Adolph Reed

Black Particularity Reconsidered

Over forty years ago Benjamin pointed out that “mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses.” This statement captures the central cultural dynamic of a “late” capitalism. The triumph of the commodity form over every sphere of social existence has been made possible by a profound homogenization of work, play, aspirations and self-definition among subject populations — a condition Marcuse has characterized as one-dimensionality. Ironically, while U.S. radicals in the late 1960s fantasized about a “new man” in the abstract, capital was in the process of concretely putting the finishing touches on its new individual. Beneath the current black-female-student-chicano-homosexual-old-young-handicapped, etc., etc., ad nauseum, “struggles” lies a simple truth: there is no coherent opposition to the present administrative apparatus.

Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism

A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it perceives capitalism dialectically, as a social totality that includes modes of production, relations of production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective, Marxism’s most important contribution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A historical materialist perspective should stress that “race”—which includes “racism,” as one is unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored to a particular system of production.

W.E.B. Dubois: A Perspective on the Bases of his Political Thought

E.B. DUBOIS is by all accounts acentral figure in the history of Afro-American political activity, a major contributor to a halfcenturys debate over the condition of and proper goals and strategies for the black population. Yet little scholarly work has concentrated on the specifically political component of his thinking. Moreover, such attention as has been given to DuBoiss political ideas either is ancillary to some other intellectual purpose-for example, general biography-or is simply hagiographical.1 The paucity of systematic analysis has coincided with his longevity and persistent intellectual engagement to make DuBois appear as a champion who can be appropriated on an equal basis by any and all political tendencies. There is little need to rehearse the various appropriations. Against Washington, DuBois has been understood as a defender of radical activism and a pristine idealist. Against Garvey, he appears as an elitist integrationist, even though he was within a few years to leave the NAACP in part as a result of the latters rejection of his proposals for organizing the race behind segregations walls. Communists claim him, his elitism notwithstanding, as do anticommunist Pan-African nationalists. Yet among prominent Afro-American political actors in this century, DuBois is perhaps the most systematic thinker (at least insofar as coherent writing is the expression of systematic thought). Therefore, one might expect less eclecticism among categorizations of his place in black thought. What bases are there for the anomaly that DuBois should be more variously interpreted than less explicit writers?

The Post-1965 Trajectory of Race, Class, and Urban Politics in the United States Reconsidered

Comments by Larry Bennett, Cynthia Horan, Cedric Johnson, and Timothy Weaver prompted me to reflect on and connect my work on race ideology, the underclass idea, class dynamics in American politics, and the evolution of urban governance and the terms of black political incorporation since the 1990s. Race is best understood as a particular instance of a class of ideologies that work to justify existing hierarchies by reading them into nature. Understanding race in that way helps to see the notion of an urban underclass as also an ideology that seeks to naturalize hierarchy by attributing it to a population defined by durable cultural and behavioral defects, which make it impervious to social intervention. Proliferation of underclass ideology has rationalized retreat from social provision and underwritten a punitive turn in social policy. It has also articulated with the class dynamics driving black politics to generate a basis for an urban neoliberalism steered by an increasingly interracial or biracial governing class committed to diversity and market-driven social policy. New Orleans provides a useful case examination of these dynamics, both through reconsideration of the character of racial transition in local politics in the 1970s and 1980s and through analysis of the forces shaping the post-Katrina political regime. New Orleans’s political development, pre- and post-Katrina, exposes the inadequacy, indeed the class character, of a critical politics based on antiracism as a frame of reference for pursuit of egalitarian interests. More hopeful signs lie in emergence of a strong labor voice in the city.

Why Labor's Soldiering for the Democrats is a Losing Battle

Rather than a departure, however, Obama’s political style presumes and consolidates Clintonism’s ideological and programmatic victory. Obama could not have sold his liberalconservative “bipartisan” transcendence so successfully to leftists/progressives if Clinton had not already moved the boundaries of liberalism rightward enough to incorporate key elements of the Reaganite agenda and worldview. Clinton’s presidency articulated a Democratic version of neoliberalism that abjures commitment to the public sector’s role in mitigating inequalities produced through market processes. This is the substantive foundation of Obama’s political vision. His posture of judiciousness and transcendence of left-right division, for example, depends partly on ritual Why Labor’s soLdiering for the democrats is a Losing battLe

Black Urban Administrations

The elections of Harold Washington and Wilson Goode, along with the near election of Mel King, have generated new speculations about black urban adminstrations. The tacit assumptions here concern the significance of these administrations for racial democracy in the U.S. The fact that a black or Hispanic candidate is elected mayor is taken as evidence of “progress.” Presumably, if an electorate selects a candidate, that candidate must have been able to transcend previously insurmountable boundaries to galvanize a winning coalition. This view, of course, does not account for the fact that blacks tend overwhelmingly — unless black candidates are woefully pock-marked politically — to vote black and whites are just as likely to vote white.

Narcissistic Politics in Atlanta

Atlanta has recently become a focal point of national and international attention because of a mysterious series of murders of local black children. Reporters have come from around the world and visitors to the city immediately press Atlantans for news, inside dope or the latest updates as they express their sympathy and solidarity. The sentiments no doubt are genuine and the outpouring of befuddled, curious concern is understandable, especially given the apparent senselessness of the killings. However, this phenomen has another side beyond the personal and collective tragedy of the murders themselves. Indeed, the Atlanta child murders can serve as a micrological window on several important trends in contemporary American life.

Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity

Afro-American social thought lost its critical thrust in the 1970s, when the American state incorporated the organizing principles of civil rights/black power politics. Since that time the protest activism grounding black social thought has floundered in a contradiction. On the one hand, protest requires an alienated outsider evoking the specter of disruptive mobilization. On the other hand, racial politics has assumed the character of negotiated agreements among elites whose legitimacy derives from official positions within the corporate-state nexus, but neither what is negotiated nor the negotiators themselves are amenable to mass mobilization. The former generally are not mass issues (e.g., magnitude of minority set-asides in contract letting), and the latter, structured in the environment of officialdom and rational administration, shrink from popular participation.

The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions

Now and again intelligent volumes are published only to have their insights go unmined because of lack of critical reponse. All too frequently, on the other hand, plain stupid books create an interest unwarranted by their research findings or force of argument. To the latter category belongs Wilsons The Declining Significance of Race. Its publication has generated a shock wave throughout black academic circles. Panels have been organized specifically to consider its merits at every major association meeting of black political scientists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and economists. Moreover, special symposia and seminars on the “Wilson thesis” have proliferated on campuses all over the U.S., and Wilson has been rewarded for the volumes popularity with chairmanship of his sociology department at the University of Chicago.