Feb 1, 2022 08:29 AM
(This post was last modified: Feb 1, 2022 06:59 PM by C C.)
The renowned Black scholar Adolph Reed opposes the politics of anti-racism, describing it as a cover for capitalism.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of...d-the-left
EXCERPTS: Within the world of racial politics, Adolph Reed is the great modern denouncer. His day job, for forty years, was as a political scientist. (He is now emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.) But by night he has maintained a long-term position, too, as a left-wing lambaster of figures he believes are selling some vision of race for political expediency or profit.
[...] Reed has called out Barack Obama as a “vacuous opportunist,” and the scholars bell hooks and Michael Eric Dyson as “little more than hustlers, blending bombast, cliches, psychobabble, and lame guilt tripping in service to the ‘pay me’ principle.”
For Reed, class is what divides people, and far too many political actors treat race as an all-explaining category.
Like his friend and ally Barbara Fields, a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of “Racecraft,” Reed tends to look skeptically on diversity programs or campaigns for reparations, which he believes redirect political energies for change into symbolic efforts that help just a few powerful Black people; these stances have put him in opposition to activist anti-racist thinkers...
[...] “I taught Obama’s cohort -- the Yale version,” Reed told me. “And I was struck by how many of them were so convinced that the whole purpose of the civil-rights movement was that people like them could go to Ivy League colleges and go to Wall Street afterward, how many of them were dispositively convinced that rich people are smarter than the rest of us.”... [talented tenth]
Cornel West, at times one of Reed’s targets [...] and lately an ally, told me, “Brother Adolph has three deep hatreds. He hates the ugly consequences of predatory capitalist processes. And he hates the neoliberal rationalization for those predatory capitalist processes. And he hates the use of race as a construct that promotes the neoliberal rationalization of predatory capitalist processes.
[...] In the summer of 2020, Reed began a new campaign, which had both a technical element and a polemical one. The technical observation was that public-health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic had overemphasized racial disparities.
[...] shortly after the death of George Floyd, an anti-racist fervor was clouding the political judgment of progressives. “That thing got rejected in more ways by the Times than you could possibly imagine,” Michaels told me. ... Eventually they published it ... “The problem (thought to be so ingrained in American life that it’s sometimes called America’s original sin) is racism; the solution is antiracism,” Reed and Michaels wrote. That point of view, they went on, is “mistaken.”
On the basis of his article with Chowkwanyun, Reed was invited to give a talk, on Zoom, to the New York City and Philadelphia chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America.
On the morning of the event, the D.S.A.’s Afrosocialist and Socialists of Color Caucus formally demanded that the New York City chapter “unendorse” and remove all promotion for the event or that it be turned into a debate over Reed’s “class reductionism.” The event’s organizers tried to reassure Reed that they could use Zoom to manage the discussion.
But Reed, who had been accused of “class essentialism,” on and off, for decades, decided against it. Eventually there would be debates, in the Times and on podcasts and in private conversation, about whether Reed had been “cancelled,” and whether the episode suggested that even the socialist left was uninterested in an analysis that didn’t center on race.
[...] Next month, Reed will publish a book that is, in the context of his polemical writing, unusual. Called “The South,” it is an account of growing up in segregated Arkansas and New Orleans, and of navigating, as a young man, Jim Crow’s immediate aftermath. ... Reed suggests that the everyday experience of Jim Crow was defined by the formal racial-apartheid regime, but that class and simple contingency played large roles, too...
[...] Reed has a very specific story to tell. He was born into the Black middle class ... In his neighborhood, he writes, there was a duplex in which both units were occupied by branches of the same family, bearing the same surname, one of which lived as Black and the other as white...
[...] Reed recalls that, in ninth grade, he was caught shoplifting a bag of chips by the white couple who ran a corner store. The proprietors sat him down on the stoop, and to his great relief, he writes, talked to him “more like concerned parents or relatives than as intimidating or hostile storekeepers.” They told Reed that he seemed like a good kid, that they wouldn’t call his parents or the police, but that if he tried this again he might find that other storekeepers were not so understanding.
