Intelligent Action: an Interview With Adolph Reed

GC Advocate readers, particularly those steeped in cultural studies, literary theory, political science, and sociology literature are probably very familiar with “star” academics like Cornell West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William Julius Wilson, all hailing from our most venerable of higher education institutions that purportedly form the core foundations of the Ivory Tower in America. What they may not be familiar with are the ideological and historical foundations that are constitutive of these scholars’ interpretations of black American thought (not to mention those of their followers), as well as the cultural and political commentary that flows from it. When these black scholars comment on the social, cultural and political conditions of Americans in general and black Americans in particular, people listen. To be sure, the reflex among people on the left is to assume that whenever Cornell West says something we must take heed as it will most likely call attention to the problem of racism, America’s “disease.”

And as readers will recall, last summer we could not turn our attention away from Professor Gates’—and most Americans’—indignant response to a Cambridge police sergeant who in our collective minds committed the egregious sin of racially profiling and arresting one of the most respected black scholars in the United States. The story had a bottoms-up ending that culminated with President Barack Obama’s intervention to bring Gates and Sgt. Crowley together for what reportedly was a “frank” discussion about the incident. In the United States, it seems, we have reached a point where questions of race and racism can now be resolved with the semi-public consumption of cool, inebriating suds. Given this particular instance and the current historical and political moment, how are we to make sense of what race and racism mean in the United States? How do the black scholars mentioned above, among others, and their perspectives on questions of race and racism set the framework for understanding and explaining the concepts of race and racism in the United States? How is the discipline of black studies shaped by and in turn how does it shape political and cultural debates about these issues? And what are the operating assumptions that supposedly shed light on questions of race and racism as problems deeply entrenched in America’s psyche and history? These provocative questions require ambitious answers, which is precisely the project that Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth Warren take up in a new book.

Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought compiles a series of essays that combine theoretical rigor and incisive, politically grounded critique to interrogate—and in the process demolish—many of the assumptions made by mainstream black scholars who write about and comment on the “black” experience. These assumptions, including the existence of a singular, undifferentiated “black community,” are deployed in much of what is now branded African American studies within the American academy. The essays in the book, particularly those in Part II and III, explain how these assumptions then become reified into mainstream political discourse. This process and the discourses that follow from it, the authors argue, “have shaped the main lines of public debate of political, social, and cultural ideas and strategies through which dominant notions of common black American identity and agendas have been constructed and pursued.” Central to this argument and its critical interpretive framework is the historicist approach running through each of the ten essays in the book; an approach through which the authors situate their arguments within broader streams of social, political and cultural currents in order to understand black American thought and the processes and frameworks that, in many instances, facilitate and constrain policy interventions that bear on black Americans.

This historically grounded method in the study of African American thought represents a significant contribution in the practice of political science. This is a signature approach to examining and interpreting the literature explored by the book as a whole and by Reed in particular. Similar to the approach taken in this collection of essays, in W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (1997) Reed makes a strong case for an “evolutionist or a generative” perspective on the history of political thought. This approach to historical and political inquiry allows for the examination of individuals and debates that prevail given specific historical and political junctures in American society, which in turn shed light on the genesis of current political debates and the intellectual history that shaped them.

As the subtitle of the book suggests, the substantive fulcrum advancing the authors’ critiques is the ideological and material foundations that have evolved from Emancipation to the post-Jim Crow eras, paying close attention to the academic discourses that took place in the 1980s, which have influenced the current shape of the black studies field across American universities. Arranged chronologically, Renewing Black Intellectual History is divided into three parts, each corresponding to particular political, social and cultural moments in American history—Part I: Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Retrenchment; Part II: The Jim Crow Era; and Part III: The Post-Jim Crow Era.

