Discriminating Rage

...Black Power, he argues, shared many of the governing assumptions of the white movements of which it was the ostensible antithesis: a "corporatist" vision of the black "community...

...The notion of an "underclass" offers a limpid illustration of the process...

...He does not suggest that the work will be easy...

...But they are less comfortable when he brands liberal poverty researchers such as William Julius Wilson and Christopher Jencks "poverty pimps" and "upscale welfare frauds...

...Just as the Pentagon is not forced to "sell chicken dinners at Fort Bragg" when it wants a new missile system, poor people should not have to pass the hat when they want to repair an elevator in public housing or to sleep safely in their homes...

...Reed hilariously recounts Jackson's refusal to endorse Michael Dukakis in 1988 until he had been guaranteed use of his own airplane for the fall campaign, comparing the bargain to the private rail car that Booker T. Washington received from his philanthropic sponsors to spare him the indignity of riding Jim Crow...

...Inherently classist, custodial politics emphasized the black elite's special "tutelary role" toward the black "masses"—what we today might call role modeling...

...In the process, he has earned a strangely schizophrenic reputation...

...At the same time, the ad hominem character of some of Reed's writing, his penchant for personal vituperation, has made him perhaps the most reviled figure in African-American studies today...

...He acknowledges the daunting problems these new regimes inherited, problems that were, almost by definition, most severe in those cities in which blacks came to power...

...The term was then recycled in the media and in political discourse, lending a scientific air to shopworn, right-wing charges that the poor were somehow responsible for their own plight, that poverty was a product of "behavior" rather than public policy...

...he asked...

...Erstwhile activists like Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young, his successor, would become not only consummate political insiders but vital cogs in "a new mode of administrative domination," predicated on public-private "cooperation" and the priority of "growth and development...

...How do we explain the revival of Washingtonian selfhelp ideology—now typically garbed as "community empowerment"—or the endless hand wringing about the need for "middle-class role models" for the black poor...

...in the rise of structuralism and, later, poststructuralism, which he sees as providing elaborate theoretical explanations for why the basic institutional order of a society could not be (or, in the latter case, need not be) overturned...

...Commentators across the political spectrum refer unproblematically to "the black community," as if African-Americans inhabited a single, separate space, "simultaneously opaque to those outside it . . . and smoothly organic" to those within...

...Relatively few of the billions of taxpayer dollars invested in new convention centers and football stadiums find their way into the pockets of the urban poor, aside from what might "trickle down" through minority set asides or from the expansion of low-wage, lowskill jobs in an increasingly segmented labor market...

...JAMES T. CAMPBELL is an associate professor of American civilization, Afro-American studies, and history at Brown University, and the author of Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa...

...THE QUESTION for Reed is not why such politics existed but why they persist...

...Reed concedes that custodial politics were logical, indeed inevitable, in the Jim Crow South...

...Yet Ellison's lament remains curiously apt...

...Surely this is a message worth entertaining, whatever one thinks of the messenger...

...the chronic failure to think critically about black politics...

...The most visible products of a generation of civil rights agitation, black urban regimes have become vehicles not for popular mobilization but for the perpetuation of a kind of neo-Jim Crow politics, in which a narrow "leadership" stratum exacts concessions from capital in exchange for delivering black support for (or at least acquiescence to) an ongoing "corporate reorganization of American economic life...

...108 • DISSENT / Winter 2001 BOOKS Although all three books address contemporary political issues, they rest on an argument about history, specifically about the persistence in the post-segregation era of a political style conceived during Jim Crow...

...In today's political climate, simply posing such questions is a service, but Reed also sets out to answer them...

...Such things, for Reed, are among the "basic responsibilities" of government, and it is the responsibility of progressives to ensure that government fulfills them...

...Even the arch classism of black political leadership, the elaborate displays of "culture" and "respectability," had a logic, refuting prevailing racial ideologies that denied AfricanAmericans' capacity ever to rise above the level of brutes...

...Although he has referred to the experience in other writings, he offers the first systematic report of his findings in Stirrings in the Jug, fully half of which is devoted to a discussion of the "black urban regimes" that arose in the years after 1965...

...A professor of political science at the New School, Reed is best known for his columns and essays in such periodicals as the Progressive, the Village Voice, and the Nation, which have earned him renown as a trenchant and fearless radical polemicist...

