The Reparations 'Brand'

“Toward Freedom – the Case Against Race Reductionism,” by Toure F. Reed, 2020 
The battle in the U.S. between an economic & class view of racist oppression and a reductionist ‘identity’ view has been going on since the 1950s.  Recently we’ve encountered academic concepts like ‘class reductionism,’ ‘intersectionality,’ ‘post-racialism,’ ‘ethnic identitarianism,’ ‘white fragility,’ ‘black pessimism,’ ‘racial tribalism,’ ‘micro-aggressions,’ ‘critical race theory,’ etc.  In a complementary manner, ‘white identity’ is also the calling card of the white supremacist Right.  Much of the debate is reminiscent of the 1960s-1970s between labor socialists or revolutionary nationalist and Marxists on one side and liberals and cultural black nationalists on the other.

Reed traces that history, showing how early African-American labor leftists like W.E.B. Dubois, A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin saw a direct connection between economic conditions and the oppression of African Americans.  'Race' and class were inextricably combined.  This was true under Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal when the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the NAACP, the Urban League, the National Negro Congress, the Workers Councils and others supported the New Deal and the rise of the CIO and unionism.  As Reed points out, unionization was one of the best ways to secure a working-class life for African-Americans.

Broad universalist programs like the Wagner Act, the CCC, the GI Bill, the WPA, unemployment insurance and Social Security benefitted all workers, but especially African-Americans.  According to Reed, the New Deal set the stage for the development of the modern Civil Rights movement.  This is why the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” targeted a broad range of discrimination methods but also public-works jobs, a higher minimum wage and extending labor rights to agricultural and home workers - unifying themes that would benefit African-Americans most of all. This is one reason the UAW under Walter Reuther endorsed the march.  The most successful civil rights struggles in the South had specific policy aims, not vague racial identity claims.  ML King eventually began backing labor struggles, anti-imperialist struggles and opposing capitalism in the 1960s.  Even Malcolm X came around to this perspective.

However, identity liberals reject all this.  In the conservative period of 1950s McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam developed to pursue black capitalism and ‘racial solidarity.’  This continued in the 1960s through various fake ‘black power’ views of ethnic solidarity which led to middle-class entrepreneurs and black capitalism, an idea also supported by Richard Nixon.  A similar narrative has been adopted by liberal identitarians to this day.

These two main tendencies within the libratory African-American movement reflects its class structure.  The question is, which one works for the majority of African-Americans, and which one does the ruling-class prefer?  Because that gives you an idea of what threatens the rulers the most.  Here Reed clearly shows that European-American ‘culture of poverty’ theorists like Daniel P. Moynihan and Oscar Handlin, while rejecting fake biological ‘race’ science, chose instead a ‘cultural’ or ethnic understanding of the African-American community.  This resulted in the ideology of a stressed ‘underclass’ unable to climb out of poverty.  The solution was piece-meal, means-tested programs dealing with poverty, ignoring the larger issues of wealth, class, exploitation, jobs or labor rights.  What really followed from ‘the culture of poverty’ analysis that isolated African-American poverty from European-American poverty was mass incarceration, the drug war, cuts to public housing and welfare, urban ‘renewal’ and the privatization of schools.   In a sense, this is also the symbolic Obama presidency in a nutshell.

Reed sees present neoliberal ‘black identity’ politics doing the same thing.  The practical result is the promotion of a layer of African-American professionals, non-profits, business people and politicians, just as happened in the 1960s - while the vast working-class of African-Americans remain far behind.  In a sense, identity politics is isolated from material reality on purpose.  Reed thinks the “War on Poverty” was lost because it did not involve large economic solutions like public work programs, free education, pro-unionism and a higher living wage.  It failed not because it was too universalist but because it was actually narrowly focused and consisted of ‘cultural tutelage,’ as Reed calls it.

At the same time in the 1960s, the service economy was rising while manufacturing - which employed many working-class people including African-Americans - was beginning to decline.  The civil rights laws had little effect in turning this around.  This was the opinion of 1960s labor analysts like Michael Harrington, Rustin and Charles Killingsworth.  They came up with the 1966 ‘Freedom Budget for All” to address the problem economically, a budget never adopted.