The authors’ arguments are bold, trenchant, refreshing and, ultimately, necessary to understand the current state of black studies and how its intellectual practice both informs and is informed by political debates that center around race and racism in the United States. Students and practitioners in the fields of political science, history, sociology, cultural studies, and literary theory will find the book provocative and timely. If you’re not familiar with Reed’s scholarly work, this will be a great introduction to his oeuvre. And if you are familiar with his work, this will be an excellent addition, not only to your personal collection of “critical” works in the academy, but also an illuminating collection of essays that will undoubtedly provoke you to consider alternative interpretations of black cultural studies, intellectual history, and the ideological foundations under which they operate.

I had the opportunity to have a candid and provocative telephone conversation with Reed—who is currently teaching at the University of Pennsylvania—about several topics including some of the recurring themes in Renewing Black Intellectual History, his thoughts on race and racism, his intellectual and political projects, and the discipline of political science in general and black studies in particular.

•  •  •

Douglas Medina: What was the catalyst for writing Renewing Black Intellectual History?

Adolph Reed, Jr.: Well, it’s kind of funny because Ken[neth] Warren and I got to know each other when I was being recruited to go to Northwestern, and he was still there. And I just happened to have read a little of his work, before that dance started, and he’d read a little of my work. And he left after a year and went to the University of Chicago, but with the understanding that we could team teach between the two campuses, which we did. And we had like a two man seminar, really, that met in this bar in Hyde Park for about five or six years. And a lot of it was about trying to get a handle on the black cultural studies stuff and to figure out the best way to provide a critical alternative to it. And we were going back and forth, because one approach would be something like that book that Don Green and Ian Shapiro did on rational choice [Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory by Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Yale University Press (1996)]. But what was really daunting about that was that meant we had to read a lot of that crap and read reams and reams and reams of it.

And the way that this thing that we’d kind of jokingly called the seminar at Jimmy’s, because we’re also closing down the bar every night, went was that we would decide to go read some Stuart Hall or some Paul Gilroy or something, and then meet to talk about it and complain about how dense the stuff was and how it didn’t add up to anything, about how the labor that was necessary to get through the text was in no way compensated by the payoff of insight that you came to once you got through it.

So, we kept saying, “well, damn, you know, I don’t know if I can get myself up to go in that direction to tackle this stuff,” because you read too much bad shit and see too many bad movies and stuff, like in the name of being current in the field anyway.

And the other alternative was to think about collaborating on a history of black studies that would go back to the beginning of the 20th century—to the beginning of the Negro History Project—and then reconstruct an account that acknowledges the creation of black studies at the end of the ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘70s and follows its evolution.

But, we realized that to do that book properly would also be a really big undertaking and in some ways even a bigger one. And we both had other stuff on our individual research agendas.

So we had the idea that we could take some of the burden off ourselves. And since there were a number of scholars who were operating in the same kind of interpretivist frame of reference, and really what it is is an historical materialist approach to black intellectual history, that maybe a way to go with this would be to collect a chunk of that work and present it as de facto articulations of the alternative approach. That is to say, because we both had become really skeptical of debates about interpretation, because the big problem is that those debates are conducted at a level of abstraction that just leaves too much hiding space.

So, we figured that the ideal thing would be to collect a number of discrete studies that show the payoff of an historical materialist approach to black American intellectual history. And then, as we went about it we wanted to be interdisciplinary and we’ve got historians, political scientists, and lit[erature] scholars, but all of whom are working out of the same interpretative disposition.

And then we thought that doing two books, a companion piece [Culture/Politics: The Present(ism) of Black Studies by Adolph Reed, Jr. and Kenneth Warren, forthcoming] that was more interpretivist, or rather was more about engaging in interpretative debate would be a nice compliment to this one. And, you can play off it and each could help the other.

The focus of Culture/Politics is a little tighter and a little more theoretical. It’s really directed explicitly as a challenge to the cultural turn in black studies.

Medina: As I was reading the book it became clear that one of the main arguments that you and the other authors make is that the discipline itself is politicized, the discipline of black studies. And it is a political enterprise of sorts. That being the case, it’s also subject to interpretation and therefore contestation. So what do you think led to that, the dominant interpretative framework for what we now know as black American studies?

