Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene

242 Pages·2000·5.046 MB·English

by  Adolph L. Reed

C L A S S
N O T E S
POSING AS POLITICS
AND OTHER THOUGHTS
ON THE AMERICAN SCENE
C L A S S N O T E S
Posing As P o li ti c s and Other
Thoughts on the A m er ic an Scene
A D O L P H R E E D , J R.
THE NEW PRESS NEW YORK
To Anthony Mazzocchi, Katherine Isaac, and the memory of Bob Kasen, and to Noel
Beasley, Richard Berg, Howard Botwinick, Bob Brown, Ed Bruno, Dave Campbell,
Robert L. Clark, Kit Costello, Beth Gonzalez, Stephanie Karamitsos, Michael Kaufman,
David Klein, Les Leopold, Laura McClure, Rich Monje, Cecelia Perry, Carl Rosen,
Frank Rosen, Leo Seidlitz, Tom Verdone, and Gerald Zero, as well as the many others
who are working to build our Labor Party.
© 2000 by Adolph Reed, Jr.
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:
“Martyrs and False Populists,” “T okens of the White Left,” letter to the editor in “The Underclass Myth,”
“Pimping Poverty, Then and Now,” “Kiss the Family Good-bye,” “Token Equality,” “The Battle of
Liberty Monument,” “Looking Back at Brown? “Sectarians on the Prowl,” and “Building Solidarity” are
reprinted by permission of the Progressive, 4og E. Main Street, Madison, WI53703.
“‘Fayettenam,’ 1969” was originally published in the Objector, the journal of the Central Committee for
Conscientious Objectors.
“Why Is There No Black Political Movement?,” “The Curse of‘Community,’” “Romancing Jim
Crow,” “Have We Exhaled Yet?,” “We Were Framed,” “What Color Is Anti-Semitism?,” “Triumph of
the Tuskegee Will,” “‘What Are the Drums Saying, Booker?’: The Curious Role of the Black Public
Intellectual,” “Liberals, I Do Despise,” “A Polluted Debate,” “Nasty Habits,” “A Livable Wage,” “Skin
Deep,” “The Content of Our Cardiovascular,” “Posing As Politics,” and “The Longer March” originally
appeared in the Village Voice.
“The Rise of Louis Farrakhan” by Adolph Reed, Jr. from the January 28,1999 issue of the Nation.
“Looking Backward” by Adolph Reed, Jr. from the November 28,1994 issue of the Nation.
ISBN 1-56584-482-3 (he.)
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York
Distributed by W.W. Norton 8c Company, Inc., New York
The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing
houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The New Press operates in the public interest
rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational,
cultural, and community value that might be deemed insufficiently profitable.
www.thenewpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
—Contents
Preface v
Introduction vii
part i— Issues in Black Public Life
Why Is There No Black Political Movement? 3
The Curse of “Community” 10
Romancing Jim Crow 14
Have We Exhaled Yet? 25
We Were Framed 29
What Color Is Antisemitism? 33
The Rise of Louis Farrakhan 57
Triumph of the Tuskegee Will 61
Martyrs and False Populists 64
Tokens of the White Left 71
“What Are the Drums Saying, Booker?”:
The Curious Role of the Black Public Intellectual 77
part 11— Equality 8c Ideology in American Politics
The Underclass Myth 93
Pimping Poverty, Then and Now 101
Liberals, I Do Despise 109
Kiss the Family Good-bye 113
A Polluted Debate 119
Nasty Habits 124
A Livable Wage 128
iv — Contents
Token Equality 153
Skin Deep 159
The Content of Our Cardiovascular 144
Looking Backward 148
part hi— T he Question of Practice
Posing As Politics 167
Ethnic Studies and Pluralist Politics 171
The Battle of Liberty Monument 180
Looking Back at Brown 187
Sectarians on the Prowl 192
“Fayettenam,” 1969: Tales from a G.I. Coffeehouse ig6
The Longer March 205
Building Solidarity 207
—Preface
he final stages of preparing this book for publication have
been marked by a singular tragedy. Joe Wood, the editor
who guided the project from its inception, disappeared—
last seen while hiking on Mt. Rainier outside Seattle.