...Critic Katha Pollitt puts the case simply: Reed is "the smartest person of any race, class or gender writing about race, class and gender" in the United States today...

...Within this political universe, which remains hegemonic in most American cities today, the chief responsibility of municipal authorities is not to redress historical inequities or the imagined grievances of "special interests," but to attract the investment on which the survival of the city as a whole is presumed to hinge...

...Why did so many otherwise subtle thinkers persist in treating black life "as an opaque steel jug with the Negroes inside waiting for some black messiah to come along and blow the cork...

...Last but not least, Reed emphasizes the concrete improvements in the lives of black and poor citizens that the election of black public officials produced, in everything from access to municipal jobs and contracts to reduced rates of police brutality...

...Why is black diversity still so routinely discounted...

...The books under review are very different, reflecting Reed's diverse callings as critic, intellectual historian, political scientist, and activist...

...Above all, all three books exhibit a profound faith in politics—in the right and capacity of all people, including blacks, women, the poor, and other members of the so-called "underclass," to participate as full citizens in the American polity, without the mediation of "experts," "charismatic" leaders, cultural studies doyens, "Bantustan administrators," or other would-be "interpreters" and "brokers...

...disdain for formal politics as "inauthentic...

...Reed shows how a complex of forces—chronic fiscal crisis, the pressures of professional socialization, a pragmatic desire to reassure skeptical whites, the logic of incumbency—propelled black urban officials away from their insurgent roots toward a familiar custodial posture...

...But the real irony, from Reed's point of view, is to be found in the character of black politics...

...Whether assaying nineteenth-century scientific racism (now experiencing an unexpected revival) or the O.J...

...Even sympathetic readers tend to talk as much about the propriety of his writing as its substance...

...This, for Reed, is the only terrain on which a viable progressive movement can be built...

...the struggle to secure affordable housing, health care, and child care...

...The brute facts of segregation and disfranchisement did produce an unusual degree of political unanimity among black Americans, while eliminating the usual mechanisms for selecting leaders and ensuring their accountability...

...Besides opening a door for demagogues, he writes, such an analysis left radicals without the "conceptual tools" to understand the complexities of "post-segregation" black politics, particularly in cities like Atlanta, Cleveland, and Gary, where black regimes were assuming control of local government and social welfare bureaucracies...

...Such projects, the argument goes, benefit everyone, by restoring sagging urban morale and providing the air of dynamism necessary to attract (white) capital...

...the fight to maintain equitable, high quality public facilities, from parks to public schools to policing...

...The wages of this failure were dramatically revealed in Atlanta in 1977, when Mayor Maynard Jackson summarily sacked two thousand striking sanitation workers, most of them black...

...Adolph Reed has spent the better part of twenty years reflecting on this baleful state of affairs...

...Equally remarkable is Reed's capacity to weave together theoretical and empirical analyses, to connect, say, a discussion of the "culture industry" in the work of the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School to a critique of the current academic infatuation with "hip-hop" culture...

...Building political organizations is a "painstaking, slow and time-consuming process," that carries "no guarantees of victory or even shorter-term success...

...As it happens, Reed was a graduate student in Atlanta in the 1970s, and the city became for him a kind of "natural laboratory" to observe the emergence of what he calls a new politics of "race relations management...

...112 • DISSENT / Winter 2001...

...Imagine producers of Nightline dragging out the same half-dozen people to convey the "white point of view" on issues of the day...

...In Class Notes, in particular, he rails against the "besetting sins" of the contemporary left: the elevation of militant "posturing" over substantive political engagement, especially among university-based intellectuals...

...0 • DISSENT / Win ter 2001 BOOKS The ironies are palpable...

...the casual disparagement of electoral politics...

...Indeed, in the perverse logic of disfranchisement, white recognition often served as the primary token of black leadership, as W. E. B. Du Bois complained at the time...

...Much of the problem, he notes, stems from white Americans' perdurable tendency to see black people as fundamentally different from themselves, a perspective that leaves even progressive whites susceptible to stereotypes and simplifications—to media reports about "welfare queens," adolescent "superpredators," the teen pregnancy "epidemic," and so forth...

...Leftists may cheer when he skewers Charles Murray (the notorious author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve) or fulminates against the craven hypocrisies of the Democratic Leadership Council...

