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https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org Wed, 16 Aug 2023 15:10:08 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.4 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/on-the-origin-of-r-m-schindlers-architectural-program/comment-page-1/#comment-71913 Wed, 02 Aug 2023 08:43:51 +0000 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/?p=16011#comment-71913 Dear Alex I enjoyed reading this.
You maybe interested in my phd and profile on Academia.com
https://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/entities/publication/b7ba8c98-d2e5-44ed-80e4-b5ee11a1df43

]]> https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/on-the-origin-of-r-m-schindlers-architectural-program/comment-page-1/#comment-71196 Wed, 21 Jun 2023 22:09:24 +0000 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/?p=16011#comment-71196 […] the journal Nonsite I've written an article about the origins of R. M. Schindler's "Modern Architecture: A Program," his […]

]]> https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/scapegoating-politics-how-fascism-deploys-race-and-how-antiracism-takes-the-bait/comment-page-1/#comment-71152 Mon, 19 Jun 2023 10:57:13 +0000 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/?p=15991#comment-71152 […] Scapegoating Politics: How Fascism Deploys Race, and How Antiracism Takes the Bait Adolph Reed, nonsite.org […]

]]> https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/incidence-of-labor-relations-1962/comment-page-1/#comment-71145 Sun, 18 Jun 2023 15:48:48 +0000 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/?p=16016#comment-71145 […] Impact of labor relations (1962) Nonsite.org […]

]]> https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/jan-lubicz-nycz-the-tale-of-an-underrecognized-shooting-star-of-california-modernism/comment-page-1/#comment-71113 Sat, 17 Jun 2023 12:33:08 +0000 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/?p=16000#comment-71113 […] fusing all these into new forms of human habitat.1 […]

]]> https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/listening-to-trump/comment-page-1/#comment-64583 Fri, 29 Apr 2022 17:29:53 +0000 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/?p=9910#comment-64583 […] Article: “Action Will Be Taken”: Left Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents2016 Article: Listening to Trump2022 Article: How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns […]

]]> https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/the-first-privilege-walk/comment-page-1/#comment-64233 Wed, 27 Apr 2022 12:45:21 +0000 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/?p=14960#comment-64233 […] advantage that applies to them (setting aside how you feel about them — “privilege walks” have their detractors — it’s not clear how prevalent such exercises are in K-12 schools). Sometimes — as in […]

]]> https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-the-left-we-need/comment-page-1/#comment-64123 Tue, 26 Apr 2022 16:08:00 +0000 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/?p=12043#comment-64123 […] 1.&nbsp This essay builds on and deepens the critique laid out in my July 23, 2021 editorial, “Why Black Lives Matter Can’t be Co-opted.” Its immediate prompt was the snarky, completely gratuitous, and false dismissal of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act as “a white guy employment act” by MSNBC tribune of antiracist neoliberalism, Joy-Ann Reid, in a January 20 interview with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Although Reid’s platform has helped to distinguish her as a militant in the antiracist struggle against the left, practically each day brings new evidence that what is now called antiracism is entirely in league with ruling class political interests and programs. See, for example, a sample of disclosures that have occurred only since I began writing this essay: REI’s wedding of diversity and union-busting (https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/rei-union-busting-podcast-land-acknowledgment-liberals); defenses of the Direct Contracting program against charges that it is a stealth effort to privatize Medicare claim that it will help address racial disparities in healthcare access and provide entrepreneurial opportunities for people of color (https://www.hcinnovationgroup.com/policy-value-based-care/alternative-payment-models/news/21256769/healthcare-groups-plead-with-hhs-becerra-to-retain-direct-contracting-model); Nikole Hannah-Jones’s February 11 discussion of black history “through the lens of the #1619Project and her new children’s book, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water” with Carlyle Group Principal Naima Garvin, Covington & Burling LLP Partner Amy Wollensack, Carlyle Chief Transformation Officer Reggie Van Lee, and Covington Senior Partner Eric Holder, Jr. The Hannah-Jones event was hosted by Carlyle’s Multicultural Employee Resource Group in partnership with Covington & Burling (see Carlyle Group twitter). Another exposé of Black Lives Matter’s finances and another revealing account of its Potemkin, commercial flimflam origins make its class allegiances plain. See also Rep. James Clyburn’s (D-SC) pressing for President Biden to nominate a black female employer-side labor lawyer, J. Michelle Childs, to the Supreme Court (https://prospect.org/justice/clyburn-pushes-management-side-labor-attorney-for-supreme-court/). Clyburn’s lobbying for Childs ultimately did not succeed, but if it had, the result would have made Joe Biden instrumental in the appointment of two black conservatives to the Court, each justified in part by the equivalent of an up from slavery story of supposedly humble beginnings intended to deflect from the candidates’ political allegiances and commitments.