Reed: I think there are a couple things to say about that. One of them is that on one level, probably any academic discourse, especially in the social sciences but also in the humanities, is going to be imbued with, if not political significance, at least political inflections given the moment.

In fact, I was thinking about how modernization theory was consciously, in some cases, and perhaps less consciously in others, an appendage of American Cold War era objectives in the post-war period. So, these notions of the five stages of growth and the cultures of modernization were clear alternatives to a class discourse and to a discourse of inequality and underdevelopment. And there was a parallel within the United States. Or rather, in American politics. We saw class being defined in cultural terms and the emergence of ethnic/pluralist discourses and so forth and so on. And a reification, say, in the urban politics field of the moment of post-war growth politics as though it were like a natural law. But in the case of black studies and Latino studies and women’s studies, there’s an additional boost that those fields of study themselves emerged quite directly out of the ferment of the 1960s, both on and off the campus. From my perspective and, I think, from the perspective of most of the authors, if not all of the authors—but, you know, I’m not carrying proxies with me, or, I mean, I’m not a ventriloquist—the issue, I think, is how to think about what it means to say that the discipline is saturated with politics. Because I think one of the arguments that a lot of us come together around is that at the end of the day—in fact, at the beginning of the morning—there’s a substantive difference between writing a journal article or a book and engaging in politics. They aren’t the same thing.

And one of the problems that we associate with the cultural turn, and not just in black studies but across the board inside the academy with the emergence of the cultural studies mindset in the late ‘80s probably, is a tendency, like an intellectual tendency, to kind of blur distinctions between scholarly practice and political practice.

I think I discussed this a little bit in my chapter in Renewing, maybe a little bit more in a chapter of the Obamamania [The Perils of Obamamania, forthcoming] book, that it’s not that difficult to understand how the slippage came to pass. A lot of it had to do with the retreat of extramural politics. As the labor movement goes into retreat the, what used to be called the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the absence of political dynamism outside the university either creates more space or gives too much room or puts pressure on the work of academics to sort of make political claims.

So, I’ve said this maybe in more provocative ways and in a more provocative context. But, one of the things that most of us in the book find disturbing, or maybe at least unsatisfying, about this turn is the extent to which academics presume that their academic work carries political stakes that reach outside the university, in a way. That may not necessarily be the case.

That puts pressure on them or encourages them to seek to speak beyond the university and to take on—in the space that you’d think about where the scholarly work gets done—to take on a project of speaking to topical debates outside the academy.

I guess this is the way that I put it somewhat more provocatively: that there’s a tendency to represent oneself outside the university as a voice of scholarly expertise that can say things that are of political significance, and to represent oneself inside the university as a representative of the oppressed community who’s channeling that voice.

Medina: One of the things that’s become clear for people who follow your work is that you stand apart from many scholars who study the question of race and African American political thought, and American politics in general. Being on the left, you are essentially a scholar who also does extramural political civic work. How do you manage that? How do you negotiate that? How does your scholarly work inform your political activism and vice versa?

Reed: They’ve always been connected. I went to graduate school out of a sense of defeat when I’d been out organizing for a few years, even before I graduated from college.

I left college after a cafeteria strike. And I went [into] eastern North Carolina and worked for three years, and came back one summer and graduated, and then went to graduate school largely—or at least partly—because I had a sense that we’d just gotten outflanked and that the bourgeois politicians had basically won. But, going to Atlanta in the early 1970s, I didn’t encounter anything that would challenge that view, to put it mildly.

So, from the very beginning for me the academic project was an intellectual project, and the intellectual project was part of a political project. My politics have been focused on one ultimate objective since I was—at the latest—since I was nineteen years old. And that objective is overthrowing capitalism.

I think it’s important to make distinctions between work that one does as a propagandist—work that one does in sort of sharp political commentary—and work that one does as a scholar. And there are domains in which it’s appropriate to do either. Both have their place and I’m not embarrassed about either one.

