Adolph L.
Reed Jr
We must
find the road to the most deprived, to the darkest strata of the proletariat,
beginning with the Negro, whom capitalist society has converted into a pariah,
and who must learn to see in us his revolutionary brothers. And this depends
wholly upon our energy and devotion to the work.[1]
Leon
Trotsky
"Direct
slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as
are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery, there would be no cotton. Without
cotton, there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value
to the colonies, it is the colonies that have created world trade, and world
trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Slavery is,
therefore, an economic category of paramount importance."[2]
Karl Marx
One of
the purposes of this excellent new book by Adolph L Reed is to preserve the voices
of the last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow.[3] In
the words of the English historian E. P Thompson, it attempts to rescue them
from the "enormous condescension of posterity".
The South
documents Reed's personal history almost in the manner of a memoir. However,
unlike similar books, Reed presents a historical and class-based analysis of
the racist Jim Crow laws.
As
Barbara J Fields explains, it is important to understand the race from a
historical perspective. She writes, "When virtually the whole of society,
including supposedly thoughtful, educated, intelligent persons, commits itself
to belief in propositions that collapse into absurdity upon the slightest
examination, the reason is not hallucination or delusion or even simple
hypocrisy; rather, it is ideology. And ideology is impossible for anyone to
analyse rationally who remains trapped on its terrain. That is why race still
proves so hard for historians to deal with historically, rather than in terms
of metaphysics, religion, or socio- (that is, pseudo-) biology".
Nothing
so well illustrates that impossibility as the conviction among otherwise
sensible scholars that race "explains" historical phenomena;
specifically, it explains why people of African descent have been set apart for
treatment different from others. But race is just the name assigned to the
phenomenon, which it no more explains than judicial review "explains"
why the United States Supreme Court can declare acts of Congress
unconstitutional, or than Civil War "explains" why Americans fought
each other between 1861 and 1865".[4]
Reed's
defence of a historical and class-based understanding of race has led him to be
heavily criticised and ostracised. Reed has opposed what he calls "race
reductionism,". In 1996, he famously described Barack Obama as a "smooth
Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive
neoliberal politics." [5].For
Reed, class-based inequality is the historical constant, not race. Reed
examines how the black middle class were treated differently than the black
working class. He recounts how many black middle-class people could avoid some
of the worst excesses of the murderess Jim Crow regime.
As Reed contends
in his article Separate and Unequal, "Middle-class, "respectable"
black people sought as much as possible to insulate themselves and their
children from contact with those they considered to be class inferiors. An
elaborate structure of social clubs—for example, the Links and the Girl Friends
for women, the Boulé for men, Jack and Jill for children, and fraternity and
sorority chapters for students and alumni—evolved to create and sustain
homogeneous middle-class social networks locally and nationally. Segregation
did have a levelling effect on race. Those with higher status were forced to
share neighbourhoods, schools, churches, restaurants, and other public
entertainments with those they would prefer not to associate with. From the
system's beginnings, a complaint about the injustice of enforced segregation
was that it did not account for class distinctions among black people".[6]
DSA
Reed has
also criticised "critical race theory", saying, "It is another
expression of reductionism. On the most pedestrian level, it is an observation
that what you see is a function of where you stand. At that level, there is
nothing in it that was not in Marx's early writings or Mannheim. But then you
get an appropriation of the standpoint theory for identity that says, for
example, all blacks think the same way. It is taxonomic, a reification. So the
retort to that critique has been "intersectionality." Yes, there is a
black perspective, but what you do is fragment it, so there are multiple black
perspectives because each potential—or each sacralised—social position becomes
discrete. That is what gives you intersectionality.[7]
Reed's
political and class-based perspective has been too much for the Democratic
Socialists of America(DSA), who had a speech of Reed's cancelled due to
objections by the AFROSOCialist and Socialists of Color Caucus over his "reactionary
and class reductionist form of politics".
1619 Project
His critique
of the 1619 project has led to personal and political attacks. In a recent
interview with Tom Mackaman- Reed states, "I did not know about the 1619
Project until it came out, and frankly when I learned about it, my reaction was
a big sigh. But again, the relation to history has passed to the appropriation
of the past in support of whatever kind of 'just-so' stories about the present is
desired. This approach has taken root within the Academy. It is like all bets
are off. Merlin Chowkwanyun and I did an article a few years ago in the
Socialist Register that is a critique of disparitarianism in the social
sciences, by which this or that disparity has replaced the study of inequality
and its effects. As Walter Benn Michaels said, and as I have said time and time
again if anti-disparitarianism is your ideology, then for you, a society
qualifies as being just if 1 per cent of the population controls 90 per cent of
the wealth, so long as that within that 1 per cent 12 per cent or so are black,
etc., reflecting their share of the national population. This is the ideal of
social justice for neoliberalism. There is no question of actual
redistribution.[8]
Reed demolishes
one of the myths of the 1619 project that enslaved people were introduced to
America because of racism. Reed points out that the first slaves were brought
over under the auspices of a wage labour system. He writes, " the 1619
Project assumes, in whatever way, that slavery was the natural condition of
Africans. And that is where the Afro-pessimism types wind up sharing a cup of
tea with James Henry Hammond."
As Niemuth
points out in his defence of Reed, "The furious reaction within the DSA
leadership to the invitation to Reed reveals how deeply the organisation is
imbued with the reactionary and right-wing politics of racial division. The
extreme hostility to any analysis based on the primacy of class expresses the
interests of affluent sections of the petit bourgeoisie, who utilise racial and
identity politics in the fight over positions of power and privilege within the
apparatus of the state, the trade unions, academia and corporations".
Conclusion
This
concise volume deserves to be read widely and hopefully put onto university
reading lists. It is hoped a younger readership picks it up and learns about a
class-based and historical perspective on racism than the racialist perspective
touted by the 1619 project.
Adolph
Reed, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous books and articles dealing with race
and class in American society and writes regularly for the New Republic.
Further
Reading
1. The cancellation of professor
Adolph Reed, Jr.'s speech and the DSA's promotion of race politics-Niles
Niemuth- 18 August 2020-wsws.org
2. The New York Times' 1619 Project
and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews Paperback –
26 February 2021
3. by David North, Thomas Mackaman
[1] On Black Nationalism-Documents on
the Negro Struggle- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/negro1.htm
[2] 1846 in The Poverty of
Philosophy,
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
[4] Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the
United States of America-https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5281-slavery-race-and-ideology-in-the-united-states-of-america
[5] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2010/03/obama-and-the-left-95-edition-026114
[6] https://harpers.org/archive/2022/02/separate-and-unequal-the-south-jim-crow-and-its-afterlives-adolph-reed-jr/
[7] "Reinventing the past to
suit the purposes of the present"-An interview with political scientist
Adolph Reed, Jr. on the New York Times' 1619 Project-Tom Mackaman-20 December
2019-wsws.org
[8] "Reinventing the past to
suit the purposes of the present"-An interview with political scientist
Adolph Reed, Jr. on the New York Times' 1619 Project-Tom Mackaman-20 December
2019-wsws.org