Joe has been more than this book’s editor. His ear, voice, and
hand are present throughout it, and this presence extends far be­
yond his capacity with The New Press. It was Joe who nagged me
for more than a year to write for the Village Voice when he was an
editor there; specifically, he prodded me first to undertake a critical
assessment of the “black public intellectual” phenomenon and then
to do a regular column in the Voice. Since we met in 1991, he also
read practically everything I wrote for the Voice, the Progressive, the
Nation and elsewhere. In fact, we read most of each other’s work in
draft, and we talked at length about nearly all of it. I have valued his
ear, eye, and insight; he has been one of the smallest handful of
readers I imagine when I write.
Going through these last preparations against the stark reality of
Joe’s absence, therefore, is an experience that is simultaneously ee­
rie and ultimately indescribable. He has been a confidant, collabo­
rator, comrade, and crony; a younger brother, fellow searcher, and
pal. It’s all of a piece: enjoying and appreciating his clear prose, in its
spareness and quiet clarity evoking haiku and Thelonious Monk
(comparisons which have met with his somewhat embarrassed ap­
preciation as well); long, widely ranging conversations on the
phone, in bars, watching ball games, sitting around listening to a
potpourri of music, walking all over Manhattan; variously produc­
tive and uniquely mirthful evenings at the Algonquin, Pampy’s, the
Checkerboard, the Green Mill, and the Jazz Showcase; observing in
conspiratorial invisibility (behind boots, jeans, parkas, and a cap)
the bizarre human comedy enacted beneath the surface of dazzle at
B. Smith’s; outlining a journal project at the Mello Yello Cafe and
polishing off the success at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap; kvetching,
commiserating, and advising about the personal and the political;
sharing gossip, info, and speculations about the many crosscutting
vi— Preface
domains of mutual concern; learning and engaging around facets of
each other’s biographies and family stories; comparing impressions
of the complexities of the South, both past and present; his genuine
pleasure and sense of vindication at my sudden, totally unexpected
rebirth in ’96 as a Yankees fan after a lifetime of automatic and un­
equivocal Yankee-hating; his irrational animus toward Michael Jor­
dan and the Chicago Bulls and equally irrational commitment to the
ridiculously overhyped mediocrity that is the Ewing-era Knicks;
our bonding around high regard for Thomas Mann and Ellison and
astonishment at the absurdities of both New Jack basketball and the
ideology of cultural politics.
Joe was young when he disappeared, not yet thirty-five. Most of
his life’s work certainly lay ahead of him when he took that day trip
onto Mt. Rainier to decompress and bird-watch. If he’s gone, many
of us are pained and diminished by the loss, but I know that he
would insist that his demise should be seen, except within his world
of intimates, as no more tragic—notwithstanding his impressive
accomplishments, his even greater promise, his visibility, and Yale
pedigree—than that of anyone else who meets an untimely or unfair
end. His striving to maintain that kind of balance of perspective and
honesty stands out as part of the core of his beauty as a person.
Yet within that world of intimates, part of the difficulty no doubt
for all those who loved him, is the indeterminacy of it all, the per­
sisting hope that somewhere, somehow he’s still among us. As that
smoldering hope threatens to dim, I at least can take some small
solace that, in addition to his editorial hand, encouragement, and
critical judgment, Joe is present in this book in all the aspects and
quirks of our friendship, and he always will be.
September 1999
—Introduction
T his book is built on commentary about current issues and
events in American politics over most of the 1990s. As
such, it expresses an on-going attempt to make sense of
contemporary American political life from a critical perspective.
Most of the essays published here appeared originally in substan­
tially the same form in my regular columns in The Progressive and
The Village Voice, or in similar venues. Writing in those venues pre­
sents a special challenge—to convey complex, perhaps unconven­
tional ideas clearly and concisely to a general audience. I’ve found
this challenge very useful partly because I work out my own views
on many issues by writing about them; to that extent, these essays
are much less a set of didactic pronoucements than a sustained at­
tempt to think things through, and the obligation to communicate
those views effectively to others encourages preciseness and clarity.
Having to ask constantly, “What would this formulation mean to
someone outside my own head or outside a narrowly specialized
community of discourse?” imposes a requirement to bring abstrac­
tions down to the ground, to imagine how—if at all—they appear
in, explain or bear upon the daily world we inhabit and reproduce.
The challenge is more important, though, as a corrective to the
flight from concreteness that has increasingly beset left theorizing
and social criticism, and as a result political practice, in the U.S. in
recent decades.