Neighborliness did not necessarily extend to real acceptance. “Many of those white people who were cordial in the neighborhood’s everyday confines would snub or feign to not recognize their black neighbors when encountering them elsewhere,” Reed writes.
[...] As a teen-ager, Reed noticed the presence of Black social clubs, fraternities, and sororities, which, he writes, existed in part to distinguish their members from lower-class Blacks. “We were all unequal,” Reed writes, “but some were more unequal and unprotected than others.”
In the two decades that form the core of Reed’s memoir, his experience of race changes. [...] In 1965, shortly after bus segregation ended, Reed, on a bus in Arkansas, saw a white driver try to move some Black college students to the back to make space for an elderly white couple; the students resisted, and Reed feared violence.
About seven years later, Reed was driving with his family when a white police officer pulled them over on the side of a dark South Carolina road. They grew nervous, but the officer had just been confused by a political bumper sticker on the car calling for a boycott of Gulf Oil, and Reed, now a doctoral student at Atlanta University, wound up giving an impromptu lecture on post-colonial politics and resource extraction in Angola.
When he writes of white supremacy in “The South,” he puts it in the past tense: “White supremacy was as much a cover story” -- for, as he later puts it, “a specific order of political and economic power” -- “as a concrete program.”
In this slim book, one line in particular read to me like a manifesto: “A danger,” Reed writes, “is that, when reckoning with the past becomes too much like allegory, its nuances and contingencies can disappear. Then history can become either a narrative of inevitable progressive unfolding to the present or, worse, a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed.”
I asked Reed what he had in mind. He said, “This won’t come as a surprise but one thing that was on my mind was the 1619 Project. I mean that ‘nothing has changed’ line is one I have found bemusing and exasperating.” That project, he went on, wiped away any historical specificity, so that racism operated as an unchanging force.
“And so you get to say that the murder of Trayvon Martin or of George Floyd is the same as Emmett Till or of the slave patrols.” Reed told me, “... racism is less and less capable of explaining manifest inequalities between Blacks and whites.”
Liberals, he said, wanted it both ways. “It’s a common refrain: ‘I know race is a social construction, but—’ ” Reed said. “Well, there’s no ‘but.’ It’s either a unicorn or it’s not a fucking unicorn.”
[...] I had imagined that Reed might take some comfort from the swelling young membership of the D.S.A., but instead he dismissed it, comparing it to the late-period Students for a Democratic Society, full of political naïfs, and noting that Socialism was a somewhat “vaporous concept at this point,” anyway. “It may sound odd, but where the hopefulness lies is in recognizing that, as the real left, we can’t have any impact on anything significant in American politics,” Reed told me. “So we don’t have to constrain our political thinking.”
[...] Reed seemed confident that American politics are turning away from him; this seemed less clear to me. [...] Maybe most relevantly, it is possibly, but not definitely, true that anti-racism has become the essential progressive creed, even though conservative and contrarian media outlets insist that it has; in the past few months its presence in politics has faded, as Democrats have focussed on the lingering emergency of COVID and the economic projects of infrastructure and inflation.
What does seem more obviously true is that, at a moment of very high political stakes, it isn’t clear what the Democratic Party will organize itself around...
In such a period, very basic questions come to the fore: how fixed or fluid racial categories are, and whether history has moved or is stuck in an unimprovable loop. In such a period, a Marxist factionalist might see both danger and opportunity, and write a gentle first-person book, speak to the mainstream press, and try to persuade people whom he might not ordinarily reach to see politics as he does... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of...d-the-left
EXCERPTS: Within the world of racial politics, Adolph Reed is the great modern denouncer. His day job, for forty years, was as a political scientist. (He is now emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.) But by night he has maintained a long-term position, too, as a left-wing lambaster of figures he believes are selling some vision of race for political expediency or profit.