↑ 2.&nbsp Quoted in Michael Powell, “A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury,” New York Times, August 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html.↑ 3.&nbsp See, for example, Adolph Reed, Jr., and Touré F. Reed, “The Evolution of ‘Race’ and Racial Justice Under Neoliberalism,” in Socialist Register 2022: New Polarizations, Old Contradictions, The Crisis of Centrism, ed. Greg Albo, Leo Panitch, and Colin Leys (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021), 113–34; Adolph Reed, Jr., “Black Politics After 2016,” nonsite.org 23 (February 2018), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/black-politics-after-2016/; Adolph Reed, Jr., “Antiracism: A Neoliberal Alternative to a Left,” Dialectical Anthropology 42 (2018): 105–15; Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Trouble with Uplift,” The Baffler, September 2018, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-trouble-with-uplift-reed; Adolph Reed, Jr., “Why Black Lives Matter Can’t Be Co-opted,” nonsite.org (July 2021), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/why-black-lives-matter-cant-be-co-opted/; Adolph Reed, Jr., “Splendors and Miseries of the Antiracist ‘Left’,” nonsite.org (November 2016), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/splendors-and-miseries-of-the-antiracist-left-2/; Walter Benn Michaels, “A Note from ‘His Collaborator,’” nonsite.org (November 2016), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/a-note-from-his-collaborator/; Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Trouble with Disparity,” nonsite.org 32 (September 2020), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/the-trouble-with-disparity/; Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption,” nonsite.org (June 2020), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/the-triumph-of-black-lives-matter-and-neoliberal-redemption/; Cedric Johnson, “Don’t Let Blackwashing Save the Investor Class,” Jacobin, June 24, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/blackwashing-corporations-woke-capitalism-protests; Cedric Johnson, “What Black Life Actually Looks Like,” Jacobin, April 29, 2019, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/racism-black-lives-matter-inequality; Cedric Johnson, “Reparations Isn’t a Political Demand,” Jacobin, March 7, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/cedric-johnson-brian-jones-ta-nehisi-coates-reparations/; Cedric Johnson, “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” Catalyst 1 (Spring 2017), https://catalyst-journal.com/2017/11/panthers-cant-save-us-cedric-johnson; Cedric Johnson, “The American Left After Black Lives Matter: A Symposium,” New Politics 17 (Winter 2019), https://newpol.org/symposium/the-american-left-after-black-lives-matter/; Cedric Johnson, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter (New York: Verso, 2022); Touré F. Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (New York: Verso, 2020); Kenneth W. Warren, “Back to Black: African American Literary Criticism in the Present Moment,” American Literary History 34 (2022): 369–79; Kenneth W. Warren, “‘Blackness’ and the Sclerosis of African American Cultural Criticism,” nonsite.org 28 (May 2019), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/blackness-and-the-sclerosis-of-african-american-cultural-criticism/; Kenneth W. Warren, “The Poetics and Politics of Black Lives Matter,” nonsite.org 32 (September 2020), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/the-poetics-and-politics-of-black-lives-matter/; Kenneth W. Warren et al., “On the End(s) of Black Politics,” nonsite.org (September 2016), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/on-the-ends-of-black-politics/; Walter Benn Michaels and Kenneth W. Warren, “Reparations and Other Right-Wing Fantasies,” nonsite.org (February 2016), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/reparations-and-other-right-wing-fantasies/; Willie Legette and Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Role of Race in Contemporary U.S. Politics: V. O. Key’s Enduring Insight,” nonsite.org 23 (February 2018), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/the-role-of-race-in-contemporary-u-s-politics/. Michaels and Warren, “Reparations and Other Right-Wing Fantasies” is hereafter cited in the text as “RWF.” Warren, “Back to Black” is hereafter cited in the text as “BTB.”↑ 4.&nbsp Reed, “Black Politics After 2016.”↑ 5.&nbsp West, Education of Booker T. Washington, 56–57.↑ 6.