I recommend bookmarking both pages and reading his writings whenever you have the time and interest. I won’t say I completely agree with everything he says even now, but he saw through a number of things that I was fooled by at the time—starting with Barack Obama.
Here’s what he wrote in the Village Voice in 1996, when Obama was just getting started in politics. I wasn’t able to find a link to the full article.
In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds.
His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance.
I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.
Source: Wikipedia
I think Reed’s analysis is correct. The thing he does not explain is why his ideas have gotten so little traction. Reed didn’t think Obama would be elected. He didn’t foresee that Black Lives Matter activism would sweep the nation (nor did I).
If he is right, then a broad-based coalition, such as the one led by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. would be the key to constructive social change. Maybe it will. But, at least for now, it is the race-specific Black Lives Matter than has captured the public’s imagination.
LINKS
Liberals, I Do Despise by Adolph Reed Jr. in The Village Voice (1996)
The Case Against Reparations by Adolph Reed Jr. for The Progressive (2000).
Undone by Neoliberalism, by Adolph Reed Jr. for The Nation (2006) About New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina.
Obama, No by Adolph Reed Jr. for The Progressive (2008)
Race and the New Deal Coalition by Adolph Reed Jr. for The Nation (2009)
Adolph Reed Jr. on Sanders, Coates and Reparations, an interview segment from Doug Henwood’s Behind the News (2016)
How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence by Adolph Reed Jr. for nonsite.org. (2016)
Splendors and Miseries of the Antiracist “Left” by Adolph Reed Jr. for nonsite.org. (2016)
Black Politics After 2016 by Adolph Reed Jr. for nonsite.org (2018)
The Myth of Class Reductionism by Adolph Reed Jr. for The New Republic (2019)