It’s the same principle when you’re trying to build something politically: you’re supposed to do what needs to be done. You do whatever has to get done.

I don’t believe that academics have a responsibility to be civically or politically active. In fact, I would just as soon have most of them not be, given what I imagine their politics and their class interests are.

My expectations are more modest, that they just face up to the political and the ideological implications or biases in their own work, the questions they ask and the problems that they consider meaningful and how they go about doing them.

As long as everybody’s clear and puts their shit aboveboard, then that’s not only all that I expect, it’s, I think, all that should be expected, in a university setting or in the academic setting.

And when we in the Labor Party [Reed was a founding delegate of the Labor Party in 1996, and he is co-chair of its Campaign for Free Higher Ed] decided to try to get a ballot line in South Carolina, I was basically commuting to South Carolina on the weekends for a while there, and going to flea markets and standing out in the sun all day to get signatures and stuff.

From one perspective, I could say, “Well, it slowed my progress in getting these books done.” On the other hand, I think [it] strengthened and deepened my understanding in—maybe in nuanced ways that I couldn’t even draw a straight line through. So, it makes the work better.

One of the things that I think politics—at least in the way that I’ve tried to do politics—has done for my academic work is that it just kind of stresses the concreteness of the questions.

I think maybe a part of this is like getting older and being in the racket for a long time, too, because I remember in my early years as an assistant professor in high theoretical discussions or—I would find myself feeling that there were links that I was missing, that things just didn’t seem to make sense. And the reasonable impulse is to chalk it up to one’s own shortcomings and then try to figure out what’s being missed.

But, I’ve always been trying to find the levers that can help us build the kind of movement that we need to build to transform this society. That’s not a simplistic thing, either. Because it means you got to try to figure out what the cultural domain is, what the ideological domain is.

Medina: You’re one of the few scholars, political scientist specifically, who persists in looking at questions of social phenomena through the lens of political economy. That’s unusual. Why do you do it? What are the benefits of doing that, given that not many people are practicing that approach?

Reed: That’s a good question. The discipline is getting worse and worse and worse. I decided, when the APSR [American Political Science Review] published its second article in three years on genes and politics—this was the one on the genetic bases of political ideology. And it was…bullshit all the way through, from beginning to end. It was play science…. I’ve not renewed my dues. I haven’t been to the convention. I don’t plan to. We had to fight back even in our department [at Penn]. Last academic year, we had to fight back an attempt to hire one of these genes and politics idiots.

But, I tell you, it was Rosalind Rosenberg in the early ‘80s in her book, Beyond Separate Spheres, [who] made the point that—and I’m sure she’s not the only person that made it—when egalitarian political forces and ideas have the momentum outside the university, then the center of gravity—for a variety of reasons—within academic discourses, especially in the social sciences, shifts to the left. And when conservative ideas have the social momentum, then the center of gravity shifts to the right.

And no matter how much academics like to pretend that they influence—political scientists in particular like to pretend—or believe that they influence what appears on the op-ed pages of The New York Times—the fact of the matter is much more the opposite.

There’s a Catch-22 about this, too…There were two choices that faced left academics. You either follow the liberals in making the concessions to maintain respectability, or not. And the price of not doing it is to set yourself up to be dismissed as cantankerous or you’re too aggressive or uncivil [and] whatnot.

You need to call this shit for what it is, and especially for people who want to redefine what it means to be on the left in ways, to be blunt, that are just consistent with the limits of neoliberalism. This is part of the problem I’ve found; maybe I was a little naïve about this at the outset. And partly, I came out of the tradition of sharp Leninist polemics, anyway.

So, what I came to see was that if you don’t make the critique sharply or in a very sharp way, then it gets ignored, right? If you make it in a sharp enough way that people will pay attention to it, then all they pay attention to is the sharpness. So, then they’ll say that “so and so is a bomb thrower, takes no prisoners”, this, that, and the other.

