being me stepping up onto the sidewalk to continue to try to provoke the other two DPS idiots. So, like, the black man’s game got tight. The object is to rag the pig, not to jaywalk, not to get killed or arrested, and not to get punked myself. Although “provoke” may be a misnomer. My own preference was to call it social justice in action.

Trooper Maier said no he would not call a supervisor even after my warning to him that “the Colonel”—the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety—once told me that a trooper is required to get a supervisor if a member of the public asks. Which was true, the Director of DPS told me the same thing that Chief Acevedo did. That is what they’re taught at the DPS academy too, btw. Trooper Maier said he wasn’t calling anybody and he told me to go online to complain on the Department’s complaint portal. Trying to formulate provocative things to say on such short notice is always a challenge. That is my only excuse for a so-so performance up to that point. 

You always think of what you should have said after the encounter. Not having planned my rap in advance, it was especially difficult because all three idiots were already on the move back to their cars, like, really fast. One flash of inspiration was to tell this last idiot, Trooper Meier, “Welcome to Austin, motherfucker.” 

Or say, “You’re not in Abilene now, asswipe.” Which had alliterative appeal because it kind of rhymes. What’s he going to do, shoot me? 

Unless it really is against the law to curse a bitch out, but if that’s true there’s a bunch of black women who need to be in jail, not just black guys. Anyway the last opportunity to score was as Trooper Maier and his girlfriend, the other DPS idiot who had been standing with him as “backup,” were almost at their cars. Moving with a spring to their step, a certain speed even. The game suddenly was ending and it was time for a "Hail Mary" pass like we know from football. Took out my cellphone and started to film. Got one good photo of Trooper Maier standing in front of the bus stop, which is useful for purposes of study, because the shot caught him with the look on his face when he is approaching wanting to shoot me but his training is still overruling innate cracker desire? Which is what the game is all about, actually.

 And this is absolutely true, just as my camera was sweeping across these three idiots, a fourth DPS car—unmarked—appeared at the curb behind the black-and-whites. With a black pig in civilian clothes getting out, who had apparently been attracted to all the activity at the bus stop. Or he smelled shit, like pigs do. 

He was coming towards us on foot and as my camera swept out an arc that started to include him, he ducked and turned like he was playing football himself and got back in his unmarked car and was, like, gone. He did in a car what a number of brothers are known to do on the football field—he just disappeared, he was so fast getting away once he saw a camera. The DPS brother was there one second and gone the next. All four puercos were gone actually within like one minute of my phone coming out of my pocket. Luckily they didn't shoot me for reaching for something, which is a pig's favorite excuse for capping a nigger. Not to brag or anything, not to claim to be the Tupac of cellphones or anything. 

Which is something that Chief Acevedo did not tell me, take out your phone, and is as good as asking to speak to a supervisor. Maybe better.

The only aspect of my near-death experience at the bus stop, not to be dramatic or anything, what really pissed me off was this last brother, the alleged-Negro state trooper, another running dog person of color like the Taiwanese APD idiot at the 7-Eleven? Come the black revolution, these two race traitors will be smoking last cigarettes, let me tell you that, after trial by a Revolutionary Court in the People’s Republic of Austin. You may say, well, as a practical matter it’s easy to make an error playing pin the tail. You could go too far, you know? If that happens despite my best calculations, you have to listen to the cop’s testimony when he's tried for my murder and hang him with his own damn words.

 If he says, “Oh, he was reaching for something,” that is a lie. Unless it was my cellphone. Or if he says, “I feared for my life,” that’s bullshit too.

 If he says, on the other hand, “That guy had a mouth on him. That’s why I shot him,” yeah, that would be true and he deserves a reduced sentence for actually telling the truth, which is rare among pigs. It was pure provocation on my part. It was, in fact, Pin the Tail on the Pig.

My Critical Race Theory Professor

           My critical race theory professor is Angela Smith, a sister from the Midwest who’s an expert in human-computer interactions (HCI) and is now a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas in Austin. Her exact title is assistant professor of social justice informatics. It was my honor to be in her first seminar at the iSchool, last semester—INF 385T Special Populations. The fact is that we never quite heard her views on critical race theory because it wasn’t on the syllabus. Even though Professor Smith was advertised before her arrival at UT as a CRT expert. 