[...] Reed has called out Barack Obama as a “vacuous opportunist,” and the scholars bell hooks and Michael Eric Dyson as “little more than hustlers, blending bombast, cliches, psychobabble, and lame guilt tripping in service to the ‘pay me’ principle.”
For Reed, class is what divides people, and far too many political actors treat race as an all-explaining category.
Like his friend and ally Barbara Fields, a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of “Racecraft,” Reed tends to look skeptically on diversity programs or campaigns for reparations, which he believes redirect political energies for change into symbolic efforts that help just a few powerful Black people; these stances have put him in opposition to activist anti-racist thinkers...
[...] “I taught Obama’s cohort -- the Yale version,” Reed told me. “And I was struck by how many of them were so convinced that the whole purpose of the civil-rights movement was that people like them could go to Ivy League colleges and go to Wall Street afterward, how many of them were dispositively convinced that rich people are smarter than the rest of us.”... [talented tenth]
Cornel West, at times one of Reed’s targets [...] and lately an ally, told me, “Brother Adolph has three deep hatreds. He hates the ugly consequences of predatory capitalist processes. And he hates the neoliberal rationalization for those predatory capitalist processes. And he hates the use of race as a construct that promotes the neoliberal rationalization of predatory capitalist processes.
[...] In the summer of 2020, Reed began a new campaign, which had both a technical element and a polemical one. The technical observation was that public-health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic had overemphasized racial disparities.
[...] shortly after the death of George Floyd, an anti-racist fervor was clouding the political judgment of progressives. “That thing got rejected in more ways by the Times than you could possibly imagine,” Michaels told me. ... Eventually they published it ... “The problem (thought to be so ingrained in American life that it’s sometimes called America’s original sin) is racism; the solution is antiracism,” Reed and Michaels wrote. That point of view, they went on, is “mistaken.”
On the basis of his article with Chowkwanyun, Reed was invited to give a talk, on Zoom, to the New York City and Philadelphia chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America.
On the morning of the event, the D.S.A.’s Afrosocialist and Socialists of Color Caucus formally demanded that the New York City chapter “unendorse” and remove all promotion for the event or that it be turned into a debate over Reed’s “class reductionism.” The event’s organizers tried to reassure Reed that they could use Zoom to manage the discussion.
But Reed, who had been accused of “class essentialism,” on and off, for decades, decided against it. Eventually there would be debates, in the Times and on podcasts and in private conversation, about whether Reed had been “cancelled,” and whether the episode suggested that even the socialist left was uninterested in an analysis that didn’t center on race.
[...] Next month, Reed will publish a book that is, in the context of his polemical writing, unusual. Called “The South,” it is an account of growing up in segregated Arkansas and New Orleans, and of navigating, as a young man, Jim Crow’s immediate aftermath. ... Reed suggests that the everyday experience of Jim Crow was defined by the formal racial-apartheid regime, but that class and simple contingency played large roles, too...
[...] Reed has a very specific story to tell. He was born into the Black middle class ... In his neighborhood, he writes, there was a duplex in which both units were occupied by branches of the same family, bearing the same surname, one of which lived as Black and the other as white...
[...] Reed recalls that, in ninth grade, he was caught shoplifting a bag of chips by the white couple who ran a corner store. The proprietors sat him down on the stoop, and to his great relief, he writes, talked to him “more like concerned parents or relatives than as intimidating or hostile storekeepers.” They told Reed that he seemed like a good kid, that they wouldn’t call his parents or the police, but that if he tried this again he might find that other storekeepers were not so understanding.
Neighborliness did not necessarily extend to real acceptance. “Many of those white people who were cordial in the neighborhood’s everyday confines would snub or feign to not recognize their black neighbors when encountering them elsewhere,” Reed writes.
[...] As a teen-ager, Reed noticed the presence of Black social clubs, fraternities, and sororities, which, he writes, existed in part to distinguish their members from lower-class Blacks. “We were all unequal,” Reed writes, “but some were more unequal and unprotected than others.”