Which Way Will BLM Go?

Reed points out that poverty is the inevitable result of an unequal capitalist class system, an inequality which affects everyone. The liberal nationalist method of ‘race reductionism’ wants to disappear class and capitalism and only emphasize skin color.  This ‘ethnic affinity’ plays into the hands of the racists as you might guess.  Ultimately its practical result is to divide the working class, which is the only force able to significantly change political economy. If you read or listen to corporate European-American media to this day, the word ‘class’ almost never appears in the litany of supposedly equal identities. The skin color caste that nestles within the class and employment system is always isolated from it.  Yet color and class are part of one whole.  The media instead promote cultural nationalists who fit the race reductionist narrative like some BLM activists, as well as Ta Nehesi Coates, who Reed discusses, and middle-class neoliberal politicians like Obama who actually ignore ‘race.’

Coates’ seemingly radical answer to Obama ‘post-racialism’ and ‘culture of poverty uplift’ narrative was claiming that “race was the engine of history,” all white people were the problem and reparations the only answer.  In a theoretical sense, these two cultural analyses fit together.  According to Reed, both these neoliberal narratives “divorces what we tend to think of as racial inequality from political economy.” Reed carefully takes apart most of Coates’ historical examples that back-up his position of racial ontology to show their falsity. For instance, while Coates claims that liberals embraced class over ‘race’ after WWII, Reed shows this to be very mistaken, especially after the McCarthy period.

In a searing section of the book, Reed roasts Coates moralistic attempt at ‘reparations’ for slavery, as it plays to middle-class white guilt and political impossibility.  Reed calls Coates’ metaphysical writing a "densely packed fog of black suffering and white plunder” and his non-plan for reparations a ‘brand.’  Reed says non-political demands like reparations are based on a white-guilt petit-bourgeois coalition running on “altruistic noblesse oblige” rather than a proletarian one focused on material and mutual interests.

Coates and other race reductionists’ fierce rejection of universal programs that benefit the whole working class, but especially those in the color castes, jibes with the neoliberal identitarian platform of the Democratic Party leadership.  As Reed says of Coates: “So, while it is unlikely that Coates set out to be neoliberalism’s most visible black emissary of the post-post-racial era, his insistence that we must treat race as a force that exists independently of capitalism has, ironically, earned him this accolade.”

This book is a good refutation of simplistic race reductionism and a hard blow to Coates - neoliberalism’s pivot guard whose business is letting capital score the points.  Reed himself is a social-democrat who thinks that significant anti-discrimination and New Deal programs can blunt or crush institutional racism.  A revolutionary Marxist approach is that these steps will certainly help and are to be supported, but they ultimately cannot overcome the capitalist need for super-exploitation of some sections of the working class.  This is built into the profit and class system.  The imperialist U.S. will never become Reed’s social-democratic paradise, sad to say, because capital itself is becoming rigid and desperate, not flexible and optimistic.

P.S. - Ta Nehesi Coates’ father was in the Black Panther Party in Baltimore.  Coates wrote for Marvel Comics, writing the ‘Black Panther’ character and movie, thus changing his father’s BPP reality into a nationalist children’s fantasy.   Cornel West takes down Obama-supporter Coates in The Guardian:  Cornel West on TN Coates 
P.P.S. – There is only one race, the human race.  All ‘plural’ usages here are derivative of Reed’s usage, not mine.

P.P.P.S. - The African-American identity liberals in Minneapolis coalesced around African-American police chief Arradondo in Minneapolis, but in Rochester NY after the murder of Daniel Prude, BLM has called for the resignation of the African American police chief AND the African American mayor. The former just resigned.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: “Da 5 Bloods,” “Are White People White?” “Viking Economics,” “Cornell West in Toronto,” “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “Slavery by Another Name,” “The New Jim Crow,” “Slave States – the Practice of Kafala,” “The Latino Question,” “Mistaken Identity,”  “Populist’s Guide to 2020,” “White Trash,” “Understanding Class."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 8, 2020