[ The renowned Black scholar Adolph Reed opposes the politics of
anti-racism, describing it as a cover for capitalism.]
[[link removed]]

THE MARXIST WHO ANTAGONIZES LIBERALS AND THE LEFT  
[[link removed]]


 

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
January 31, 2022
New Yorker
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ The renowned Black scholar Adolph Reed opposes the politics of
anti-racism, describing it as a cover for capitalism. _

Adolph Reed, Jr. Speaks at Omni's Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration by
tsweden.,

 

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. In _Harper’s_, the _Village
Voice_, _Jacobin_, and smaller factional outlets, not all of them
still operating, 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
[[link removed]],”
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, like Ibram X. Kendi
[[link removed]] and
Robin DiAngelo, and to mainstream liberal figures, such as Isabel
Wilkerson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “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.” It was the same perspective, Reed went on, that suggested that
“more Oscars for Ava DuVernay is like a victory for the civil-rights
movement, and not just for Ava DuVernay and her agent.”

Cornel West, at times one of Reed’s targets (Reed once denounced him
as “a freelance race relations consultant and Moral Voice for
whites”) 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. A trinity of hatreds—you could almost put that
as the epitaph on his grave.” Among the left-of-center, this puts
Reed at odds with just about everyone, which means that there are few
more interesting developments in intellectual politics than the news
that Adolph Reed is on the warpath.

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. With Merlin Chowkwanyun, a
professor in public health at Columbia, Reed published an essay
in _The_ _New England Journal of Medicine_ that was drained of his
usual combative glee. It urged medical practitioners to collect
socioeconomic data, to be leery of suggesting that a person’s race
made him more likely to catch a disease, to remember that emphasizing
racial disparities can “perpetuate harmful myths and
misunderstandings that actually undermine the goal of eliminating
health inequities.” With his close friend and collaborator Walter
Benn Michaels, Reed wrote the polemical version, which argued that,
shortly after the death of George Floyd
[[link removed]],
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.
(In fact, he later clarified, it was rejected twice by the Opinion
editors.) Eventually they published it under the title “The Trouble
With Disparity” in two smaller and more ideologically aligned
outlets: Common Dreams and Nonsite. “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. To Reed’s allies there was irony in
this. Michaels told me, “The _Times_ was outraged that Adolph was
cancelled by the D.S.A., but the _Times_ had zero interest in
publishing the views for which he was cancelled.” (A spokesperson
for the Times said, “The suggestion that this reporting ‘expressed
outrage,’ and that Opinion editors rejected Reed and Walter Benn
Michaels’s essay because of it, is completely false.”) But to Reed
himself the situation was simpler: “This is a handful of jerkoffs
who had their Cheerios that fucking morning.”

Next month, Reed will publish a book that is, in the context of his
polemical writing, unusual. Called “The South
[[link removed]],”
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.
The book read to me as a memoir, a term he adamantly rejects. He told
me my interest in the book made him regret writing it; he did not want
to receive mainstream attention for his reminiscences. But the
argument in the book is both pointed and characteristic of Reed. By
assembling the “quotidian” details of his early life, 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. There is an unacknowledged offensive action
here. In returning to the material of his childhood, Reed also engages
a central history for many anti-racist writers, Jim Crow. He is in his
own childhood, but on their turf.

Reed has a very specific story to tell. He was born into the Black
middle class—his father was a political scientist who taught at
Black colleges—and raised largely in Creole New Orleans, one of the
most urban settings in the South and one where racial categories
tended to be more fluid. In his recollection, a phenomenon like racial
passing was not so much an expression of internalized subjugation as
an instrumental reaction to it—an impulse evident in his own family
when they sent their lightest-skinned member, his grandmother, to a
notoriously racist bakery to buy beignets. 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. He remembers Black and white
men on one another’s front yards kibbitzing over radio broadcasts of
baseball games. 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. And the
harshest aspects of the Jim Crow regime often could not be mediated at
all. He writes, of an adolescent friend who was caught joyriding, sent
to the notorious Angola prison
[[link removed]],
and was dead within a year, “No intercession by his parents could
save him.” Even the gestures of neighborliness were always
contingent, subject to changes in the political climate that served to
extend “white supremacy’s radar range.” In his own neighborhood,
an early post-Brown desegregation attempt at a local school brought
“police barricades and riot control dogs” and left behind a
“blockbusting frenzy.” 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. Reed grew up in the years before
the Voting Rights Act
[[link removed]];
by his late twenties he was living in an Atlanta presided over by its
first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson. Reed describes this period, the
late nineteen-sixties and seventies, as one of uncertainty in racial
manners—of “flux in the order and the order in flux.” 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
[[link removed]].
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, “I don’t like the frame of the declining
significance of race narrative—I didn’t like it in the
nineteen-seventies and I don’t like it now, right? But 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.”

Since roughly 2015, every part of politics has been pressured by the
possibility of authoritarian developments on the right. When I reached
Reed on Zoom in Philadelphia, he confessed that he’d been feeling
those pressures, too. For his Zoom background he’d chosen a diagram
of a mounting tsunami, which he said represented his fears of an
imminent surge of authoritarianism and the retreat of American
democracy. “I’ve basically been haunted by that image of drawback
for a couple of months now,” Reed told me. In the fall, he said,
he’d begun to doubt that the democracy would survive the 2022
midterm elections. That so many “voices among the governing class
and the corporate media” had since expressed a similar alarm made
him a little less panicked, without making him doubt that the
situation is existential: “Either the Biden Administration and
congressional Dems begin to deliver material benefits to the American
people, to the working-class majority, or the right, which seems
pretty uniformly bent on imposing authoritarian rule, will succeed in
expunging nominal democracy.” He later e-mailed me that one
possibility he foresaw was something like Biden running with the
Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney on a national-unity ticket,
“which wouldn’t resolve the contradictions—the problems of
mounting inequality and economic insecurity—but, in kicking the can
down the road, could help buy time for the real working-class
organizing that I think is the only way to turn the tide.” (Later,
he said, of Vice-President Kamala Harris, “To be clear, I’m not
part of the tendency that sees Harris as a liability to Biden.” He
also seemed to have reconsidered the idea, saying, that it might
“cater to a supposed Republican constituency I’m not even sure
exists.”)

Some of the things Reed said struck me as surprisingly bleak, coming
so soon after the Bernie Sanders
[[link removed]] Presidential
campaigns. 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.” To illustrate how far the left is from power,
he said something I’d heard him say before: “The most significant
left force in the Biden Administration on domestic policy is the asset
managers of BlackRock, and on foreign policy it’s John Mearsheimer
[[link removed]] and
the foreign-affairs crowd.” Reed did not mention that these
developments—that his ideological enemies in the Administration were
pushing large amounts of social spending in the domestic sphere and
retreat from forever wars overseas—might count, from another
perspective, as a left-wing victory.

Reed seemed confident that American politics are turning away from
him; this seemed less clear to me. It is possibly, but not definitely,
true that authoritarianism is a nearing possibility, and possibly, but
not definitely, true that a spending program that delivered
“material benefits to the working class,” in Reed’s term, would
stave it off. 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. The Sanders campaigns shook liberalism without
transforming it, Biden—tacking always toward the center of his
party—has not exactly been a figure of change or a figure of
retrenchment, and the Democrats have not been able to replicate the
electoral success of Obama’s high liberalism without Obama himself.
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.

_Benjamin Wallace-Wells
[[link removed]] began
contributing to The New Yorker in 2006 and joined the magazine as a
staff writer in 2015. He writes about American politics and society._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]