And that’s one reason I stopped talking to reporters except, for Don Terry at The New York Times. But, I wouldn’t talk to anybody else, among other things, because I realized that they got the story written before they talk to you, and they’re auditioning you for parts that they’ve already crafted. And there’s this moment of repressive tolerance. I remember, I did a couple of these things, one with—I think it was Peter Applebome or maybe Jason Deparle, one of them. [It was] a long article on some shit about welfare or workfare, the underclass or something.

And I was on the phone for more than an hour trying to talk him off of the simplistic cultural poverty framing he was operating in. And what I got for my effort was a little quote that’s dropped in the middle of the article…and the thrust of the article was not changed a bit. So there’s a moment where the author says, “But not everyone sees it this way,” and then they quote you. And then, they say, “But others say….”So, I said fuck it.

Medina: They call that objectivity, right?

Reed: Right. Right. Right, exactly.

So, yeah, I said fuck it. I mean, you can write this shit, but you don’t need me to be part of it.

Medina: Exactly. So, they legitimized the whole article by using you.

Reed: Right, exactly.

So, political science has always been problematic, I think, as a discipline. I sometimes think that the thing about academic disciplines is like what my father used to say about state legislatures, that the worst one in the country is the one that’s presiding in the state where you are at the moment. So, the worst academic discipline is the one you’re in.

I would sometimes say that the one thing I can say for political science was that it’s not economics. But, that difference is getting narrowed, because one of the problems in our discipline has been this really powerful impulse to try to explain politics by reference to every fucking thing else in the world you can think of except politics…

Medina: Or inequality.

Reed: Oh, yeah. Well, in fact you can’t even talk about “inequality” anymore.

Medina: As you point out in Renewing, we talk about “disparity.”

Reed: Right.

Medina: We don’t talk about “inequality” anymore, or “equality.”

Reed: That’s exactly right.

And I think I’m going to do something for the Socialist Register next year on the racial disparity discourse around the differential impact of the economic downturn—or the depression, basically. Just an examination of the disparity discourse: what work it does for whom and then what work it doesn’t do for whom, basically.

Medina: One of the things that I want to go back to here is specifically the chapter, “The Color Line Then and Now,” the chapter that you wrote. That’s the chapter that brought it all together, I thought. And in it, of course, you elaborate on Du Bois’ color line formulation, which you argue a lot of black studies scholars are using to deploy the concept of race and racism. You critique this approach, because it doesn’t really clarify anything. In fact, you say that it obscures more than it clarifies. What did you mean by that? How does it do that? What are the mechanisms that lead to that?

Reed: Well, I think one of the problems is a straight conceptual one: that the category is asked to do too much work, so that racism is a notion, a concept that’s not very tightly specified. And in fact, one of the debates now between left and right is that conservatives want to specify racism in a very, narrow way as an individual prejudice or, rather, unjustified individual prejudice or bigotry…..

But I understand that the objective and defensible foundation for this is that the way that American politics has evolved over the last sixty years or so, and thus the terms on which egalitarian interests have won the victories that they’ve won are such that in law and public policy and increasingly in non-policy discourse, the only kinds of inequality that are considered unjust are those forms of inequality that have to do with disparities based on some kind of ascriptive status like race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever.

So, for instance, when I was involved in the Cabrini-Green tenants’ lawsuit against the city, they had to file the suit under the 1968 fair housing law, which meant that they had to charge the city and the CHA with discrimination, and discrimination on the base of race, age, and gender, when the issue was really displacement.

I understand that pressure. I mean, if you’re trying to seek the actual remedies for actual people, then the language that’s available in the law, through which to operate and, frankly, like in moral discourse to some extent, exerts a pressure to define the injustice in racial terms.

I think there’s a lot more than that going on, though. I think that there’s also a political economy of race relations that invests—or that ties activists to a discourse of race and racism as the sole metric of inequality or injustice.

