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

Reed, Adolph L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565844823 ISBN 13: 9781565844827

Publisher: The New Press, 2000

Synopsis

The classic and deeply prescient collection that explores the multifaceted nature of race, class, and identity in America, from one of our most insightful and iconoclastic intellectuals

Hailed by Publishers Weekly for its “forceful” and “bracing opinions on race and politics,” Class Notes is a collection of critic Adolph Reed Jr.’s clearest thinking on matters of race, class, and other American dilemmas. With barbed wit, Reed takes aim against the solipsistic, individualistic approaches of identity politics, and in favor of class-based political interpretation and action. Reed leaves no topic untouched, from the myth that there exists a particular kind of “Black Anti-Semitism,” to the grift perpetuated by commentators who claim to speak for groups solely based on their identity categories.

Adolph Reed Jr. remains one of our most controversial and necessary interpreters of American politics. These essays illustrate why Reed is “the smartest person of any race, class, or gender writing on race, class, and gender” (Katha Pollitt). Class Notes is a classic text that signposts a path for the Left—out of essentialist gridlock and into meaningful, goal-oriented mass politics.

About this title

About the Author

Adolph Reed Jr. is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of Race, Politics, and Culture and Without Justice for All and the author of The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon, W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought, and Stirrings in the Jug.

Reviews

Reed (The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon) doesn't have much patience with what he views as the mushy liberals of the Democratic Party and black intellectuals like Michael Dyson and Cornel West. In these essays (most of which have appeared in publications such as the Progressive and the Village Voice), Reed offers his bracing opinions on race and politics in the 1990s from a "left-critical perspective." Black "leadership" substitutes for popular mobilization, he argues, while nostalgia for black unity under segregation falsifies the past and serves reactionary interests. He finds consonance between the black establishment and Louis Farrakhan in that they consider the inner-city poor "morally defective," and contends that the white Left won't confront the complexity of black politics ("They simply do not see political differences among black people"). In perhaps the most memorable essay, Reed pungently analyzes what he calls the "crisis of black intellectual [life]" (in which a "lucky few," West and Henry Louis Gates Jr., for instance, direct themselves more to a white audience than to blacks). The author, a leader in the nascent Labor Party, values the primacy of class politics over so-called cultural or identity politics ("If we don't organize on a class basis, we'll be picked off one at a time, as we were with 'welfare reform' "), preferring "real" class politics, based on people's daily lives. But his snapshots of such organizing based on class are too briefly presented for readers to evaluate. Similarly, his forceful but too-brief argument against stigmatizing the "underclass" ("poor people are just like everyone else") invites a deeper critique of the work of those (e.g., Nicholas Lemann) whom he attacks.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reed, who teaches African American studies and political science at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has long been a provocative contributor to the national conversation about race. Many of this volume's 30 essays are drawn from Reed's columns in The Progressive and The Village Voice. In the section "Issues in Black Public Life," Reed addresses segregation, anti-Semitism, the lack of a black political movement, O. J. Simpson, and Louis Farrakhan. In "Equality and Ideology in American Politics," he considers the black underclass, family values and welfare reform, and Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve. In "The Question of Practice," Reed looks back at the Brown decision and at New Orleans' controversial Liberty Monument, examines ethnic studies in the academic world, and discusses "building solidarity." At the center of Reed's analysis is his belief that "understanding American politics and organizing effectively to operate within it require recognizing the centrality of class forces and dynamics in shaping consciousness and establishing both lines of cleavage and possibilities for solidarity." Mary Carroll

Edition details

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565844823
• ISBN 13: 9781565844827
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320