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Nikil Singh responds to Adolph Reed on FB:
This is my fairly long response to Adolph Reed's latest screed. The
response is intended to be a bit all purpose, since if you've read one
of these lately, you've read them all. As someone who has read and
learned a lot from Reed's scholarly work, I was hesitant to put this out
there, since I want to resist the kind of camp thinking that these
polemics encourage. But for those who honestly struggle with what he has
had to say recently and repeatedly come up short, you may find something
of value here. (You can find the original essay at:
http://nonsite.org/…/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-mak…
Reed claims that focusing attention on racial disparity in police
violence *necessarily* draws attention away from a broader and more
accurate class reading of the sources of such violence, and thus [as
with all such focus on race and racism in his view] *necessarily* allies
with the program of neoliberal market governance, and [again] proves the
general bankruptcy of the black “professional managerial class” (pmc)
and allied (mostly academic/non-profit complex) hucksters peddling
anti-racism snake-oil as a cure for what ails us.
His primary evidence for this is that numerically more whites than
blacks are routinely killed by police (in spite of otherwise significant
racial disproportionality), and that many of the 'whitest states' have
the highest per capita rates of police homicide, and that neither of
these things can be explained by a focus on racial differentials. [BTW
this argument can be made even stronger with attention to county by
county distinctions within states and to urban rural divides.]
The substantive question about making sense of police violence in mostly
white and rural counties is important, but it is also something of a non
sequitur, for Reed's target is actually something much broader -- that
is, that the focus on race obscures and deflects. But there is little
more than presumption to his now oft-repeated axiom, (put forth without
much evidence, but with plenty of ad hominem venom), that attention to
admittedly disproportionate anti-black violence somehow prevents or
“distattends” to other sources of police violence (and to wider, more
pertinent inequalities) -- specifically that related to policing and
punishing the surplus poor, of all hues.
Once again, I am not saying that this point is always invalid. I think
it is true -- sometimes. Anyone who does political work seriously has to
face the ways that cheap identitarian grandstanding can be used to
narrow and undercut a more radical program and widening of egalitarian
affiliations. But there are many other ways to say this and to show
this, just as there are very different theoretical and political
articulations of anti-racism.
What Reed will never consider or countenance, is the possibility that
attention to racial disparity, racial inequality and racial violence
might actually be one important route to more radical and universalist
demands, something that has been shown repeatedly in the history of
black freedom struggles, as well as in labor struggles, and that would
seem to represent the kind of political orientation that he ostensibly
supports.
When this exact kind of thing occurs (in the very moment in which he
writes), as, for example, when black activists lead opposition to
instances of police murder of non-black people in Los Angeles and
elsewhere, or the laudable, detailed, if also messy and demanding
'vision for black lives' platform, Reed ignores it, or is dismissive,
describing the vision for black lives platform, for example, in
unspecific and (ultimately contradictory terms) as "fine" when narrowly
reformist, but otherwise non-strategic, unachievable, “politically
wrong-headed” and “empty sloganeering.”
The alternative that Reed himself proposes is a windy, yet deflating
turn to full-blown abstraction -- non-strategic and unachievable on its
face -- and I dare say, something on the order of an empty rhetorical
postulate: {"Challenging that immensely fortified and self-reproducing
institutional and industrial structure [of the carceral state], he
writes, "will require a deep political strategy, one that must
eventually rise to a challenge of the foundational premises of the
regime of market-driven public policy and increasing direction of the
state’s functions at every level toward supporting accelerating
regressive transfer and managing its social consequences through policing.”}
No duh. Of course, no sign of any such "deep political strategy" is on
offer here, or anywhere I've seen, even in embryo, since Reed's stock in
trade is to find all manner of fault and failure in the guise of
merciless criticism of the most inane and hyperbolic racial
controversies. (Note the thousands of words he dropped on Dolezal, but
that's another matter). Never mind either that his own most recent
politico-strategic recommendation is a call to unite the vote around
Hillary Clinton. Damn those contradictions.
In this piece yet again, I think, Reed shows that his mind is sharpest
when used as a mean scalpel against erstwhile opponents, those on whom
he pours vitriol and ridicule, but that largely masks the fact that his
own argument, (once the invective is cleared away) is a more or less
banal call for a unified class struggle to overthrow the neoliberal
order (after Clinton is elected).
What otherwise could be the motivation behind or purpose of painting
Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors, Deray McKesson, and of course poor Ta
Nehisi Coates, quite distinct political actors, not to mention the
multiple and diverse organizations that signed into M4BL, with the same
broad brush? In what sense can the clearly left, anti-war, and radically
egalitarian 'vision for black lives' platform – whatever one’s
disagreements with its specifics or ultimate efficacy -- be understood
as advocating a focus on race and racism that defaults to a politics of
anodyne, elite diversification -- a clear implication of Reed’s broader
argument?
For someone who claims that political investments in the carceral state
are complex and cross-cutting and demand careful strategic thinking and
painstaking cultivation of new and ever more broad political
assemblages, this argument is not only sloppy, but not a little pernicious.
Particularly egregious is the claim that there has been a moderation of
capricious police violence against black people since the 1960s,
something that is somehow meant to invalidate arguments that emphasize
the long duree of specific black bodily violation in the United States
as a key to racism's durability. But this is actually a kind of bait and
switch, for what is post-1960s mass incarceration if not an evolution of
what has long been an intertwined regime of race and class domination
whose specific lineaments and change over time is precisely what so much
important recent scholarly and public intellectual work has tried to
capture? (There are so many I could cite, [I am not just talking about
Michelle Alexander] but refrain from doing so here, since I do not want
anyone to feel conscripted to my viewpoint here. I will say that for his
most determined acolytes Reed's brand of criticism has become a license
not to read.)
The main irony of all this in my view is the fact that Reed believes
that the focus on a generalized racism *necessarily* cuts the left off
from allies in the fight against the neoliberal order we despise, and
yet, that it is just fine in his view to trash and traduce many
politically active younger people who might actually be recruited as
allies in such a fight, particularly given that quite a few of them have
expressed substantial sympathy for social democracy, if not socialism.
A second lesser irony is Reed’s repeated accusation that the black pmc
has a vested occupational-material interest in a kind of mystificatory
racial discourse, but that Reed, who occupies a very similar structural
position (in the Ivy academy no less), and also produces a highly
repetitive and imperiously unreflective kind of writing, is somehow
immune from the politics of racial representation and clickbait
constituency cultivation. Alas, these days, every vain bonfire attracts
its gang of moths.
Lastly, coming as it does in this time, when openly racist, that is
ideologically white supremacist, mobilization of constituencies by the
right is increasingly viable and politically formidable, attacks on
pretty much anyone who is actively and publicly challenging overt racial
domination as a neo-liberal sell-out is at best irrelevant, and at worse
corrosive of the capacious vision of left solidarity that the current
moment demands.
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