But, I guess to go back to the other point I was making, the right wing wants to define racism in a very, very narrow way. Our side wants to define it very, very broadly. And that’s because, partly, of the iconic power that the charge of racism has at least within the universe of people who understand themselves to be antiracist.

I’m not at all convinced that it has that sort of iconic power out in the society at large, and especially as the currency of racism just seems to be inflated, so that when Houston Baker and Cornel West can’t get a cab uptown, that’s racism. If the police beat you down, then that’s racism.

I mentioned to a student in class last night that on one level—while I understand what people wanted to do in articulating the notion of institutional racism, it’s on one level an oxymoron. And so what happens is, I think, that racism becomes a convenient shorthand that—and I think this is what I mean by the charge—that it obscures more than it clarifies—it becomes an alternative to explanation, you label in lieu of explaining.

For instance, I think the sub-prime mortgage crisis is a good illustration of this problem. So, you say that blacks and Latinos were disproportionately targeted for these high-risk mortgage instruments, and were steered toward them even when they could have qualified for something less risky. And you say, “So, this is a clear disparity and it’s a clear evidence of racism.”

Well, but what is the racism? Where does the racism intercede? What carries it? It’s not doing anything itself. So, is the claim that the people who are involved in steering these classes of people to these high risk mortgages are themselves racist? But that just feels a little bit like the Nation of Islam’s white devil theory—that white people just kind of go around trying to find ways to gratuitously fuck over black people.

It seems more likely that these people, black and Latinos, in these inner cities were targeted because they were vulnerable, and they were discriminated against and they had a history of being discriminated against for conventional mortgages.

Medina: In Renewing, you also make this point in analyzing and looking at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Reed: Yeah, absolutely. I was just looking at some numbers this morning. I can’t remember what I was reading, but I was struck to see that 45 percent of people who live in the most damaged sections of the city were black. But, see, what’s interesting about that is that, more than 60 percent of the population was black, at that point. So, by definition, that means that 55 percent were not black. And in the poorest parts of the city, the same thing.

It feels like what on some level is going on is a vestigial mindset from the last days of the Fordist era, where there was an assumption that if you could demonstrate a racial disparity, then that would call for a remedy of some sort. Not necessarily an adequate remedy because most often the remedy would be a representational one or some form of recognition instead of redistribution. So, there’d be a job for the person who announced the racism, to be kind of crude about it.

But, the problem is that for twenty years that hasn’t worked, but people do it anyway. And I think they do it anyway for a complex of reasons. One is it’s just soothing. It just feels good because it’s comfortable. But, another is that there is no other—or that this is the consensual language within which one is expected to express a grievance that has any bearing at all to do with race.

And I think that one of the reasons that it is takes us back to the political economy of race relations, because there are vested interests that want to insist that the only way to talk about any kind of inequality that at all involves people of color is through the language of race.

By the way, I think reaction to the Tea Party stuff is a good example of this, because I’m convinced that the Tea Party crowd is like an iceberg tip with no iceberg underneath, which makes them just like our movement. And they’re trying to grow icebergs.… They’re trying to grow icebergs underneath the iceberg tips just like we are. And they’ve got some advantages, some big advantages that we don’t have.

Medina: They got Fox News.

Reed: Right, exactly. Yeah.

At the same time, groups like Color of Change and the Southern Poverty Law Center also have an interest in, I wouldn’t say exaggerating, but in stressing the significance of this phenomenon, because they fundraise off it.

The Democrats also have an interest in exaggerating the significance of this stuff because they need shit like that to tell us that the other guy is worse and that’s why we need to shut up and get behind Obama.

Medina: Actually, what you just said leads me to another theme that kept coming up in the book, and really in all of your work, namely the question of elite brokerage politics. So, what is the relationship between, getting back to the book, black studies, politics, and elite brokerage politics?

Reed: Well, that’s really an interesting question, too.