This flight has taken at least two distinct forms, both fueled by
the decline of popular activism after the 1960s. One route led di­
rectly from activists’ deepening isolation in the 1970s and was
driven by a failure to adapt to the new political situation. The other
was charted by university-based leftists’ accommodations to their
environment during the 1970s and 1980s.
These tendencies, of course, were not the 1960s’ only radical
legacy. Many activists dug in and persisted in the labor movement
and other terrains of organizing, advocacy, and constituency-based
politics, adapting to political realities and the requirements of build­
ing a real base for action while not losing sight of larger principles
viii— Introduction
and goals. More than a few did so after or through periods of sec­
tarian affiliation, often drawing usefully on the discipline learned in
such political organizations while discarding the immobilizing sec­
tarian baggage. One of the most encouraging aspects of the current
period is that a good many of those people have become solid, well-
rooted leaders in trade unions and other popularly grounded politi­
cal institutions.
It is no accident that this legacy of 1960s radicalism goes largely
unnoticed in public discussion around the state of the left. Even in
what passes for a left public sphere there is little sense of creating a
movement as an activity that rests on organizing, working actually 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 commitment to
what is generally understood as a left political perspective or iden­
tification with issues that leftists see as highly symbolic. Instead, the
more gestural approaches to politics associated with the flight from
concreteness have been much more prominent and visible, and
tend to monopolize public discourse about the left. That results
mainly, I suspect, from the circumstance that the left public sphere
itself is sharply slanted toward the social world and sensibilities of
disconnected left intellectuals and political celebrities and, to that
extent, reflects the symbiosis of defeatist thinking and wish fulfill­
ment that have come to shape political thinking in such quarters.
This book proceeds from a different view, one neatly summa­
rized in the Labor Party’s model of an “organizing approach to poli­
tics.” From this perspective, the key fact is that we do not have the
popularly based, institutionalized, mass political movement that we
need to realize any meaningful progressive agenda in the United
States. Therefore, the principal task should be building an active
membership base for such a movement. Strategic political thinking
and critique should be harnessed to that goal as the normative and
pragmatic linchpin of analysis. Finally, the movement we need can­
not be convoked magically overnight or by proxy. It cannot be gal­
vanized through proclamations, press conferences, symbolic big
events, resolutions or quixotic electoral candidacies; it can be built
only through connecting with large numbers of people in cities and
Introduction — ix
towns and workplaces all over the country who can be brought to­
gether around a political agenda that speaks directly and clearly to
their needs and aspirations as they perceive them. This, like all or­
ganizing, is a painstaking, slow and time-consuming process, and it
promises no guarentees of ultimate victory or even shorter-term
success. But there are no alternatives other than fraud, pretense or
certain failure.
This viewpoint has always seemed to me to be simple common
sense. The twists and turns of the self-identified left, both activist
and intellectual varieties, from the Carter years through Clinton—
including more than a decade of responding to the Reaganite on­
slaught by focusing on international solidarity work and serving as
prop soldiers in Jesse Jackson’s Potemkin army, never admitting
what his game so clearly is—underscore just how great a toll the
legacy of defeat has taken on strategic will and clarity within our
ranks. For that reason, I think it is helpful to reconstruct the two
main roads that led to this situation.
One strain of those activists who found themselves cut off from
ready access to any broader audience or dialogue were left talking to
no one but one another. Their isolation was reinforced by a largely
honorable rejection of pressures to abjure radicalism. Practical ex­
pressions of that rejection, however, were often naively catechistic
and misguided strategically. Radicalism’s proceeding marginaliza­
tion heightened fears that attempts to compensate would slide into
an opportunistic betrayal of fundamental radical commitments.
Those fears set in motion a dynamic of intensifying ideological vigi­
lance and purification. As a consequence, many who took that route
succumbed to the temptation to retreat into arcane debates, ever
further removed from issues and concerns that resonate with the
lives of people outside the self-conscious left. They produced a pat­
tern of left discourse that centers on fitting aspects of contemporary
social relations into one or another pre-scripted narrative of global
revolution or noble resistance. Thus a current of activist radicalism
dribbled off into scholastic, albeit bizarrely intense (and often in­
tensely bizarre), debates over what “stage” of capitalism or imperi­
alism the current moment represented, to what extent which
populations in the United States or elsewhere enacted generic roles