...In its nineteenthcentury incarnation, this mode, which Reed calls "custodial politics," had two defining characteristics: an assumption of the fundamental identity of black interests...

...He provides a ringing defense of affirmative action, directed not only at conservatives but at those leftists and liberals who would, in the name of expediency or a misguided "universalism," jettison it...

...In all these books, he highlights the continuing ravages of racism and sexism, and the innumerable ways in which state authority actively underwrites them...

...in which he examines "the curious role of the black public intellectual," reward rereading, though they contain passages that will strike most readers as unfortunate, if not unfair...

...Not surprisingly, Reed is particularly sensitive to this failing in critics on the left, who, he believes, should know better...

...Though invariably defended as a "responsible" alternative to redistributive policies, pro-development policies are emphatically redistributive: wealth flows to the wealthy...

...The difficulty is compounded by the dispersion of Reed's work in various periodicals and scholarly books and journals, making it difficult to appreciate as a whole—all of which makes the appearance of these three new books a most welcome event...

...This politics also placed great value on white "recognition," magnifying symbolic concessions to elite blacks—inviting Booker T. Washington to lunch at the White House, for example—into victories for the race as a whole...

...All these tendencies, he argues, deflect attention away from the real business at hand: organizing large numbers of people into political coalitions to contest for state power and the right to shape public policy...

...When these elements come together—as they do, for example, in the final chapter of Stirrings in the Jug, which charts the refashioning of Malcolm X from political activist to decontextualized, commodified icon—the results are scintillating...

...For all their differences, the books share certain signature characteristics...

...Notorious essays such as "Tokens of the White Left" and "What are the Drums Saying...

...Many of the most pressing issues currently confronting African-Americans, Reed notes, are also faced by millions of other Americans: the search for meaningful work and a living wage...

...WHATEVER ONE thinks of Reed, there is little doubt that his sheer outrageousness has impeded critical engagement with his ideas...

...and the investment of political agency in a narrow stratum of middle-class racial "spokesmen," who presumed to embody and articulate the interests of "the race...

...And they are apt to be completely nonplussed by his withering attacks on prominent black progressives such as Cornel West ("a mile wide and an inch deep"), Manning Marable ("never to be outdone at piling up labels"), and Michael Eric Dyson (whom he variously compares to Joseph Goebbels and to Pigmeat Markham, minus the burnt cork...

...And that means political organizing...

...Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis...

...Opponents deride him as petulant and puerile, a "loose cannon" whose fufiDISSENT / Winter 2001 107 BOOKS ous salvoes serve only to antagonize would-be allies...

...For Reed, however, the telling fact was less the firing itself than the silence that ensued, the failure of black radicals in particular to advance any sustained criticism of Jackson's action...

...In practice, this usually means employing public funds to underwrite private development, through tax abatements, selective investments in infrastructure, and other direct and indirect subsidies to would-be investors...

...A veteran political organizer, Reed is a member of the National Council of the recently established Labor Party) The most accessible of the three books—and the most entertaining— is Class Notes, a collection of Reed's columns and essays spanning most of the 1990s...

...Whom would they choose...

...The episode was doubly poignant, not only because of the circumstances of Martin Luther King's death— King, recall, came to Memphis to support striking garbage collectors—but because Jackson himself had first earned popular acclaim a few years before when, as vice mayor, he walked out of City Hall to join picketing sanitation workers...

...If there is one thread that ties these books together, it is politics—not "cultural" or "identity" politics, not community-based "self help," but formal, electoral politics, focused on the acquisition and exercise of public authority through democratic means...

...A century after the rise of Booker T. Washington and thirty-six years after the Voting Rights Act, we still turn to designated racial "spokesmen"—Jesse Jackson for much of the 1980s, and more recently a coterie of universitybased black intellectuals—to disclose the "black point of view...

...Within the space of two or three years, it had become a core premise of urban poverty research, notwithstanding the category's palpable sexism or the inability of its purveyors to define it in anything but the most arbitrary or nakedly tautological way...

...While Reed's rage is abundantly in evidence in all three books, it is more discriminating than some might suppose...

...It means working "face DISSENT / Winter 2001 n I I I BOOKS to face, door to door," to "build support and solidarity among real people in real places around concrete objectives that they perceive as concerns—people who may not, indeed probably do not, all start from what is generally understood as a left political perspective...

