Adolph L. Reed Jr. > Quotes

“Despite its affective packaging, the disposition to catalogue and aggregate neatly rounded-off identities is in no meaningful way radical. Not only is it evocative of nineteenth-century essentialisms, it also reproduces the mindset of the mass information industry, which, though public opinion and market research, sorts the population into the demographic equivalent of sound bites—market shares, taste communities—all in service to the corporate sales effort and management of the national political agenda.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene

“Racial identity is willed or imposed, or both; it has no foundation outside of social experience. Nor, therefore, is racial ancestry or heritage a real thing other than through will or imposition. There are no racial imperatives that demand expression of particular attitudes, behavior, or social practices. Simply put, racial heritage cannot be denied or rejected because there's no such thing as racial heritage. In biological terms, saying "I am black" and "I am not black" are equally meaningless statements.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated, and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology. Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests. At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it. That is the source of that bizarre sensation I felt in the region a generation after the defeat of Jim Crow. The larger takeaway from this reality is that a simple racism/anti-racism framework isn’t adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn’t up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenging the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“People accept what they must but no worse.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“The segregationist order was never stable. It was only the white southern myth of timeless tradition, a myth installed partly at gunpoint as an element of consolidation of ruling class power, that gave it the appearance of solidity. Retracing that history, which contained and shaped but generally lies beyond the insight that can be drawn from personal experience, is necessary to fill in the picture of what the Jim Crow South was. However, because of the ways the past lives imagistically so near the surface of the present in the South, moments occasionally erupt that encourage, perhaps demand, critical reflection on the region's actual history and that history's relation to social and political life today.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“It is also apparent, especially to those familiar with the old order, that all these improvements have evolved from a foundation of social relations and class power built around the architecture of white supremacy. Vestiges of that foundation remain visible within current arrangements, and it can seem commonsensical, therefore, to suspect that it continues to shape the limits of the new structures of routine life. That is one reason, for example, that discussions of the relation between race and life chances in the contemporary United States gravitate so easily toward allusion to the explicit racial hierarchies that defined the Jim Crow era as an alternative to deep examination of the discrete processes that ground and reproduce inequality in the present. But commonsense rests on projection of the familiar and thereby stresses continuity over change. Unquestioned power and deference persist in the region, but their connection to race is no longer straightforward or easily predictable. The tendency to mistake superficially familiar imagery for actual continuity threatens to obscure how the present differs most meaningfully from the past.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“I have often pointed out to students that the Jim Crow order had a specific and relatively brief life span. It was not completely consolidated until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. All of my grandparents were fully sentient and aware of their social environments, if not full adults, before the order's features took definite shape and assumed the form of normal politics and everyday life. And during the roughly three decades or so between the regime's consolidation and its slow, painful unraveling, the system was placed under considerable strain and reorganized internally by the Great Migration of black people out of the South or to cities within it, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the emergence of the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the war. And in large and small ways, black people never stopped challenging its boundaries and constraints–from the struggle over its imposition to its eventual defeat.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“Allegory might be rhetorically powerful, but it is not adequate as analysis or explanation.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“At bottom, identity politics rests on problematic ideas of political authenticity and representation. These derive from the faulty premise that membership in a group gives access to shared perspective and an intuitive understanding of the group's collective interests. This leads to two related beliefs that are wrong-headed and politically counterproductive: that only a group member can know or articulate the interests of the group, and that any group member can do so automatically by virtue of his or her identity.

Clarence Thomas should have been evidence enough to invalidate the premise linking group membership and perspective. Embarrassingly, people like Maya Angelou and Catherine MacKinnon initially cut Thomas slack based on the silly belief that because he's black and once was poor, putting him on the supreme court would turn out OK.

The simplistic belief that any credible member of a group can automatically represent that group's interest feeds a tendency to reduce political objectives to a plea for group representation on decision-making bodies or in other councils of power. That's the Clinton trick: to accept pleas for group representation or "access" while repudiating demands for an issue-based program. The dominant elites can happily satisfy such pleas; token egalitarianism is no threat at all.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene

“What seem to be vestiges of the Jim Crow world in a sense are just that. But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy. Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks. And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were.