&nbsp The late Judith Stein examined the parallels between this stratum that was coming into existence among black Americans in that period and similar strata within British West African and West Indian colonies. See Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 7–37; and Judith Stein, “Defining the Race 1890-1930,” in The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). The latter was reprinted by nonsite.org, May 10, 2019, https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/defining-the-race-1890-1930/. The agenda of early twentieth-century Pan-Africanism, which arose from members of this stratum internationally, centered literally on appeals for more substantial roles in colonial administration for “civilized” blacks, including post-World War I calls for the former German colonies to be placed, as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, “under the guidance of organized civilization” with special administrative voice for the “chiefs and intelligent Negroes among the twelve and one-half million natives of German Africa [and the] twelve million civilized Negroes of the United States.” W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Future of Africa—A Platform (1919),” in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1920, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 273. Dean E. Robinson in Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8–33, makes clear that what often have been understood as black nationalist expressions before Garvey, including the various emigrationist or colonizationist Victorian era schemes associated with individuals like Alexander Crummell and Edward Wilmot Blyden, had little in common with militantly anti-colonialist tendencies of the post-World War II era and were instead anchored to a civilizationist mission that saw western blacks and western-trained African elites as agents of a Christianizing and civilizing imperative perceived as the engine of racial uplift. Also see Wilson J. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), which was the pioneering study historicizing black nationalism.↑ 7.&nbsp Kenneth W. Warren, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 27. Warren elaborates this critique in What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2012).↑ 8.&nbsp For non-hagiographical examinations of the programmatic substance of racial uplift politics, see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Touré F. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Emergent scholarship on racial uplift in the 1980s and 1990s, which came largely via investigation of the socially engaged work of upper-status black club women, was limited by a naïve premise that the class character of programs advocated by early proponents of the uplift agenda was mitigated by their expressed commitment to the general good of the race. See, for example, Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: W. Morrow, 1984); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1994); Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought To Be and Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Glenda Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Gaines, Uplifting the Race, began to correct for that naïve premise. Reed, Not Alms But Opportunity, challenged it fundamentally by focusing on the class content and impact of the programs the Urban League debated and adopted.↑ 9.&nbsp Adolph Reed, Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 27–28. On Lamarckian race theory in fin-de-siècle American life, see George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 232–69; Adolph Reed, Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107–25; and Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 1–46. The Gaines text explores specifically links between uplift ideology and Victorian race theory among the nascent black elite.↑ 10.&nbsp And in the early twentieth century this elite-led, ‘uplift’-focused political economy of race relations was not exclusively a black thing. For example, Touré F. Reed compares the uplift programs of the (Jewish) Educational Alliance and the Urban League in the first third of the century in “The Educational Alliance and the Urban League in New York: Ethnic Elites and the Politics of Americanization and Racial Uplift, 1903-1932,” in Rethinking Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought, ed. Adolph Reed, Jr., and Kenneth W. Warren (New York: Routledge, 2016).↑ 11.&nbsp Montgomery was the only black delegate to the 1890 state constitutional convention that disfranchised the black population and installed white supremacy as the foundation of the state’s government. And “he even served on the key committee on elective franchise, appointment, and elections and actually voted for disfranchisement and endorsed the white supremacist regime from the convention floor, purporting to ‘lay the suffrage of 123,000 of my fellow-men at the feet of this convention’ as ‘an olive branch of peace.’ Though he was not without black supporters, Montgomery’s address and vote in no way reflected a consensus among black Mississippians, even within the elite, and he was widely reviled as a traitor.” See Reed, Stirrings, 20–21. Unsurprisingly, Montgomery’s complicity with the worst of the state’s white supremacist Democrats to disfranchise Mississippi’s black voters as part of the price of his dream does not show up in celebrations of Mound Bayou.↑ 12.&nbsp “Race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations as groups and sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on ‘natural’ or essential characteristics attributed to them. Ideologies of ascriptive difference help to stabilize a social order by legitimizing its hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, including its social division of labor, as the natural order of things. Ascriptive ideologies are just-so stories with the potential to become self-fulfilling prophecies. They emerge from self-interested common sense as folk knowledge: they are ‘known’ to be true unreflectively because they seem to comport with the evidence of quotidian experience. They are likely to become generally assumed as self-evident truth, and imposed as such by law and custom, when they converge with and reinforce the interests of powerful strata in the society.” Adolph Reed, Jr., “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism,” New Labor Forum 22 (2013): 49.