Case Against Race Reductionism
* Book: Toward Freedom. The Case Against Race Reductionism. by Touré F. Reed. Verso / Jacobin,
URL = https://www.versobooks.com/books/3166-toward-freedom
Description
1.
"In the age of runaway inequality and Black Lives matter, there is an emerging consensus that our society has failed to redress racial disparities. But who is the culprit?
For many progressives, racial identities are the engine of American history, and by extension, contemporary politics. They, in short, want to separate race from class. While policymakers and pundits find an almost metaphysical racism, or the survival of an ancient and primordial tribalism at the heart of American life, these inequities are better understood when traced to more comprehensible forces: to the contradictions in access to New Deal era welfare programs, to the blinders imposed by the Cold War, to Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal assault on the half-century long Keynesian consensus. As Touré Reed argues in this rigorously constructed book, the road to a more just society for African Americans and everyone else, the fate of poor and working-class African Americans is inextricably linked to that of other poor and working-class Americans."
2.
"According to Reed, the antipoverty and antiracist policies advanced by Democratic presidential administrations from John F. Kennedy through Barack Obama failed to eliminate racial disparities because they uncoupled racial inequities from the political-economic processes that engendered them. “Since the 1960s, liberal social policies have been shaped by constructs such as ethnic pluralism, culture of poverty and underclass ideology, and even diversity and intersectionality, which have tended to impute a rigidity to race that understates its historically-contingent fluidity,” said Reed.
Reed argues the retreat from class-based politics since the postwar period has led liberal policymakers to attribute lingering racial disparities to either the alleged cultural failings of poor Blacks or the presumed ingrained racism of whites, with little regard for the impact of big economic trends on Blacks. “Ironically, what liberal policymakers have not done, then, is advocate agendas intended to counter the effects of issues like deindustrialization, the decline of the union movement, public sector retrenchment, and wage stagnation that have characterized the last 40 or more years of American life—all of which have impacted Blacks disproportionately.” (https://news.illinoisstate.edu/2020/04/toure-reed-book-explores-failure-of-social-policy-for-black-americans/)
Review
Preston Smith:
"Reed has produced a rigorous intellectual and political history that reveals the inaccurate historical and political claims that underlie race reductionism, beginning with its distortions of the history of the New Deal. The defensible claim that blacks did not receive their fair share from the New Deal often morphs into the charge that they did not receive any benefits at all. In other words, the race reductionist criticism of the New Deal goes from racial discrimination to racial exclusion. The slope is admittedly slippery, and race partisans end up discrediting the public goods approach that the New Deal featured during the 1930s and 1940s rather than zeroing in on the limitations imposed by a resurgent capital. Toward Freedom includes a full assessment of how African Americans did and did not benefit from the New Deal, thus providing a necessary corrective to a crucial underpinning of the race reductionist case. Reed makes it clear that blacks did not receive their fair share from the New Deal; however, to simply stop there is intellectually dishonest and politically reactionary.4 In his first chapter, “When Black Progressives Didn’t Separate Race from Class,” Reed shows that African Americans benefited, sometimes disproportionately, from the New Deal in receiving relief, public employment, and housing. Just as important, he points out, was the New Deal labor legislation, which turned out to be a foundation for civil rights policy from the 1930s to the 1960s. After all, there was a reason why African Americans changed their political loyalty from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party after 1932 despite the segregationist bulwark represented in its southern wing."
(https://catalyst-journal.com/2020/12/which-black-lives-matter)
Details
- Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950. TOURÉ F. REED. University of North Carolina Press, 2008
- 4. Labor Unions, Social Reorganization, and the Acculturation of Black Workers, 1910–1932 (pp. 81-106)
https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807888544_reed.10
Like its work in the fields of housing and job placement, the Urban League’s interest in organized labor was consistent with a general desire to shape the behavior and attitudes of black workers. Although the Urban League left little doubt that it perceived unions as vehicles through which to improve Afro-American workers’ wages, this chapter advances the view that Leaguers also conceived of the union movement as a means of reorganizing the lives of Afro-American workers while simultaneously promoting racial amity. In particular, many Urban Leaguers believed that Afro-Americans’ involvement with unions could enhance job performance, reduce racial tensions, and...
