Post-Crow

 The South – Jim Crow and Its Afterlives” by Adolph L. Reed, Jr., 2022

This is a genial remembrance of a youth spent in Jim Crow New Orleans and the Arkansas Delta and then times living and working in North Carolina after the fall of that legal system in the South.  It includes historical events of the day. Reed wanted to write before the actual memories and subtleties of his ‘boomer’ generation as that South fades into the history books.

Reed contradicts some easy anti-racist clichés in the process. He avoids jargon, theorizing and rhetoric and settles for simple stories. He insists that it is Jim Crow that impacts the ‘modern’ South more than slavery. He doesn’t believe that ‘The New Jim Crow’ is an accurate depiction of the situation for the whole African-American population now. He discusses passing – passant blanc as it was called in New Orleans - and its decreasing relevance, as well as its real non-moralistic, practical significance under Jim Crow. He opposes the idea that ‘races’ are real, biologic categories – a concept tied to eugenics. He approves of the removal of the memorials to the Confederacy and the White Leagues in New Orleans. He knocks the Black Panther Party’s unreal and ultra-left rhetoric, and also to a “doctrinaire sectarian group” organizing soldiers – probably RU/RCP. Reed discounts the triumph of a separate ‘black’ economy in the U.S. proffered by forces like the NOI or other black capitalists.

Reed notes the necessary link of white supremacy with exploitation. He views Jim Crow as an assault on working-class ‘whites,’ but in a different way. Finally, he says that race has become many times a stand-in for class in the South.

Reed grew up in a middle-class family below “the cotton curtain.” As a child he visited segregated cafes to get the wonderful French treat, a beignet or a great po’ boy sandwich. He discusses Jews and Italians in the context of the color line, along with white flight. He notes the disparate treatment middle-class ‘blacks’ are now given in the South, which was true even under Jim Crow. As a professional he is usually treated with respect by modern Southerners, even police, but he notes the signs of that old paternalistic, dominant attitude when it comes to proletarian African-Americans. In his old home town, New Orleans, a well-integrated elite now presides over one of the most unequal cities in the U.S. – again because of the continuation of color caste poverty.

Quotes:

Middle-class black professionals and businessmen “were better able than others to shield themselves from the both the everyday indignities and the atrocities of the Jim Crow world.”

“Continuity and change seem indistinguishably linked…”

“Abstractions like prejudice, bigotry, racism and most recently an eternal White Supremacy … tell us nothing about how the order operated, how its’ official and unofficial protocols organized people’s lives.”

Adolph Reed, Jr.

“News that eggplants, satsumas, Creole tomatoes, crayfish or mirlitons had appeared in markets announcing their season’s arrival was information much too vital to be blocked by the color line.”

Boss … “is a derivative of ‘baas,’ the Dutch term for master.”

Poverty… “was the point of the system, after all.”

Under Jim Crow Lumbee Indians … “Delta Chinese, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Arabs and South Asians commonly strove to distance themselves from identification as black.”

“Racial identity is willful or imposed, or both; it has no foundation outside of social experience.”

“Race has no biologic foundation.”

Huey P. Long’s brother remarked, related to the purity of the ‘white race’ – “it was possible to feed all the truly white people in south Louisiana off one plate of red beans and rice.”

He describes the neo-Confederates defending statues of P.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis in New Orleans as having “professional-wrestling-cum-Red-Dawn cosplay fantasies.”

“Lost Cause ideology and the mythology of the Solid South were cudgels employed to demand political conformity among whites and to stifle dissent from ruling-class agendas, as well as to suppress blacks.”

Regarding being in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood: “…race is a visible shorthand for class.”

“Allegory may be rhetorically powerful, but it is not adequate as analysis or explanation.”

Segregation… “…wasn’t merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power…”

“…the core of the Jim Crow system was a class system rooted in employment and production relations…” “…that victory (of the Civil Rights Movement) left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms, affirmed it.”

My only real beef with this wonderful book is that Reed gives credence to ‘race’ as a non-biologic category by repeatedly using the terms ‘bi-racial,’ ‘multi-racial’ etc. without quotes. He does make fun of the term ‘race relations’ but never comes to the conclusion that more scientifically accurate terms are called for, especially due to his assertion that race is a social construct. The U.S. government, the Census, identity politicians, many professors and every Tom, Dick and Harriet media person use it as a biologic fact referring to different humans.   

In 1950 the U.N. and the overwhelming majority of biologists and anthropologists declared that there was biologically only one race, the human race.  Multiple races are a reflection of early scientific racism in the U.S. pushed by those justifying slavery and Jim Crow.  Some attempted to create a taxonomy of human races, sometimes running into the 100s.  All nonsense. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “Rising Tide – the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927” “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson); “Selma,” “How Bigger Was Born” (Wright); “In Search of the Blues,” “Tremé,” “How to Kill a City,” “Caste – the Origin of our Discontents” (Wilkerson); “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Sycamore Row”(Grisham); “Monroeville, Alabama & To Kill a Mockingjay,” “Slavery by Another Name” (Blackmon).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 14, 2022