↑ 13.&nbsp Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 162.↑ 14.&nbsp Karen E. Fields and Barbara Jeanne Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2014), 268.↑ 15.&nbsp The three can be seen as constituting a “single integrated family of forms of cultural understanding, social organization, and political contestation”; see Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (2009): 22.↑ 16.&nbsp When this shift in the standard supplicants’ posture in the clientelist relationship first occurred during the Black Power era, some of my comrades and I referred to it as “militant begging.” The commitment to Black Pride that supplanted pursuit of social-democratic reform required shedding the obsequiousness but not, however, the supplication.↑ 17.&nbsp On the genesis, persistence, ideological content, and political impact of underclass ideology, see Reed, Stirrings, 179–96; Adolph Reed, Jr., “The ‘Color Line’ Then and Now: The Souls of Black Folk and the Changing Context of Black Politics,” in Rethinking Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought, ed. Adolph Reed, Jr., and Kenneth W. Warren (New York: Routledge, 2016), 132–58.↑ 18.&nbsp I examine this interpretive pathology in “Antiracism: A Neoliberal Alternative to a Left.” Of course, one point of asserting that all the things that obviously have changed in fact haven’t is to make sure that one thing—the ability to collect from the big white man—doesn’t. And to be clear, I do not suggest that contemporary race relations politics is identical to the original Bookerite tendency, just as I do insist that the current era is profoundly different from the Jim Crow era in which that politics emerged. Jim Crow was a specific social order. Bookerite race relations politics emerged from a class that partly formed around race relations administration in the context of that order; race relations administration has evolved over the last century—not unlike bourgeois democracy—but is still race relations administration.↑ 19.&nbsp Intra-group inequality is substantially greater among blacks than among whites or Hispanics and has increased since 1970; see Rakesh Kochhar and Anthony Cilluffo, “Key Findings on the Rise in Income Inequality within America’s Racial and Ethnic Groups,” Pew Research Center, July 12, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/12/key-findings-on-the-rise-in-income-inequality-within-americas-racial-and-ethnic-groups/. And nearly ninety-six percent of “black” wealth is held by the richest twenty percent of African Americans; see Matt Bruenig, “Wealth Inequality Across Race and Class in 2019,” People’s Policy Project, September 29, 2020, https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/09/29/wealth-inequality-across-race-and-class-in-2019/ .↑ 20.&nbsp Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Surprising Cross-Racial Saga of Modern Wealth Inequality,” The New Republic, June 29, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/158059/racial-wealth-gap-vs-racial-income-gap-modern-economic-inequality; and Matt Bruenig, “The Racial Wealth Gap Is About the Upper Classes,” People’s Policy Project, June 29, 2020, https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/06/29/the-racial-wealth-gap-is-about-the-upper-classes/. Moreover, the tortious argument rests on a simplistic historical claim; it depends on identifying isolated moments when some extraordinary or exogenous—i.e., non-market generated—intervention deprived blacks of assets or opportunities and then asserting, by conjecture, how those assets or opportunities likely would have accreted, ceteris paribus. But ceteris is seldom paribus. This contention fails to take account of the impact of capitalism’s boom and bust cycles on sectors, regions, and industries. For example, there is no reason to assume that, had Radical Reconstruction’s promise of land redistribution been honored, the nascent black yeomanry would have been able to survive the long depression in the cotton economy after 1880, and in another recently topical example, that Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” destroyed by pogrom in 1921, would have survived the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression. Merlin Chowkwanyun and I propose that, by contrast, “class analysis leads to consideration of how the social relations of production alter localities and regions, transformations that greatly affect the life chances—and self-understandings and pragmatic identities—of those within them.” Adolph Reed, Jr., and Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and its Analytical Discontents,” in Socialist Register 2012: The Crisis and the Left, ed. Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber (London: Merlin Press, 2011), 165.↑ 21.&nbsp Reed and Reed, “The Evolution of ‘Race,’” 126.↑ 22.&nbsp Quoted in J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 78.↑ 23.&nbsp There is a substantial literature on the genesis of black clientelist politics in the electoral context; for two classic contextualizing examinations see Martin Kilson, “Political Change in the Negro Ghetto, 1900-1940s,” in Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, ed. Nathan I. Huggins, Martin Kilson, and Daniel Fox, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971); and Harold Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935).↑ 24.