          Nonetheless my preference now, in casual conversation, is to begin sentences, “Well, my critical race theory professor says ….” even though she didn’t say anything in that regard, it still sounds cool and might make headway with a liberal chick who you’re trying to charm, and would give state leadership a coronary if they heard you say it. In fact it would justify every fear the Board of Regents probably already has about what really goes on at this end of Guadalupe Street, at Forty Acres in Austin. And because, as the descendant of slaves in Texas, my feeling is that it’s time for a little CRT on campus even if it’s not on the syllabus. Long story short, white people including academics need to worry about Professor Smith but not for the reasons they think. You feel me?

Basically my takeaways from her class, sixteen long motherfucking weeks, not to sound ignorant, were two. In research—the readings showed, and our discussions concurred—there needs to be a greater effort to provide information on the researcher’s positionality: who he or she is, in other words, because even in the case of scientific research, who is crunching the numbers has a lot to do with what the results turn out to be. 

Takeaway #2 is also imperative and requires participatory design in the study’s architecture—especially in the case of vulnerable populations. That means not just circling back to tell the people whose data you collected what the results were, but getting the subjects of the study involved in study design in the first place. To avoid exploitation. This is a hard sell even in academia because it means taking power from researchers and giving it to the people being researched.

           If you’re wondering what is an instance of a special population—Governor Abbott would be a good example. He uses a wheelchair. Although Professor Smith didn’t speak explicitly about the governor, white people like Greg Abbott who are part of the majority demographic can also be members of special populations, as Professor Smith taught in class. Other examples that we considered included people who have regularly been screwed in the past—like Native Americans—prisoners used in research—people who have a disability, as mentioned above—and immigrants. Black people were not the focus of Professor Smith’s class, which was more about anyone who is vulnerable to researchers and to society-at-large. Democrats and Republicans were never mentioned in class or in the readings—at least not in those read by me—but the powerful and powerless were mentioned in different contexts. This couldn’t even be considered Marx Lite but there’s almost certainly someone in the State Capitol who would call Professor Smith a Commie or a terrorist. In Texas common sense need not apply. In 385-T, btw, we had Dr. Smith and eight students. Two Taiwanese chicks, one Chinese American, one tech-type originally from Nepal, two white women who were into other cultures, one Latina. Me and Dr. Smith were the only bloods. Only one male—yours truly—which made me a special population too, you know? 

My experience as a black man in America is that PhD-earning sisters like Dr. Smith can make short work of un-highly-educated brothers like me, therefore my decision early in class was to establish my own positionality. What real estate the black man decided to defend, you could call it, in an academic setting. As it turned out Dr. Smith was completely cool, there was no male-bashing, but a guy can never be too careful. Our first assignment was actually a short paper to describe our own positionality. My paper was part-territoriality—in an effort to fend off any possible feminist in class, not to repeat myself. Part of my effort in class was also to develop the “toolbox” that they keep telling us about in graduate school, that we need to get hired after we have a diploma. My positionality was like a lion defining his territory, not to sound Old School, peeing on rocks and bushes in order to let others know that this is where not to tread, as part of a psycho-social-gender dialectic. 

So, like, as defined for 385T: Growing up in a single-parent African American household of the 1960s, heavily “influenced” by my strong mother and three older sisters, sometimes by a backhand across the mouth. Attended segregated schooling. Today working in a profession—nursing—where women have been on my ass almost non-stop for a quarter-century. That is my positionality, yeah. 

Throughout the semester Professor Smith kept a poker-face. Once, answering a question that all the other students had already replied to, and parsing my response, my feeling was that Professor Smith’s bullshit meter was going off, like a bomb, as she listened to me, but she didn’t call me out. She encouraged us to speak more than her telling us what to think. You may ask what does all of this—positionality/territoriality and critical race theory—have to do with the School of Information at the flagship university in blood-red Texas? Which was a prime mover of the Confederacy and where Jim Crow has never quite died? 

Those are good questions. 

