This week has consisted mostly of Adolph Reed readings. Class Notes Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene is more accessible and broad while Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era consists of more formal, academic writing specifically related to the issues plaguing black politics in the post-segregation era. Stirrings in the Jug, with an insightful foreword by the late Julian Bond, posits a plausible explanation for the variety of reasons post-segregation black politics has failed to usher a new age of racial and economic equality, looking at the economy, social policy, shifts in the urban city pertinent to development and white flight, and last, but certainly not least, the sectarian black radical groups' failure to build accountable bases extended beyond the "communitarian" ethos. Class Notes, with its deliberate title, continues his observation on black politics with nuanced criticism of identity politics, the Farrakhan specter, and the perils of turning away from political movements that are not, well, structured in a democratically accountable fashion as in traditional liberalism. Even if one disagrees with Reed's conclusions, the limitations of identitarian politics ring clear, a message that is not heeded these days on the blogosphere. Furthermore, I find his conclusions on the illusory definition of the "underclass" merits his harsh denunciation of it as a myth, exploited by poverty research pimps who make far more money from it than any "welfare queen."
The two texts, both consisting of interrelated essays, actually engage each other quite well. Reed explains how the American city, increasingly black in the early decades of white flight, shifted from the "Industrial City" to the "Corporate City" in which developers are calling the shots, a declining tax base for cities experiencing population loss, and the ways in which demographic shifts allowed for the black petit bourgeoisie to win mayoral races. Focusing on Atlanta, for the most part, Reed's Stirrings in the Jug elucidates how, in the strangest discourse of representing the "black community," Maynard Jackson fired 2000 black sanitation workers. In a similar manner, Jackson could sell the airport project as benefiting the "black community" because of its affirmative action contracts implemented through negotiations with predominantly white developers, something that only benefits the black middle-class. Because of the constraints of white flight, white-dominated capital, the pro-growth ideology, and the divergent class interests of the "black misleadership class" (Black Agenda Report!) from that of the working-class African-American constituency, black officialdom faced severe limitations, yet also pursued policy antithetical to the interests of the lower classes in the name of the "black community."
Similarly, black cultural nationalists and Marxist-Leninist groups also participated in this problem of black post-segregration politics. Invoking the poorly defined "black community" by the radicals and mainstream black political class entails "mystification," to Reed. Because any black man with a suit couuld claim to be a "race leader" (confirmed or granted by white recognition, as was the case with Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, according to Reed), and there was no large or sizable black presence in many of these sectarian or "radical" groups, this poorly defined or essentialized "black community" became a rhetorical tool for access to federal funding, political appointments, or cooptation without building any movement or mass of members to effectively challenge the pro-growth, center-right ideology. The "black misleadership class" was allowed to continue supporting the underclass myth of the black poor while wedding their own material interests to that of white capital as neoliberalism developed. Of course, these black radical groups were also neutralized by COINTELPRO and other forces, which are mentioned by Reed but not emphasized in the ways that other activists or scholars might gauge them. That said, Reed's larger argument appears valid, given the lack of any real constituency in these myriad organizations claiming to represent or fight for the "black community" without any attention to democratic organizational structures, accountability, fighting economic injustice beyond racial language, or combating inequality in practical, relatable terms to the "masses "of people.
While I have some minor quibbles with the notion that invoking the "black community" to justify one's political legitimacy is automatically racial essentialism or mystification, as Reed defines it for the state of 1970s black politics (and beyond), these problems remain relevant today. The new wave of identity politics or identitarian discourse follows the same flaws as previous eras of black politics. We see it now with the Black Lives Matter network and Campaign Zero, which purportedly represent "blacks," as if we are some amorphous mass with the same interests, policy proposals, outlook, or needs. The ways in which cultural studies and African-American Studies sometimes perpetuates this shift away from structural causes of economic inequality or ignoring class differentiation among blacks leads to the issues we see today, where "black leaders" with connections to the rightist Democrats or foundations which support school privatization, disproportionately hurting poor minorities, are somehow said to represent the "black community" or "masses." This kind of identitarian thinking is impressively traced by Reed back to the early post-segregation politics, where racial kinship politics and ignoring class nuances and the internal diversity of "blackness" has, really, since Jim Crow days, benefitted the black petit bourgeoisie brokers with white power.