...The fact that Reed is so catholic in his criticisms makes the problem all the more ticklish...

...On several occasions, he wonders aloud whether radicals, both black and white, have heard of the Voting Rights Act...

...The boundaries of the politically possible are not given but made...

...In a neat bit of intellectual history, Reed shows how the concept, which has roots stretching back to Victorian ideas about the "undeserving" poor, entered contemporary discourse in the early 1980s via impressionistic journalistic accounts of ghetto life...

...For all the right-wing raving about "political correctness," representations of AfricanAmericans in both academic and popular culture remain mired in dismally familiar stereotypes: blacks as shiftless, violent, and viceprone on one hand, or emotional, spontaneous, and righteously Christian on the other...

...As Reed's readers have by now come to expect, the books include blistering commentary about Jesse Jackson, who has long served as Exhibit A in the case against custodial politics...

...Above all, building a progressive movement in post-segregation America requires rediscovering a belief in politics, an appreciation, in Reed's words, of the "fluid and contingent" nature of politics and of the essential "openness of history...

...Readers accustomed to thinking of Reed as a bomb thrower will be surprised by the balance and subtlety of his analysis...

...Few if any political analysts today possess Reed's historical imagination, his ability to move between past and present in ways that illuminate both...

...0 RGANIZING, in turn, means building coalitions...

...To be sure, the resources being dispensed today are vastly greater than in Booker T. Washington's time, as is the proportion of black people accorded a share, but the arrangement itself precisely parallels the original "Atlanta Compromise...

...Unlike a number of prominent critics, Reed refuses to dismiss Mayor Jackson and his ilk as dupes or "sell outs," an approach, he notes, that leads only to a stale debate about the "sincerity" and "authenticity" of this or that black leader...

...There is much besides in these books, some of it brilliant, some of it scurrilous, some of it both...

...As Adolph Reed argues, the victories of the civil rights era have generated no commensurate change in the way most Americans think about black life, and about black politics in particular...

...Almost invariably, it is directed against the "trivialization of politics," against those who neglect the political capacities of the oppressed or, worse, arrogate to themselves the right to speak on their behalf...

...For the first time, it is possible to take a sustained look at the thought of one of America's most controversial—and certainly one of its angriest—political analysts...

...in the academic left's embrace of so-called "cultural politics"—"the Straussianism of the Bennetton generation," he calls it—which reads "hidden transcripts" of resistance into the music, iconography, and even "sartorial and tonsorial" preferences of the oppressed...

...a conviction that questions of class and competing interest, so pivotal in understanding white politics, somehow mattered less among blacks...

...Yet one can respect particularity without making it the primary basis of political allegiance...

...Reed clearly enjoys castigating liberals, but he also finds roots of the current impasse in intellectual and political impulses within the left: in the New Left tendency to treat involvement with formal governmental institutions as somehow "inauthentic or corrupting" (an aversion, he notes, shared by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher...

...Who chooses these spokesmen that appear on our televisions, and what specific constituencies do they represent...

...Without Justice for All, which Reed edited and to which he contributed a coauthored essay on public housing, is a more conventionally academic work, bringing together essays by a dozen social scientists interested in what Reed calls "the new liberal orthodoxy on race and inequality" Stirrings in the Jug—the title deliberately evokes Ellison —is also cast in a scholarly mold, but its subject could not be more topical: the demise of black activism, and of progressive politics generally in "post-segregation" America...

...the future is not yet written...

...Simpson trial ("just another instance of the American version of Weimar decadence, in which trash TV provides the basis and frame for collective social experience"), Reed always has something novel and provocative to say...

...DISSENT / Winter 2001 • 109 BOOKS Reed is particularly critical of Black Power ideology, which reached its zenith at precisely the moment that the Voting Rights Act was enacted...

...Many things have happened since then, not least the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which fundamentally transformed African-Americans' relationship to the wider American polity...

...This, Reed insists, does not mean denying difference, ignoring the realities of discrimination or the value that people may attach to particularistic identities...

...At the same time, he reminds us that the primary manifestations of urban crisis—deindustrialization, suburban flight, a declining tax base, collapsing infrastructure—need to be understood not as natural or neutral "structural changes in the American economy," as most liberals would have it, but as the outcome of specific, highly racialized political processes...

...yET EVEN with these concessions, there is no denying the failures of these urban regimes...