The iSchool is what was formerly the School of Library Science and while some of the students still follow a tract that will lead to work in libraries or in archives—the current curriculum is much more digital, including data sets, and even programming. A Taiwanese chick told me in Starbucks one day, like a couple of years before my application to the program, that a lot of foreign-bred Asian kids apply to the iSchool at UT because they think it’s computer science. Which it is not, although it’s getting closer. A.I. for Health Care was one of my earlier classes, taught by Professor Ying Ding who is from Beijing and is one of the best instructors in my entire history of public education, since 1960. Another class was Data Storytelling which was problematic but useful. Everything regarding information is being redefined, including the definition of information itself. That is where critical race theory and Professor Smith come in. 

During the first semester my instructor for Principles of information, which is the single required course in the master’s program—the other ten or so all electives—he told us there is still a lot of debate among informaticists about even a definition of the word “information,” which is not a good sign for my new career. This guy said that by the time we graduate we should have developed a definition of our own—not one that will satisfy other informaticists everywhere, but to satisfy ourselves. This is the beginning of my last semester and a definition of information still eludes me, as we look toward the iSchool exit. My inclination is to borrow from thermodynamics and say that information involves a change in state. Something was something and becomes something else and the difference between the two states is information. Not all the details on my theory have been worked out. A more practical plan is to use my degree to help sort out some of the data tsunami from the pandemic. Critical race theory is important to me not to beat white people over the head, although that can be fun. Overall, my view is that racism is kind of a losing proposition for whites as well as for blacks. It’s kind of like being on a treadmill that you can never get off. 

Nonetheless many American public libraries have collections that are skewed by centuries of white ethno-centricity and that still need to be addressed and where else to do that than in the former School of Library Science? White writers, white editors, white professors—not to forget Ms. Jones, the nice white lady who chose books for us when we were kids and set up expositions in the local library for so many years. All these people made a lot of mistakes. Based upon their unexamined positionality. That would be my whole critical thesis, you feel me? 

My sense of Professor Smith—although we have not discussed her views on CRT—is that she is less concerned about the past and more concerned about the future, especially regarding human computer interactions, which is her thing. We spent a lot of time in class going over bad A.I. algorithms, for example, that can be just as racist as Huck Finn but more pertinent than the trip down the river, at least to me. Angela Smith’s bio page at Northwestern University, btw, whence she came, when they were asking her what books are at her bedside, lists The Wonder Weeks by Frans X. Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt; Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life edited by Ruha Benjamin, How Long ‘til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin; Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock; She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Joan Morgan. If you can’t even understand the title, that must be some high-level shit. 

Take note that there’s no Autobiography of Malcolm X or The Color Purple to make the Lieutenant Governor of Texas lose his lunch. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, btw, was actually written by Alex Haley, btw, who also wrote Roots and kind of started the ball rolling that led to critical race theory, in my humble view, although Roots was fiction or fictional. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a great book in the same way that Malcolm X was a great man but you don’t see it as much on campuses and in libraries—as a foundational work of American literature, which it is. Unlike To Kill a Mockingbird which is everywhere all the time because white professors and white librarians and white readers like it. 

To Kill a Mockingbird is a white savior novel, which is kind of a bullshit genre, actually, that still sells a lot of books. That’s CRT, probably, although we didn’t go into that in class either, only bad A.I. and bad participatory design.

The School of Information needs a little CRT of its own, actually, because its record on diversity is horrible. If you look on the University of Texas’s diversity website, the demographics for the iSchool are worse than anywhere else on campus except the medical school, which is run like a plantation. Overall, on campus, blacks represent one-half of one percent of instructors and one-half of one percent of students. In the iSchool there are like 9 blacks total out of about 350 students and my personal experience is, during both of my first two semesters here, of being followed into the building and asked to show identification to establish my right to be there, when Asian and whites were coming and going at will. When will we be free? My programming instructor, who is a white Southerner, has practiced microaggressions in our interactions outside class. Among iSchool faculty there are now two blacks, Dr. Smith and another female tenure-track assistant professor, and a handful of Asian women, which is good because the Asian women and the sisters know their business. Or they wouldn’t be there. Although you can’t always say that about white people, because privilege has influenced their success, as part of a critical race dialectic and seen through an equity lens. 