This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology. Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests. At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it. That is the source of that bizarre sensation I felt in the region a generation after the defeat of Jim Crow. The larger takeaway from this reality is that a simple racism/anti-racism framework isn't adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn't up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenging the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“At the same time that the Mayor and City Council acted courageously and progressively in ridding the city of those monuments to a loathsome past, the new regime that removal celebrates, as some skeptics note, rests on commitments to policies that intensify economic inequality on a scale that makes New Orleans one of the most unequal cities in the United States. ... Local government contributes to this deepening inequality through such means as cuts to the public sector, privatization of public goods and services, and support of upward redistribution through shifting public resources from service provision to subsidy for private, rent-intensifying redevelopment (commonly but too ambiguously called "gentrification"). These processes, often summarized as neoliberalization, do not target blacks as blacks, and, as in other cities, coincided with the emergence of black public officialdom in and after the elder Landrieu's mayoralty and continued unabated through thirty-two years of black-led local government between two Landrieus and into the black-led administration that succeeded Mitch.

Both the processes of neoliberalization and racial integration of the city's governing elite accelerated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It may seem ironic because of how the visual imagery of dispossession and displacement after Katrina came universally to signify the persistence of racial injustice, but a generally unrecognized feature of the post-Katrina political landscape is that the city's governing class is now more seamlessly interracial than ever. That is, or should be, an unsurprising outcome four decades after racial transition in local government and the emergence and consolidation of a strong black political and business class, increasingly well incorporated into the structures of governing. It has been encouraged as well by the city's commitment to cultural and heritage tourism, which, as comes through in Mayor Landrieu's remarks on the monuments, is anchored to a discourse of multiculturalism and diversity. And generational succession has brought to prominence cohorts among black and white elites who increasingly have attended the same schools; lived in the same neighborhoods; participated in the same voluntary associations; and share cultural and consumer tastes, worldviews, and political and economic priorities.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“We shouldn't expect heroic action from people who find themselves in oppressive systems.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“It is bemusing to observe when formative periods of one's past become grist for scholarly, ideological, and casual interpretation and debate and are constructed and reconstructed from the standpoint of current concerns and debates. That's also inevitable, on one level what history is. A danger, however, is that, when reckoning with the past becomes too much like an allegory, its nuances and contingencies, its essential open-endedness, can disappear. Then history can become either a narrative of inevitable, progressive unfolding to the present or, worse, a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed, and both divesting the past of its discrete foreignness and contingency or reducing it to the warm-up act for the present are handmaidens of ruling class power. The danger of that tendency is especially great in moments of ruling class triumphalism such as this one.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“Lost Cause ideology and the mythology of the Solid South were cudgels employed to demand political conformity among whites to stifle dissent from ruling-class agendas as well as to suppress blacks. In his definitive study of disenfranchisement, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910, J. Morgan Kousser quotes North Carolina Governor Charles B. Aycock, who made the point succinctly, writing several years after a violent 1898 Democratic putsch ousted the interracial Populist-Republican-Fusion government that had won consecutive statewide elections: "The Democratic party is alone sufficient. We need a united people. We need the combined effort of every North Carolinian. We need the strength which comes from believing alike." Segregation was enforced on whites as well as blacks.

That reality is obscured in a contemporary perspective that flattens out history and context into a simple polarity of racism/anti-racism and reduces politics to an unchanging contest of black and white. That perspective compresses historical distinctions between slavery and Jim Crow and ignores the generation of struggle, often enough biracial or interracial, against ruling class power over defining the political and economic character of the post-Emancipation South, as well as ongoing struggle against and within the new order as it consolidated.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“For reasons that have less to do with an abstraction like white supremacy than with the dynamics of a political and economic regime that concentrates benefits at the top at the expense of everyone else, black New Orleanians are disproportionately–but by no means exclusively–likely to occupy the ranks of the dispossessed under that regime. And the terms on which the white supremacist past has been acknowledged and repudiated actually obscure the sources of inequality and dispossession today.

While the segregationist system was clearly and obviously racist and white supremacist, it wasn't merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power that was clearly racial but that most fundamentally stabilized and reinforced the dominance of powerful political and economic interests. White supremacy was and remains an ideology, and a very abstract one at that, and because it's so abstract–its basic premises and categories are fantasies–its practical warrants are always improvised.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“Longevity can be a source of corrective optimism. I recall an occasion early in the George W. Bush presidency when my friend and former physician, Quentin Young, was confronted at a talk by a medical student who lamented that she couldn't imagine being able to win any progressive objectives because the right had been in power all her conscious life. Quentin, who was then about eighty years old, responded that a virtue of having lived as long as he had was that he knew that almost no one, no matter how far left or how optimistic, standing in 1950 would have predicted that the back of the Jim Crow system would be broken within fifteen years. He was correct, and that's a good lesson for us all to keep in mind in this most perilous time in this country and the world.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr.