Adolph L. Reed Jr.

Views

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.

Publications

Selected articles

• "The Myth of Class Reductionism". The New Republic
• "Antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left". Dialectical Anthropology 42.2
• "The Kerner Commission and the Irony of Antiracist Politics". Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 14.4
• "The Post-1965 Trajectory of Race, Class, and Urban Politics in the United States Reconsidered". Labor Studies Journal 41.3
• "The Black-Labor-Left Alliance in the Neoliberal Age". New Labor Forum 25.2
• "No Easy Solutions". Jacobin
• "Doubling Down in Atlantic City". Jacobin
• "Bernie Sanders and the New Class Politics". Jacobin
• "From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much". Common Dreams
• "The James Brown Theory of Black Liberation." Jacobin.
• "The Strange Career of the Voting Rights Act: Selma in Fact and Fiction". New Labor Forum 24.2
• "The Crisis of Labour and the Left in the United States'".. Socialist Register. 51.
• "Michelle Goldberg Goes to Washington". Jacobin
• "Nothing Left: The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals". Harpers
• "Adolph Reed, Jr. Responds". New Labor Forum 23.1
• "Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism". New Labor Forum 22.1
• "Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and its Analytical Discontents". Socialist Register 48
• "Why Labor's Soldiering for the Democrats is a Losing Battle". New Labor Forum 19.3,
• "The 2004 Election in Perspective: The Myth of 'Cultural Divide' and the Triumph of Neoliberal Ideology". American Quarterly 57.1
• "Reinventing the Working Class: A Study in Elite Image Manipulation". New Labor Forum 13.3
• "Race and the Disruption of the New Deal Coalition". Urban Affairs Quarterly 27.2
• "W.E.B. Dubois: A Perspective on the Bases of his Political Thought". Political Theory 13.3
• "Pan-Africanism: Ideology for Liberation?". The Black Scholar 3

  Books and chapters

• "Foreword" in Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement. Heather Gautney. Verso Books
• Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought. Routledge
• "The study of black politics and the practice of black politics: their historical relation and evolution" in Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics edited by Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud. Cambridge University Press
• "Class Inequality, Liberal Bad Faith, and Neoliberalism: The True Disaster of Katrina" in Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction Edited by Nandini Gunewardena and Mark Schuller. AltaMira Press
• "Introduction," "Class-ifying the Hurricane" in Unnatural Disaster: The Nation on Hurricane Katrina. Editor Betsy Reed. Nation Books.
• "Why Is There No Black Political Movement?" in Cultural Resistance Reader by Stephen Duncombe. Verso
• Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality. Routledge
• Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. The New Press
• Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era. University of Minnesota Press
• W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line
• "Demobilization in the New Black Political Regime: Ideological Capitulation and Radical Failure in the Postsegregation Era" in The Bubbling Cauldron: Race, Ethnicity, and the Urban Crisis edited by Michael Smith and Joe Feagin. University of Minnesota Press
• "The Allure of Malcolm X and the Changing Character of Black Politics" in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image edited by Joe Wood. St. Martin's Press. Reprinted in Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era.
• The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics
• "Pan-Africanism as Black Liberalism: Du Bois and Garvey" in Pan-Africanism: New Directions in Strategy edited by Ofuatey-Kodjoe. University Press of America
• Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s
• “Black Particularity Reconsidered”. 39. New York: Telos Press. Reprinted in Is It Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism Editor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. University of Chicago Press.