In the two decades that form the core of Reed’s memoir, his experience of race changes. [...] In 1965, shortly after bus segregation ended, Reed, on a bus in Arkansas, saw a white driver try to move some Black college students to the back to make space for an elderly white couple; the students resisted, and Reed feared violence.
About seven years later, Reed was driving with his family when a white police officer pulled them over on the side of a dark South Carolina road. They grew nervous, but the officer had just been confused by a political bumper sticker on the car calling for a boycott of Gulf Oil, and Reed, now a doctoral student at Atlanta University, wound up giving an impromptu lecture on post-colonial politics and resource extraction in Angola.
When he writes of white supremacy in “The South,” he puts it in the past tense: “White supremacy was as much a cover story” -- for, as he later puts it, “a specific order of political and economic power” -- “as a concrete program.”
In this slim book, one line in particular read to me like a manifesto: “A danger,” Reed writes, “is that, when reckoning with the past becomes too much like allegory, its nuances and contingencies can disappear. Then history can become either a narrative of inevitable progressive unfolding to the present or, worse, a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed.”
I asked Reed what he had in mind. He said, “This won’t come as a surprise but one thing that was on my mind was the 1619 Project. I mean that ‘nothing has changed’ line is one I have found bemusing and exasperating.” That project, he went on, wiped away any historical specificity, so that racism operated as an unchanging force.
“And so you get to say that the murder of Trayvon Martin or of George Floyd is the same as Emmett Till or of the slave patrols.” Reed told me, “... racism is less and less capable of explaining manifest inequalities between Blacks and whites.”
Liberals, he said, wanted it both ways. “It’s a common refrain: ‘I know race is a social construction, but—’ ” Reed said. “Well, there’s no ‘but.’ It’s either a unicorn or it’s not a fucking unicorn.”
[...] I had imagined that Reed might take some comfort from the swelling young membership of the D.S.A., but instead he dismissed it, comparing it to the late-period Students for a Democratic Society, full of political naïfs, and noting that Socialism was a somewhat “vaporous concept at this point,” anyway. “It may sound odd, but where the hopefulness lies is in recognizing that, as the real left, we can’t have any impact on anything significant in American politics,” Reed told me. “So we don’t have to constrain our political thinking.”
[...] Reed seemed confident that American politics are turning away from him; this seemed less clear to me. [...] Maybe most relevantly, it is possibly, but not definitely, true that anti-racism has become the essential progressive creed, even though conservative and contrarian media outlets insist that it has; in the past few months its presence in politics has faded, as Democrats have focussed on the lingering emergency of COVID and the economic projects of infrastructure and inflation.
What does seem more obviously true is that, at a moment of very high political stakes, it isn’t clear what the Democratic Party will organize itself around...
In such a period, very basic questions come to the fore: how fixed or fluid racial categories are, and whether history has moved or is stuck in an unimprovable loop. In such a period, a Marxist factionalist might see both danger and opportunity, and write a gentle first-person book, speak to the mainstream press, and try to persuade people whom he might not ordinarily reach to see politics as he does... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED: Race problems also persist due to disagreement among good actors
EXCERPT: .. . the formulation of various legal remedies in terms of race, rather than ethnicity, has had the effect of expanding eligibility to include a large number of people who have no obvious claim to them. The problem is obvious in the case of slavery reparations, where it seems clear that the proposed beneficiaries would be limited to the descendants of American slaves. [...] because of the formulation in terms of race, a disturbingly large percentage of the beneficiaries of affirmative action (for example, in highly selective American universities) are in fact recent immigrants or foreigners. The same is true of minority “set asides” in government contracting, where preference is given to minority business enterprises, many of which are owned by immigrants...
[...] many Americans remain resistant to the suggestion that the persistence of racial inequality could be due to anything other than racism. ... Systemic racism cannot serve as an explanation of racial disparities in outcome, because it is typically just another way of describing those disparities.
