Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. New Orleanian, political scientist, and according to Cornel West, “the greatest democratic theorist of his generation” - takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. leaders agreed to cancel it, a striking moment as perhaps the nation’s most powerful Socialist organization rejected a Black Marxist professor’s talk because of his views on race.A narrative account of Jim Crow as people experienced it “That’s cowardly and cedes power to the racial capitalists.”Īmid murmurs that opponents might crash his Zoom talk, Professor Reed and D.S.A. “We cannot be afraid to discuss race and racism because it could get mishandled by racists,” the caucus stated. How could we invite a man to speak, members asked, who downplays racism in a time of plague and protest? To let him talk, the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus stated, was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.” His chosen topic was unsparing: He planned to argue that the left’s intense focus on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black people undermined multiracial organizing, which he sees as key to health and economic justice. Possessed of a barbed wit, the man who campaigned for Senator Bernie Sanders and skewered President Barack Obama as a man of “vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics” would address the D.S.A.’s largest chapter, the crucible that gave rise to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a new generation of leftist activism. In late May, Professor Reed, now 73 and a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, was invited to speak to the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter. Lasting victories were achieved, he believed, when working class and poor people of all races fought shoulder to shoulder for their rights. "Adolph Reed is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities.Īlong the way, he acquired the conviction, controversial today, that the left is too focused on race and not enough on class.
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