Among the students two-thirds are female, mostly white or Asian. The high number of foreign (primarily Pacific Rim) students is good, actually, in a different kind of race dialectic, because they’re great students—which helps to improve the games of American students. Even a bad Chinese student is better than a good American one—and they pay higher tuitions—which is important to the university, in effect subsidizing the rest of us. What’s missing from the iSchool and universities across the country now are men and specifically men of color. But that lesson has yet to be learned at UT, although we have a new president and a new provost who appear to be prioritizing change. The iSchool dean btw is a research guy named Eric Meyer who came to us from Oxford and who has had the job for three years which is long enough to have done better but he did hire the excellent Professor Smith. Even knowing what her theory was and that it is controversial in a Southern state, which is a very good thing. You may say, well, the only reason you’re praising Dr. Smith is because she’s black but that’s not true. It’s not about skin color. It’s about adherence to a revolutionary dialectic, which has been around a long, long time.

During breaks in class, or when we were arriving and settling in—as one of the only two Negroes present—my remarks to her were, like, what did she think about so-and-so—Dave Chappelle being an ass, for example—or the latest voting outrage coming out of the Capitol. She never answered. It wasn’t me trying to set her up, either. 

Three hours a week for sixteen weeks, that’s a long time in the Year of the Plague, there are breaks, there was chit chat but not much. It didn’t seem like she was being coy, either. Or that she was trying to be politically astute in order to avoid problems later, when her tenure vote comes up for example. She was just focused, and reserved. In fact we students were told nothing about her personally, except that she has a little boy and she considers Austin hot compared to wherever she came from. Her page at Northwestern says that Professor Smith’s profile became more prominent based upon a paper that she and colleagues wrote, called “Critical Race Theory in Human Computer Interactions.” Which is how academia works, one supposes, you write something timely or astute and people start to pay attention. My point would be that Professor Smith is potentially dangerous to white privilege, as a revolutionary might say, not because she’s spouting dogma, but because she has judgment and knows—not just what to say—but when not to speak. 

When it’s not on the syllabus or she hasn’t seen the data. 

These PhD-holding sisters are very impressive and enormously useful to African American liberation, as long as you can get them pointed in the right direction, which is in any direction away from studying black men. She gets my tenure vote, therefore, not that anyone has asked. 

And the positionality thing—that could be invaluable. 

You could be at a party, for example, if people after COVID go back to being socially intime, and somebody is being completely clueless or talking about shit of which they clearly have not the least fucking idea. Or they’re hiding their own personal interest in the subject, because a declaration of positionality works for undisclosed self-interest too. You know what you do? You turn to him or her—even if he or she is not talking directly to you, and you say, really casually, “So, what’s your positionality?” 

The words come out, in translation, do you know what you’re talking about or are you hiding some critical conflict that influences your opinion? Many times it shuts his or her shit down right there. That was a big takeaway for me from Informatics 385T, taught by Professor Angela Smith, in the Fall Semester of 2021, in the second year of The Plague.             

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner at Governor Abbott's House

           Guess who’s coming to dinner at the Governor’s Mansion. That’s all you can do—guess—because Governor Abbott refuses to respond to open records requests about his visitors, for dinner or for sleepovers, even though the food and electricity are provided by taxpayers. And even though his predecessors have recognized the request as legitimate and released the information in the past. As he prepares to run for the White House, our governor is reluctant to disclose who he’s seeing away from the office, across the street at the official residence, understandably. Although he was like that before too. A request three years ago for the very same information of who’s coming to the Mansion, also during Greg Abbott’s residence there, led to release of a list of names of hundreds of individuals who had toured the Mansion—even though that was not what was asked for. This time, nada. As in nothing. This time the course of this information request through his General Counsel’s office is interesting because it tells us something about the governor and who he is breaking bread with and why.

Speaking of the Governor’s Mansion. Back in the day by the way—this is so, like, not shameless gossip, not mere grist for the rumor mill in the State Capitol. 