- 5. Vocational Guidance and Organized Labor during the New Deal, 1933–1940 (pp. 107-138)
https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807888544_reed.11
By Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential inauguration in spring 1933, the United States was in the throes of a staggering economic decline. Over the previous few years, the combination of underconsumption and inadequate fiscal policy had devastated the nation’s manufacturing and financial sectors leading to widespread suffering among the citizenry.¹ Nationwide, nearly half of all gainfully employed workers were “underemployed,” unemployment was a whopping 25 percent, and American workers’ wages had fallen by more than 30 percent since 1929. For Afro-Americans, the situation was even more bleak than national statistics revealed. In northern cities, black unemployment was often between two and...
- 6. Employment from the March on Washington to the Pilot Placement Project, 1940–1950 (pp. 139-168)
https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807888544_reed.12
During the 1940s, the Urban League continued to perceive government assistance as essential to achieving its traditional goals of helping blacks obtain employment while adjusting them to the economic realities of the day. The combination of expanding employment opportunities and the swelling tide of left-wing politics ultimately strengthened the League’s commitment to a kind of militancy that generally muted the class implications of the group’s program through the first half of the decade. Even so, Urban Leaguers shed neither their concerns about social disorganization nor their special interest in the plight of the black middle class. The Urban League’s calls...
- 7. Housing and Neighborhood Work in the Age of the Welfare State, 1933–1950 (pp. 169-190)
https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807888544_reed.13
The great demographic, political, and economic shifts taking place during the 1930s and 1940s exerted significant sway over the Urban League’s housing and neighborhood development initiatives. The impact of migration and unemployment on blacks’ living conditions was, as it had been in the group’s first two decades, of some concern for the NUL and its locals in this period. While the Depression had slowed the pace of migration, the Afro-American populations of Chicago and New York grew steadily through the 1930s. To be sure, the growth of black New York and Chicago had tapered off significantly when compared with that...
- Conclusion (pp. 191-196)
https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807888544_reed.14
From the National Urban League’s inception, political activists ranging from Marcus Garvey to former Urban League staffer Abram L. Harris criticized the group for its failure to adequately address the real-world concerns of the Afro-American masses. Garvey, a black nationalist, and Harris, a left-leaning economist, occupied different niches in Afro-American politics; nevertheless, both claimed that the League’s ties to white business and philanthropic organizations led the group to pursue a conciliatory agenda that benefited only a select few.
More information
- Why Liberals Separate Race from Class. by Touré F. Reed. The tendency to divorce racial disparities from economic inequality has a long liberal lineage. Jacobin, August 22, 2015
- Article: The Post-1965 Trajectory of Race, Class, and Urban Politics in the United States Reconsidered. By Adolph Reed. Labor Studies Journal, July 15, 2016
Abstract:
"Comments by Larry Bennett, Cynthia Horan, Cedric Johnson, and Timothy Weaver prompted me to reflect on and connect my work on race ideology, the underclass idea, class dynamics in American politics, and the evolution of urban governance and the terms of black political incorporation since the 1990s. Race is best understood as a particular instance of a class of ideologies that work to justify existing hierarchies by reading them into nature. Understanding race in that way helps to see the notion of an urban underclass as also an ideology that seeks to naturalize hierarchy by attributing it to a population defined by durable cultural and behavioral defects, which make it impervious to social intervention. Proliferation of underclass ideology has rationalized retreat from social provision and underwritten a punitive turn in social policy. It has also articulated with the class dynamics driving black politics to generate a basis for an urban neoliberalism steered by an increasingly interracial or biracial governing class committed to diversity and market-driven social policy. New Orleans provides a useful case examination of these dynamics, both through reconsideration of the character of racial transition in local politics in the 1970s and 1980s and through analysis of the forces shaping the post-Katrina political regime. New Orleans’s political development, pre- and post-Katrina, exposes the inadequacy, indeed the class character, of a critical politics based on antiracism as a frame of reference for pursuit of egalitarian interests. More hopeful signs lie in emergence of a strong labor voice in the city."