Prof. Adolph Reed Jr. speaks with Andy about his new book *The South*; criticisms of neoliberal ('race first') antiracism; and locating racial ideology within histories of class rule.
"It's not a memoir" "I'm a private person...trying not to draw attention to myself... Catholic upbringing... it just feels like vanity". From the New Yorker piece."He told me my interest in the book made him regret writing it; he did not want to receive mainstream attention for his reminiscences." His comment here that the magazine is only read by out of towners...
Reed is a snob. Now talk to me about the politics of snobbery.
Another black academic elitist, friend of Reed, writing at Nonsite, the name itself an elitist in-joke
"Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism....Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism."
No shit. Call it progress. A materialist would say that this is the beginning of the end of the false equivalence of race and class. We have Buppies now! A Palestinian or an ironist would say that African Americans are now granted the indulgence of liberal ethnonationalism in the New York Times once granted only to Jews. But black Asian tensions follow the same old model.
Yes, it's a memoir, but Reed is a political scientist following Weber's neurotic self-abnegation. I'll quote myself this time: "The fantasy of objectivity is the fantasy of the universal through the elision of the particular, beginning with the elision of the particular self." It's a bit late in the day for modernist tropes, but here we are.
One of these days someone is going to remind African American liberal ethnonationalists that the conquered native African population of Liberia didn't even get the right to vote until 1946 or full legal equality until 1964. In the meantime—and ignoring for now the actual racism—we get the criticism of snobbery and moralism. Reed is bothered that the black bourgeoisie isn't leftist. He's conflating race and class. Get the joke?
Thank you for the interview. Andy, what is the Barbara Fields essay that you mentioned you teach every semester?
Stick to the atlantic and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, etc, Seth.
"It's not a memoir" "I'm a private person...trying not to draw attention to myself... Catholic upbringing... it just feels like vanity". From the New Yorker piece."He told me my interest in the book made him regret writing it; he did not want to receive mainstream attention for his reminiscences." His comment here that the magazine is only read by out of towners...
Reed is a snob. Now talk to me about the politics of snobbery.
Another black academic elitist, friend of Reed, writing at Nonsite, the name itself an elitist in-joke
https://nonsite.org/the-triumph-of-black-lives-matter-and-neoliberal-redemption/
"Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism....Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism."
No shit. Call it progress. A materialist would say that this is the beginning of the end of the false equivalence of race and class. We have Buppies now! A Palestinian or an ironist would say that African Americans are now granted the indulgence of liberal ethnonationalism in the New York Times once granted only to Jews. But black Asian tensions follow the same old model.
Yes, it's a memoir, but Reed is a political scientist following Weber's neurotic self-abnegation. I'll quote myself this time: "The fantasy of objectivity is the fantasy of the universal through the elision of the particular, beginning with the elision of the particular self." It's a bit late in the day for modernist tropes, but here we are.
One of these days someone is going to remind African American liberal ethnonationalists that the conquered native African population of Liberia didn't even get the right to vote until 1946 or full legal equality until 1964. In the meantime—and ignoring for now the actual racism—we get the criticism of snobbery and moralism. Reed is bothered that the black bourgeoisie isn't leftist. He's conflating race and class. Get the joke?