Before the millennium, before Y2K, during the tenure of Governor George W. Bush, the guest list came back from the Mansion and the only name of the dinner invitees that was surprising to my innocent eyes—among the Bush clan and proto-Bushites and wannabe Bushes who were visiting the future President and come to kiss his ring—was Rich Oppel, then editor of the Austin daily newspaper. To set the scene. 

This was well into W’s governorship, by the way, when he had already signed off on a hundred or so executions and had cut social services in state government—to polish his conservative credentials. And Oppel seeing the governor privately when the newspaper was criticizing him publicly, or not—isn’t that, like—isn’t that dining with the enemy? 

Or schmoozing with the enemy? At least Rich Oppel wasn’t sleeping with the enemy because his name did not appear among the guests who spent the night, at the time of my records request. So, like, you aren’t going to believe this. What you’re about to hear will sound completely far-fetched and mind-blowing in the extreme. But it was a different age, remember that. Among the documentation related to housekeeping accounts and work done at the Governor’s Mansion that was released by W’s lawyers was a short memo. It seemed that, during the Bush Family’s tenure in the Big House, there was a guest who slipped in and spent a night in the Mansion without Governor Bush’s knowledge or approval. 

Recall that W had twin daughters attending Austin High School, at the time, Jenna and Barbara, both wonderful young women, good students too, who also enjoyed a margarita or three and were soon to be sweethearts of Sigma Chi or whatever? To set the scene again. 

This was, to repeat, just before the millennium. This is my memory of the affair. There was a memo in some of the documentation that was released, by Governor Bush lo a quarter century or more ago, written by Mansion staff who were pissed off, actually, because unbeknownst to staff or security, or apparently the Governor and First Lady either, a teenaged boy, also from Austin High, spent the night in the Mansion and the staff only heard about it after the fact. You can call the episode, “Jenna’s Excellent Sleepover” or “Barbara’s Best Night In,” depending upon your suspicions, because the memo did not identify whom the young man was visiting. And at the time it seemed to me that this was a private matter, not mere grist for the Capitol’s deplorable gossip mill, although it was a close call at the time. 

But with Governor Abbott, nothing like that could happen, no unwanted guests, because security practically has searchlights and machinegun towers around the Mansion. 

Besides if there’s an indiscretion this time, it’s financial not an affair of the heart or a tryst for young lovers. If you’re thinking that Governor Abbott does not want to reveal his guests at the Mansion (the equivalent of the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom is the Sam Houston Bedroom in Austin) because they include rightwing politicians or nutjobs—the Governor had lunch with the Proud Boys or whoever—the Grand Dragon slept there. The kind of people Greg Abbott needs to be seen with publicly in order to burnish conservative credentials. Former President Trump has been here and done that with the Governor already. There is a hint from the general counsel’s most recent missive of what concerns the governor regarding releasing his guest list. It’s not political. It's financial.

My request was made almost exactly two months ago. The governor’s response was that fulfilling the search and providing the list of names would require staff time amounting to $225.90, which sounded reasonable. Any request on my part for a media discount, which the law allows, or a cheaper means of disclosure, which the law also allows for—the letter from the governor said explicitly that neither of those options would be possible in this case. A big bill is not a particularly original ploy to avoid disclosure, but fulfilling public information requests does take time and charging money seems fair. Usually a bill of this magnitude works like a charm with me personally and scares me off but, for a reason that remains unclear—even to me—my decision was to pay my money and takes my chances. Although $225 is a lot of money in my world. 

There are two governor’s offices in Austin, both on the Capitol grounds, the second on the eastside, home to the big guy’s lawyers. 

Trekking there to pay for disclosure of the guest list, which now had the significance of a state secret, me passing state troopers with automatic weapons mounting a non-static defense of the State Capitol grounds—no fixed posts and the lawdogs moving unexpectedly, in cars and on foot, which can be a worrisome sight for black men. Especially when the state troopers are all white.