&nbsp See Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Case Against Reparations,” The Progressive (December 2000). Reprinted by nonsite.org, February 11, 2016, https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/the-case-against-reparations/.↑ 25.&nbsp Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor and Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Reparations Debate,” Dissent, June 24, 2019, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-reparations-debate.↑ 26.&nbsp See Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Frederick Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics. 1848-1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021); and Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019).↑ 27.&nbsp There is no clearer exposition of this point than Karl Marx, “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, part 8 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 713–74.↑ 28.&nbsp Reed, Du Bois, 163–76.↑ 29.&nbsp See, for example, Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner’s, 1916); Frederick Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (New York: Macmillan, 1896). Also, Jonathan Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2009); Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Walter Benn Michaels, “Race Into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 655–85. As Michaels shows, the distance from racism to what we now consider antiracism was not so great as we might think.  ↑ 30.&nbsp Like other expressions of contemporary antiracism, reparations is not so much a political program as a sensibility. That is one reason questions about strategies for winning it can be routinely deflected onto discussions of moral desert. In their 2020 extended brief for reparations, for example, economist William A. Darity, Jr., and A. Kirsten Mullen include a chapter addressing criticisms of the idea. They discuss a dozen objections, all of which can be classified as either moral or administrative. Missing entirely is any consideration of whether and how a reparations program could be won politically. William A. Darity, Jr., and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 239–55.↑ 31.&nbsp I offer here one striking illustration of how embrace of reparations/disparities ideology reveals the extent to which even nominally Marxist (or at least Trotskyist) leftists’ discourse has introjected neoliberal market fetishism: “Since it is precisely capitalist markets that are reproducing these disparities, it follows that the disparities cannot be challenged without challenging the operation of capitalist markets. Far from leading to a quietist embrace of the market, a concern with equalizing rates of poverty between the black and white populations leads to a direct challenge of market prerogatives.” Jonah Birch and Paul Heideman, “The Trouble with Anti-Antiracism,” Jacobin, October 11, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/adolph-reed-blm-racism-capitalism-labor. It would be surprising that these authors seem not to recognize that altering “market prerogatives” is in this context the same thing as making them “more efficiently functioning”; however, this is the same duo who somehow read Walter Benn Michaels’s trenchant critique of Gary Becker’s contention that efficiently functioning markets will dissolve inequalities “not based on real differences in ability” as his endorsement of Becker’s position.↑ 32.&nbsp This has been an explicit feature of wealth gap discourse since its beginnings in the 1990s. Merlin Chowkwanyun and I note, in discussing the ur-text of wealth gap argument, Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995), that a more complicated picture of the extent and significance of a racial wealth gap appears “when intra-racial class heterogeneity closes the wealth gap for some.” Reed and Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis,” 165. We discuss Dalton Conley’s examination in Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) (often cited, rather curiously, as a simple companion to Black Wealth/White Wealth) of “the role of class dynamics in blunting the racial wealth gaps’ deleterious effects.” And we observe that, notwithstanding their being aware of Conley’s work, Oliver and Shapiro do not engage it. “Oliver and Shapiro state that [accounting for the role of class dynamics] is not a primary goal when they write that they ‘do not intend here to engage in a discourse about class in modern American life; the concept is important but not entirely germane to our purposes,’ which is to show the endurance of the racial wealth gap whatever class measure they use.” Reed and Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis,” 173n55. The Oliver and Shapiro quote is from Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2006), 70. One can only imagine what Oliver and Shapiro, as sociologists, mean by “class.” It is clear, however, that that meaning does not involve structural location within the evolving political economy.↑ 33.&nbsp See Missy Sullivan, “‘Black Wall Street’ Before, During, and After the Tulsa Race Massacre,” HISTORY, https://www.history.com/news/tulsa-massacre-black-wall-street-before-and-after-photos.↑ 34.&nbsp See https://www.facebook.com/brandnewcongress/videos/185728082700554/.↑ 35.&nbsp See https://www.brandnewcongress.org.↑ 36.