Of course, invoking this "black community" does not automatically entail mystification if one keeps in consideration how pervasive racial segregation remains to this day. Political movements or campaigns that are accountable, relevant to the needs of working-class and poor people, or not grounded in a fictitious racial authenticity can exist, something I am sure Reed would not dispute. However, one cannot hope to find political movements in the black youth who are promoted by some academics as practicing "resistance" through hip-hip or twerking in a quotidian sense without a much larger, critical attention to building movements around issues that affect broad swathes of people, black and non-black. Thus, the harsh words Reed uses for the "raptivists" or academics in cultural studies who place hip-hop on the same level as slave revolts in the past as 'resistance" are rightfully ridiculed, although Reed may be too dismissive of the potential for youth or young people in movements. Nevertheless, he's on to something when he observes on page 167 of Class Notes, "That's the beauty of cultural politics; it can coexist comfortably with any kind of policy orientation." The same could be said about consumerism and Black Power, such as the hero worship of Malcolm X in the 1990s.
Class Notes and Stirrings in the Jug touch on many other issues, of course, but these aforementioned points are particularly relevant and poignant observations. Reed's analysis of black politics and the political economy underneath it aids in understanding the conditions we are in now, especially an era where identity politics, something that has been around for ages, by the way, can perpetuate racial essentialism or be easily coopted by neoliberalism, such as the commodification of "white privilege" or diversity. Some may accuse Reed and other like-minded black intellectuals of class reductionism, but as Reed explains on page 206 of Class Notes, "Nevertheless, for all the limitations of the labor movement and of the individuals who comprise it, there's no place else where the left's political concerns gain a hearing and have a constituency outside the coffeeshops, cultural studies programs, and sectarian hutches." Calling attention to the need for a politics grounded in the material conditions of "workers" that is inclusive and aware of coexisting forms of discrimination or oppression is not some vulgar Marxism or class reductionist reasoning, but rather a keen attention to the importance of structural forces that relegate us to specific locales within a fundamentally unequal society. Perhaps Reed is right, maybe we need to ground reorganization of black politics on liberal formalism for democratic or popular politics. I know I am no longer a firm adherent in black linked fate notions yet remain sympathetic to Shelby's "pragmatic black nationalism." A loose coalition of "black" collective uplift is not, in my opinion, necessarily in opposition with the vision Reed, in my opinion, promotes.
Reed Quotes
Adolph Reed has a penchant for awesome one-liners and precise observations on politics, class, race, and cultural studies. Here are some of my favorites.
From Class Notes
1. "Thus the old quip that any black person with a clean suit and five dollars in his pocket imagined himself a Negro leader" (5).
2. "Community presumes homogeneity of interest and perception at least in principle" (12).
3. "Being victimized by the state should not in itself confer political stature" (69).
4. "If a woman's decision expresses pathology because she makes it in poverty, then we have fallen into a tautology; she is poor because she is pathological because she is poor" (95).
5. "Again, a decade of underclass ideology has denied poor people any human agency in social-policy discourse. They exist only as a problem to be handled, more or less dangerous and alien objects of administration" (104).
6. "There's no such thing as authenticity; it's only a marketing ploy" (137).
7. "Cultural production can reflect and perhaps support a political movement; it can never generate or substitute for one. There is no politics worthy of the name that does not work to shape the official institutions of public authority that govern and channel people's lives. Anything else is playacting" (170).
8. "The demand to see oneself in the text easily reduces to narcissistically anti-intellectual twaddle as anyone who has encountered it as a professor is aware" (176).
From Stirrings in the Jug
1. "The historical arc of black radicalism in the post-segregation era is thus drenched in a bitter irony. The effort to maintain a transcendent, alternative vision that could not be corrupted or restricted by mundane politics actually helped to sustain a climate that increasingly limited the compass of credible black and left options. And this environment, of course, fuels demobilization."
2. "Participating in youth fads (from zoot suits in the 1940s to hip-hop today), maintaining fraternal organizations, vesting hopes in prayer or root doctors, and even quilt making thus become indistinguishable from slave revolts, activism in Reconstruction governments, the Montgomery bus boycott, grassroots campaigns for voter registration, and labor union or welfare rights agitation as politically meaningful forms of "resistance"" (151).
3. "The point here is that the behavioral tendencies supposedly characterizing the underclass exist generally throughout the society. Drug use, divorce, educational underattainment, laziness, and empty consumerism exist no less in upper-status suburbs than in inner-city Bantustans" (190).
4. "What they have been given is a Malcolm X fabricated within an abstracted discourse of black "greatness," a discourse that lines up public figures like trading cards" (201).
5. "Confused and depressingly ignorant performers such as KRS-One, Public Enemy, X-Clan, and Sister Souljah spew garbled compounds of half-truth, distortion, Afrocentric drivel, and cracker-barrel wisdom, as often as not shot through with reactionary prejudices, and claim pontifical authority on the basis of identity with the props of their stage and video performances" (220).
6. "He was no prince, there are no princes, only people like ourselves who strive to influence their own history. To the extent that we believe otherwise, we turn Malcolm into a postage stamp and reproduce the evasive reflex that has deformed critical black political action for a generation" (224).
No comments:
Post a Comment