The governor’s office accepted my check and acknowledged same through email and cashed it a few days later. Two hundred and twenty-five dollars and ninety cents, not to repeat myself, a lot of money to me, not to repeat myself again. So, like, imagine my surprise—again, a couple of weeks after Greg Abbott banked my check. Another letter arrived from his general counsel saying the governor would not release the list of names of people who have been to the Mansion without first receiving permission from me to redact names at the governor's discretion. Or his lawyers would seek an attorney general’s ruling, which the Texas Public Information Act does permit, within ten days not two months later. Be that as it may. Specifically the letter mentioned that Governor Abbott would like to redact names for two reasons, security being one—which was bullshit, since my original request was for guests not bodyguards. And for commercial reasons. That is what the letter said and that is what apparently really worries Greg Abbott. Who the Office of the Governor of Texas is doing business with. And in that regard, in this instance, regarding who has been visiting the Abbotts at the Mansion. 

There is a change in the usual dynamic of a powerful politician not wanting to reveal his or her guests, for fear of embarrassing the politician. In this instance it’s apparently for fear of embarrassing businesspeople socializing with this governor right now. 

Right off, three names come to mind as certainties for people who have been to the Governor’s Mansion recently and probably don’t want it known, whether they’ve done a sleepover or not. Elon Musk of Tesla fame and Space X fortune for sure is one. During the early bad reaction to the latest anti-abortion legislation, not to mention the new voting restrictions which were also laid down, and which will disenfranchise minorities, uneasiness has also been reported among some businesspeople, especially those with plans to move to Texas. The world’s richest man refused to criticize the abortion law or the governor in this regard—Musk saying that he’s “not political,” words to that effect. But visiting the Mansion or being known to have visited the Mansion is something else.

Let's see. Another very likely guest is Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest person. Amazon has huge interests in the Lone Star State and Bezos grew up in South Texas and the probability is very good that he has had a drink, or two, or a meal with the governor, whoever that governor may be. #3, and this is another absolute certainty—Michael Dell, of Dell Computers, who is said to be two steps to the right of Attila the Hun’s grandmother and who has had a close working relationship with both the prior Republican governors, W and Rick Perry. 

Michael Dell is merely the world’s 25^th richest person, a pauper compared to Musk or Bezos, and for Dell the connection to the governor of Texas has historically been very important commercially. Dell Computers was built in part on State of Texas business, when Bush was governor, and W himself has said that Michael Dell liked to come by the State Capitol to show the Governor Bush how to work his PC. Michael Dell likely knows Greg Abbott well enough to stop by with takeout. 

On the political front, on the same logic, not wanting to be seen with the governor right now, there is Chief Justice Nathan Hecht and the guys and girls on the Texas Supreme Court, where Greg Abbott served for five years, btw. Supreme Court justices and powerful politicians socialize all the time, including at the White House, but Governor Abbott’s recent political activity seems to be under constant appeal to the state’s highest court and the idea that Governor Abbott is dining with or having drinks with the people deciding those cases, in cozy evenings at the Mansion, would not look good and would lead people to believe the governor and the justices discuss cases, which they almost certainly do and probably always have done, in every state and in D.C. Mostly though, as in everything else at the Texas Capitol, it's about money. 

The commercial interests that the governor cited in his letter involve flows of money that go both ways. Greg Abbott is looking for political contributions but he also gives away a lot of state money, which has been problematic in the past. 

Governor Abbott’s predecessor Rick Perry was in constant hot water regarding dispersals from the state’s Emerging Technology Fund. Greg Abbott disbanded that high tech moneypot but he still makes loans/grants for business development, through almost a dozen different programs, including one for spaceport development. The governor’s press office refuses to say who is getting state dollars as incentives and it’s hard to imagine that Elon Musk needs money from the State of Texas, but you can’t find out for sure because Greg Abbott is not telling, just like he's not saying who's coming to dinner at the Mansion. You have to guess. Maybe the real issue is not money or politics but transparency? Is that possible? No recent governor has been worse in that regard than Greg Abbott is now. 

A requestor can sue but that is expensive and time-consuming (and the case may end up with Chief Justice Hecht and his colleagues, which is another reason to want to know who’s hanging out with Greg at the Mansion.) There's a criminal provision in the open records law, actually, which led to an interesting exchange recently with a local prosecutor who would have jurisdiction, Travis County Attorney Delia Garza. Her office wouldn’t even listen to a complaint about the governor’s compliance with the Texas Public Information Act and her staff told me to take the matter to the Austin police or to the Sheriff. Does that mean flag down a patrol car? 

