#adolph reed

[phantomfingers]

Adolph Reed on Movements and Monuments ❧ Current Affairs

<p>What politics is and is not.</p>

[weil-weil-lautre]

The Obamas’ “Rustin”: Fun Tricks You Can Do on the Past

The project of “reclamation and celebration” proceeds from a common impulse to rediscover/invent black Greats who by force of their own will

As I indicate above, Rustin invents the gay affair to underscore how difficult it was to be a black gay man in 1963 but also by definition how much better it is to be one now. It unquestionably is, in many ways, for many gay people. Yet in making Rustin’s sexual orientation the film’s centerpiece, to the extent of never once discussing the specific objectives of the 1963 March and having Tom Kahn’s character trivialize disagreements about direction in the movement (“SNCC, CORE, the NAACP kids, we’re all fighting over agendas and slogans and songs”), “reclaiming” Rustin is also celebrating triumph of a thin neoliberal conception of social justice that is fundamentally at odds with the social-democratic vision Rustin actually pursued.

[is-this-really--life]

"The promise of upward mobility has been a poor substitute for a robust system of social protection, and it has rationalized the existence of degraded employment by characterizing it as part of the natural order of things, in principle temporary and justified based on desert or merit. Most of all, the ideology was tied to a presumption of continuing economic growth that promised indefinitely expanding opportunity structures. The past half century of wage stagnation and even declining living standards for an increasing share of the population has undercut the ideology’s power as a popular faith."

-Afropessimism, or Black Studies as a Class Project by Adolph Reed, Jr.

[zwischenstadt]

I propose that the familiar juxtaposition of race and class forces in debates about American inequality misunderstands both phenomena by treating them as fundamentally distinguishable.  Instead, both are more effectively, and more accurately, seen as equivalent and overlapping elements within a singular system of social power and stratification rooted in capitalist labor relations.  Hierarchies of civic status mediate and manage this stratification system by defining populations and assigning them ascriptively to what come to be understood as appropriate niches of civic worth and entitlement.  These hierarchies evolve and are enforced formally through laws, public policies and quasi-official means - such as officially tolerated but unofficially enacted preferences and coercion - and informally through popular ideologies, social practices and normative sanctions.  From this perspective, race appears as a social category that has evolved to denote an especially durable kind of ascriptive civic status in the context of American capitalism and the political and ideological structures through which it is reproduced as a social order.

Adolph Reed Jr., “Unraveling the Relation of Race and Class in American Politics.”  From Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 15, ed. Diane E. Davis

[st-just]

Look, there are moments when the political situation is absolutely hopeless, and there are such moments, and that’s when you assassinate the fascist judge, or flip the bird to the eagle that’s coming down on you, but I don’t want to rush that moment. There’s nothing beautiful about that moment.

Adolph Reed

[kitkaty731]

I’m just going to post this now because I thought of it and also I am out of my mind.

The Penumbra Podcast: Juno Steel storyline could be read (with some effort) as a kind of expression of Adolph Reed’s most pessimistic vision for the future. That is, that following current liberal goals the fact that the 1% control so much wealth would be fine so long as the 1% was proportionally diverse in race and gender. The whole “This cop killed an unarmed person, but she’s a woman! So, girl power!” idea.

Oh, I can go on.

In Juno Steel’s world no one’s race is stated explicitly, but the names do hint at diversity (the Kanagawa millionaires, the police chief Khan, etc.) which implies that race is not a hugely distinguishing characteristic anymore. The gender and sexual diversity is huge, explicit in the podcast and not remarked upon by any of the characters. Compulsory heterosexuality is GONE in the future, the mayor is nonbinary, Juno is both a man and a lady, and you have to wait for verbal cues to tell what character is wearing high heels, it could be anyone. 

But CLASS AND INCOME INEQUALITY PREVAILS! The Juno Steel future, despite making leaps in gender, race, and sexuality, is a grim hellscape because a powerful few control the lives of the impoverished many. The police are corrupt (although we only seem to run into good cops), life is cheap, and the advances of science have not improved the lives of most people. Hell, Nureyev’s home planet is a genocidal nightmare where a city in the literal clouds shoots indiscriminately down on the protesting masses below! 

Now, is this making a political statement? I think it certainly is trying to, but it is definitely a distorted one. I worry that the authors can imagine a better future with gender/race/sexuality but don’t really have a solid class politics to even draw from. I DEEPLY worry that they think that deep poverty is caused by the individual, which certain plotlines last season seemed to imply. (you’ve got to put a chip in people to make them not squander their new opportunities? I know the villain did this, but it was an odd message). 

Last season was so close to having some breakthroughs, but having the bad guy be a weird mix of Walt Disney and BERNIE SANDERS I THINK!? Sort of showed a profound misunderstanding of both Walt Disney and Bernie Sanders.

Anyway, is this anything? I have to go to work. My apologies to everyone!

[grootpoepjeplasjehoofd]

In rightly rejecting the right-wing fiction of free-standing market forces and autonomous residential choices, Massey and Denton end up dismissing the role of underlying market imperatives altogether. At one point, they explicitly reject the relevance of class as an analytic. But they do so by perpetuating the unproductive class and race dichotomy and operationalizing class in a static, quantitative way (namely, by equating it with household income). In doing so, they find that the upper-income black population still experiences high rates of segregation; ergo, race trumps class.This is true enough, but only as long as one accepts such a reductionist definition of class in the first place. That reductionist view also closes off the holistic analyses that might more fruitfully explore the relationship between political economy and racial attitudes and their spatial consequences. Taking racial disparity as a starting point can subtly coerce a univariate view that precludes attention to many overarching class dynamics. One of these is intra-racial inequality. On residential segregation, a recent study by Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff shows that income segregation among blacks in the 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas ‘grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, at a rate more than three times faster than the corresponding growth of white income segregation’, during the exact time span that is American Apartheid’s focus. This concurrent development does not invalidate American Apartheid’s overall findings, especially its authors’ emphasis that upwardly mobile blacks who move to suburbs still tend to end up in ones that are more segregated.But it does suggest that a bifurcated ‘two societies’ model tells us little about what goes on within the two nodes themselves. Strictly racial interpretation prevents careful consideration of other forces shaping social life. ... That approach is necessary and undeniably useful for seeing general macro-level trends, but there are many micro-level trends that it cannot pick up, including urban redevelopment initiatives, suburban heterogeneity  (however  limited),  and  economic exploitation and gentrification (by both blacks and whites). Black-on-black gentrification, in particular, tends to occur in small corridors, and thus can easily be masked by these conventional quantitative analyses of segregation. Moreover, when cast in the language of racial disparity, such aggregate analysis takes the larger percentage of blacks who are residentially segregated as a marker of little black political and economic power altogether. But this birds’ eye view cannot capture the small but influential number of blacks who defy residential constraints, and in turn, play influential roles in the ‘black urban regimes’, the constellation of black elected officials, political appointees, and pro-growth business interests that exert an enormous impact on urban development. Just as a robust aggregate GDP figure (to take just one example) can mask the economic stress experienced by the bulk of the population, so too can the depressing aggregate figures on minority outcomes – like those in American Apartheid and much racial disparities research – mask the affluence of a handful. Considered this way, the thematic maps periodically trucked out to show pervasive segregation may in fact obscure more subtle trends. For this work and others, then, method and choice of data obscure as much as they illuminate.

Adolph Reed Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and its Analytical Discontents”

[phantomfingers]

Nothing Left, by Adolph Reed Jr.

The long, slow surrender of American liberals