I think that this posture of speaking for a population or being interpreters for a population that, for whatever reason, is presumed not to be able to speak for itself at the public microphone is the foundation of the cultural politics mindset inside black studies.

Michael Rudolph West at Holy Cross three or four years ago published a really nice book called The Education of Booker T. Washington in which he makes the argument that Washington basically invented the idea of race relations. Not through direct argument and certainly not through a theory, but through his practice.

And West’s argument is that from the end of the 18th century until emancipation, the way that the question of the status of black people in this country got played out was in the discourse of what was called the Negro problem which was bound up with the existence of slavery and what would happen if slavery were abolished or if it weren’t abolished.

And he contends that after emancipation, the Negro problem just kind of vanished out of public discussion because what we had was a thirty-year period of contestation over how blacks were going to be incorporated into American civic life. And with the defeat of reconstruction and the defeat of the populist insurgency, the consolidation of the Jim Crow regime in the South, and the acquiescence of the Northern liberals, you wind up in this moment where blacks are citizens technically, but they’re kind of in the society but not of it, and the Negro problem is back again.

And he argues that in the context—since blacks are technically members of the society—the question then shifts from the framework of the Negro problem to the framework of how the races are going to relate. And he says in the framework of race relations: blacks disappear as workers, students, farmers, parents, individuals of any sort whatsoever, and are folded into the Negro.

And the Negro, by definition—because it’s an abstraction—doesn’t have a popular voice. So then the question is, in the title of Robert Penn Warren’s book, Who Speaks for the Negro? And Washington came forth as the person to speak for the Negro. He wasn’t the only motherfucker like that. There were a bunch of them, of course.

West’s argument, I think, is a little bit like the argument that I make about disparity, because he says that the race relations framework also takes questions of equality and inequality off the table because what’s the issue in the framework? The only issue is whether race relations are bad or good. And what bad race relations means is tension or hostility. And the only alternative to bad race relations is good race relations. And what good race relations means is there’s no tension.

But, the way you get tension, of course, is for the subordinates to make demands that piss off or make uncomfortable the people on top. So, the only way to have good race relations is to shut up and accept white supremacy, basically.

And it’s in this context that this notion of the Negro leader emerges. And it’s a notion that’s really never gone away. We talk about that stuff now. Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson.

Medina: And of course, the ultimate one would be our president.

Reed: Yeah, although he¬—

Medina: He does try to stay away from the question of race altogether.

Reed: Yeah. Although he’s trying to play on it both ways. A student just pointed out last night that he [Obama] checked the African American box on his census form, which doesn’t surprise me. Because he’d be crazy not to.

So, I think there’s an irony because it appears to be a populist kind of formulation. But, the approach to politics that posits the existence of the black masses or the black community or the grassroots are entirely consistent with an elite brokerage politics to the extent that masses and community are abstractions. And they’re abstractions that assume a singular voice. And presumption of the singular voice is what justifies the notion that some self-proclaimed spokesman will step forward and say what needs to be said to get paid in the right way.

Medina: So, what do we need to do? How can we build what we need to build? Where do we go from here?

Reed: That’s the big question.

I do think that we need to find ways just to start talking about capitalism. And, I mean, not like the Spartacist League, but I mean to do political education among people, whenever we can connect dots. The thing is, I guess, to try to always find the levers that can kind of break some stuff open.

I do think that maybe the greatest travesty—or the greatest outrage of this administration, next to the war stuff—is its absolute abdication of any attention to the fiscal crisis at the state level.

We need something, it seems to me, to do two things. To crystallize the perspective, or the understanding, that the same thing is happening to every state and that you can’t just fight it state by state. And we also need something to help get on the offensive about, which means also to mobilize, or to try to mobilize, outside the ranks of the academy.

Because this is another problem that’s a form of something like narrow trade union consciousness where the tendency is to go fight for what’s yours. We can’t do that now. The only way to fight to maintain any benefit is to fight the universal item, basically.

More Features

Share on Facebook