What goes unsaid here is that violating transparency laws is in every political leader’s best interests. Ms. Garza was until this year a member of the Austin City Council, the only people with a worse history of open government than Governor Abbott. Last year, months into the pandemic, Austin’s City Attorney answered an open records request for Mayor Steve Adler’s email on COVID-19 by saying that no documentation exists. That he had, in other words, written no messages on the subject. 

There are, basically, two ways to thwart open records requests in Texas. A politician or political entity can lie and say no documentation exists, like the City of Austin, or tell the truth and refuse to give it up anyway, like Greg Abbott. Somehow Governor Abbott’s approach seems more honest. 

         

The Nightingale Project

         

             

             Clay Johnston is a businessman and physician and was the first dean of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas, the position from which he retired a few weeks ago. The custom of heaping praise on a departing high-ranking academic can be skipped entirely in Dr. Johnston’s case, if you’re a member of a minority group in Texas—because outcomes have not been good. 

            When Dean Johnston started out he made no promises in that regard, actually. In an interview as he took the position of Dell dean five years ago, Dr. Johnston refused to be held to any firm numbers regarding diversity in the student body. And a good thing too, because he did a poor job on this crucial front of minority access to health care, on both ends, as patients and as practitioners. He and his right hand Vice Dean Mini Kahlon have been absolutely M.I.A. on race during their tenure in Austin. At the conclusion of last semester the Dell website announced that the proportion of minorities in class was 17 percent. In a state that is more than half black and brown. Shame, and shame again.

Interestingly, however, at the time of the interview when Dr. Johnston refused to commit, so to speak, lo those five years ago, he criticized the diversity profile of the institution he had just left, the University of California San Francisco, the most prominent health-related public university in the world. “I’m certainly not going to defend UCSF and its track record,” he said, rather huffily, at the time of is hiring at UT. “We both know it needs to be better.” It is better, actually—better than Dell’s. 

Dean Johnston promised to create in Austin a new and fairer way of choosing students—through greater emphasis on interviews and on non-traditional backgrounds. That hasn’t happened. Upper middle-class white male has long been the norm in American medical schools, previously it was white guys but now at Dell it’s a lot of white girls. As incoming dean, Dr. Johnston also promised to evaluate potential students’ problem-solving skills instead of relying merely on test scores and grades. But the faculty members who judge the students for admission are still white, as is two-thirds of Dell faculty (black and brown faculty membership is 12 percent), including a key administrator who is a white South African physician, an odd choice to assure increased diversity for blacks and Latinos in health care in the Lone Star State. That means the same old outcomes are achieved as previously, or worse. 

Of Dell Medical School’s 14 department chairs, under the good Dr. Johnston, 11 are white and three are Asian, again in a state that is more than half black and Latino and, the U.S. Census just reported, is getting blacker and browner every day. The context of Dr. Johnston’s time at Dell has to be considered as well, if one is interested in these poor outcomes for minorities in admissions. He came on board (as dean and as UT vice president of medical affairs, at a salary of $750,000 a year) at a time when the university was reeling from an admissions scandal, an issue that may be particularly pertinent here. The then-university president was found to have offered places to unworthy undergraduates who were politically-connected to Texas elites.

A second admissions scandal erupted three years into Dean Johnston’s tenure—code-named “Operation Varsity Blues” by the FBI—involving eight major higher education institutions, across the country, including UT but not the medical school. A corollary question arises therefore, given this history, and given what should be higher numbers of minorities at Dell Medical School. What are the chances that these very prestigious and very sought-after places, at Dell Med, have been awarded in some cases to the well-connected, as has happened in the past at UT and at UCSF also, btw, whence Dean Johnston came? It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. Considering the university’s non-diverse past, you might say. 