&nbsp For illustrations of this contention, see Kim Moody, “Cedric Johnson and the Other Sixties’ Nostalgia” in The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter (New York: Verso, 2022), 123–38; Miguel Salazar, “Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem?,” The New Republic, December 20, 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/152789/americas-socialists-race-problem; David I. Backer, “Race and Class Reductionism Today,” Verso blog, October 8, 2018, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4068-race-and-class-reductionism-today; Birch and Heideman, “The Trouble with Anti-Antiracism”; Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, “Race, Crisis, and Resistance,” New Politics, February 12, 2021, https://aas.princeton.edu/news/race-crisis-and-resistance-united-states; Walter Johnson and Robin D. G. Kelley, ed., Racial Capitalism Justice: Boston Review Forum Book 1 (Boston: Boston Review, 2018); David Roediger, Class, Race, and Marxism (New York: Verso, 2019); David Roediger, “It’s Not Just Class: The Fight for Racial Justice Is Inseparable from Overcoming Capitalism,” In These Times, August 2, 2017, https://inthesetimes.com/article/marxism-class-race-labor-unions-capital; Nikhil Pal Singh and Joshua Clover, “The Blindspot Revisited,” Verso blog, October 12, 2018, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4079-the-blindspot-revisited.  ↑ 37.&nbsp The superficial rhetoric of authenticity, familiar from the mass culture industry, conceals the Potemkin character of this activism by positing a distinction between “misleaders” or sellouts and other “grassroots” activists, whose legitimacy is no less self-proclaimed than that of the putative misleaders. Sean Campbell’s recent exposé of Black Lives Matter, “The BLM Mystery: Where Did the Money Go,” New York Magazine, January 31, 2022, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/black-lives-matter-finances.html, is a textbook example of this tendency.↑ 38.&nbsp I have examined one instance of this phenomenon in the case of the Take ‘Em Down NOLA group that, during the effort to remove odious white supremacist monuments in New Orleans, actively pressed a “progressive” agenda focused entirely on symbolic objectives like removal of all honorifics commemorating not only Confederates and slaveholders but any other putative racists, to the exclusion of expression of concern with gross inequalities in the contemporary city, which is one of the most unequal in the country. See Robert McClendon, “New Orleans is 2nd worst for income inequality in the U.S., roughly on par with Zambia, report says,” NOLA.com, August 20, 2014, https://www.nola.com/news/politics/article_812c4d3b-a732-571e-9273-55779ddea227.html. It may be coincidental that the most performatively militant of the group’s Voices were enmeshed as significant functionaries in the charter school industry. See Adolph Reed, Jr., “Don’t Be Duped: The Clamor to Take Down the Monuments Falls Short of a Truly Radical Movement,” The Lens, June 3, 2017, https://thelensnola.org/2017/06/03/dont-be-duped-take-em-down-nola-falls-short-of-a-truly-radical-movement/.↑ 39.&nbsp Michaels and Reed, “The Trouble with Disparity.”↑ 40.&nbsp Sydney Ember, “Bernie Sanders Predicted Revolution, Just Not This One,” New York Times, June 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/us/politics/bernie-sanders-protests.html.↑ 41.&nbsp William Darity, Jr., “The True Cost of Closing the Racial Wealth Gap,” New York Times, April 30, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/business/racial-wealth-gap.html.↑ 42.&nbsp Reed, Toward Freedom, 150–51.↑ 43.&nbsp Reed, Toward Freedom, 151.↑ 44.&nbsp Quoted in Reed, “Black Politics After 2016.”↑ 45.&nbsp Reed, “The Case Against Reparations,” 16.↑ 46.&nbsp Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Dutton, 2000).↑ 47.&nbsp Adolph Reed, Jr., “Undone By Neoliberalism,” The Nation, September 18, 2006, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/undone-neoliberalism/; Adolph Reed, Jr., “When Government Shrugs,” The Progressive, August 22, 2006, https://progressive.org/magazine/government-shrugs-lessons-katrina/; Reed, “The ‘Color Line’ Then and Now,” 262–67; Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Post-1965 Trajectory of Race, Class, Urban Politics in the United States Reconsidered,” Labor Studies Journal 41 (2016): 260–91. For critique of race reductionism’s failings more generally as the basis for an egalitarian practical politics, see Cedric Johnson, “The Wages of Roediger: Why Three Decades of Whiteness Studies Has Not Produced the Left We Need,” nonsite.org 29 (September 2019), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-th….↑ […]

]]> https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/the-poetics-and-politics-of-black-lives-matter/comment-page-1/#comment-64122 Tue, 26 Apr 2022 16:07:38 +0000 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/?p=12721#comment-64122 […] W. Warren, “The Poetics and Politics of Black Lives Matter,” nonsite.org 32 (September 2020), https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/the-poetics-and-politics-of-black-lives-matter/; Kenneth W. Warren et al., “On the End(s) of Black Politics,” nonsite.org (September 2016), […]

]]> https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/n1-and-the-pmc-a-debate-about-moving-on/comment-page-1/#comment-64065 Tue, 26 Apr 2022 04:22:25 +0000 https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/?p=12120#comment-64065 […] rather than in the service of the vulnerable people they often claim to represent.” Likewise, debates about the role of the “professional-managerial class” in left-wing movements are hardly new […]

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