Although former Dean Johnston criticized his ex-employer the University of California, a lot of faculty at Dell are actually ex-UCSF, including the above mentioned Associate Dean Kahlon. Before and during the pandemic there’s been an exodus from San Francisco to Austin and also from UCSF to Dell. The danger here is that while people flow from the University of California, so does the culture in Baghdad by the Bay, which is not good. An NPR report recently quoted a former UCSF medical student saying that he was still hearing black patients referred to as niggers on rounds there just a few years ago. There’s also a lot of UC propaganda in cyberspace, which is a sign that administrators know there’s a problem but are trying to hide it. For example the University of California’s common practice is to show photos of happy-looking isolated black students on its website, to make the student body appear more diverse than it really is—a practice that has been adopted wholeheartedly by Dell. Bad behavior has flowed from Texas to the Bay Area also. UC System’s Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, Dr. John Stobo was fired for sexual harassment of an assistant just last year. He arrived at UC from UT Medical Branch on Galveston Island where he was president (John Stobo’s signature is on my nursing diploma from Medical Branch, btw, for the record.) And then there’s Dr. Johnston himself, who has shown a particular talent for ethical not sexual compromise.

While still at UCSF, the Dell ex-dean authored a paper arguing the novel position that prices for medicines are not high enough and he co-authored another in which he bemoaned conflict of interest accusations against medical researchers. 

That is Dr. Johnston's legacy, you could call it, at the University of California San Francisco. His favorite business case, btw, when he's presenting papers or giving talks, is the growth of the American railroad industry, back in the day, during the Industrial Revolution or whenever, and he likens that history to American medicine today. Here in the Live Music Capital of the World, among his first efforts was the unsuccessful attempt to lure pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to the city in order to harvest healthcare data from minorities.

Traditionally one of the biggest holes in Big Pharma’s data resources involves blacks, Latinos and Asians, while whites are overrepresented. To design treatments and meds, companies like Pfizer need as much representative data as possible, and that means minorities need to be in the mix. And it is there that Dean Johnston’s reputation and his legacy at Dell Medical School may have just been rescued by history. Pfizer took a lot of heat and eventually dropped plans for a hub here but was soon replaced in the enterprise by Google Health and its Nightingale Project. With an assist by Dell Medical School and the good Dr. Johnston, who has done what he was brought in to do, basically, to create a Big Medicine-UT axis, which may help to save all of our lives one day, actually, whether Dean Johnston is a good guy or not. 

He was brought in to do a job—to establish the university’s business ties with Big Pharma or Google, or whoever, as the case may be, like back in the day with the railroads and the Robber Barons and all that—and let’s all hope he got it right. 

Specifically, Dell Medical School and its partner Ascension Seton, which is a Catholic non-profit and operates a dozen hospitals in the Austin area, have teamed up with Google to transfer information on patients. Everything from zip code to hemoglobin level, for Big Data analysis. Before the pandemic this agreement was made public—revealed by the Wall Street Journal just before Covid broke out, to widespread horror on the part of privacy activists. This Big Data agreement was considered yet another Big Tech invasion and an attempt to profit from patient information. Which it was, in another era. But since the pandemic the ground has shifted under everyone’s feet. As we enter the second wave of Covid-19, one can only hope that data is flowing like the Mississippi, from hospitals and labs. The danger of the dreaded Big Tech-Big Medicine hookup, facilitated by academics like Clay Johnston—the Nightingale Project, as the endeavor is called by Google, or by any other name—pales in comparison to the danger of the next virus, which could feature a more virulent strain or a faster-moving outbreak. Big Pharma (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and others, companies synonymous with the vaccine makers) have actually performed well in the COVID-19 crisis. You have to give the devil his or her due.

A lecture delivered last semester at UT by a Big Pharma scientist revealed that the Moderna vaccine was designed in a day-and-a-half—with the succeeding months, before rollout, spent on testing, production, and regulatory approval. The Nightingale Project preceded the pandemic, and was a bad idea then, but it’s a great one now, hopefully Dr. Johnston took care of business, like the professional he is. There is a risk that Google or whoever will become even more powerful, through access to raw patient data, much of it from minorities—who are being denied access to seats in the Dell Medical School, by the way, not that there's anything wrong with that. But that risk can be lessened by de-identifying healthcare data and making it a public good, free to everyone. The fear of medical data release—like the fear of masking and of vaccination—is real and may be just as deadly.