Race Reductionism

Discussion

"The Reeds are sharply critical of this new orthodoxy. Racial inequalities, they claim, are most effectively understood, and combated, in the context of political economy. But prevailing liberal discourse, Adolph Reed argues, posits decontextualized, abstract racism and white supremacy as “the definitive source of any contemporary inequalities affecting African-Americans.”

To the Reeds, such thinking is abstract, ahistorical and essentializing.

It is abstract since it depicts racism as a pervasive force without specifying the particular mechanisms through which racial inequalities are perpetuated. For example, Touré Reed argues that Southern Democrats’ indisputable racism does not adequately explain why Blacks were excluded from Social Security under the New Deal. It is true that Social Security did not cover agricultural and domestic workers, occupations that accounted for nearly two thirds of the Black labor force. But while 23 percent of agricultural and domestic workers were Black (more than double their share of the population), three-quarters were white. In addition, disproportionately white categories like the self-employed, professionals and government employees were also excluded. These limitations in coverage, Reed suggests, are better explained by factors like the administrative difficulties of collecting taxes and landlords’ interest in keeping labor costs down than by racism or white supremacy. (Reed acknowledges that racism played a much more central role in federal mortgage policies—but he insists that housing discrimination was grounded not in “primordial prejudice” but in specific political and economic configurations.)

Reed argues that Blacks did substantially benefit from many New Deal programs, especially from union-friendly labor legislation and court decisions. And as Adolph Reed has noted, Blacks also benefited from participation in Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps and Public Works Administration programs in numbers greater than their share of the population (though smaller than their share of those in need of work). The Reeds therefore reject both the argument that the New Deal was intrinsically racist and the corollary—increasingly common on the identitarian left—that universalist, class-based programs cannot reduce racial inequalities.

Race reductionist thinking is ahistorical because it treats racism as a timeless, ubiquitous force that remains undiminished across social, cultural and political contexts as different as the Jim Crow South—where racial subordination was codified and enforced by both law and custom—and present day America. H. Richard Milner IV, for example, claims that racism is “persistent, permanent and omnipresent” in American society. This ahistoricism is carried to an extreme in the Afro-pessimist philosophy of Frank B. Wilderson III, for whom “Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness,” a “condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress.” (As Adolph Reed dryly notes, “only the comfortable strata, and those aspiring to join them, can luxuriate in defeatism of that sort.”)

Ahistorical race reductionism, according to Adolph Reed, blinds us to the historically specific mechanisms that have produced different forms of racial injustice—as well as to the differences between the struggles that have sought to overcome them:

[This] sleight of hand … turns earlier struggles against concrete injustices like slavery, convict labor, sharecropping, disfranchisement, state-imposed segregation, [and] housing and employment discrimination into generic struggles against racism and white supremacy. These generalized struggles can never be won because, like terrorism, the target is an abstraction that can never be definitely identified and vanquished.

Race reductionist thinking is essentializing because it assumes that Black people share a single culture, and that their interests cannot be at odds. This is an example of what I have called “groupism”: the tendency to treat ethnic groups, races and nations as substantial, homogeneous entities to which interests and agency can be attributed. Such invocations of a putatively unitary community, Adolph Reed argues, often serve the elites who claim to speak in its name, while those spoken for disappear “as all but a communitarian abstraction to be ventriloquized” by the spokespersons. In reality, there is no “universal or near-universal set of singularly racial concerns that override their interests as workers, parents, teachers, students, realtors, real estate investors, tenants [or] homeowners.”

Race reductionism not only distorts the way we understand the world: it influences the way we seek to change it—in a surprisingly conservative direction. By “racializ[ing] the working class as white,” Adolph Reed argues, it steers working class Black (and brown) Americans away from class solidarities, folding them instead “into the concerns articulated by the professional and middle-class agenda-setting strata.” And by portraying broadly redistributive, universalist programs as “inimical to black people’s particular interests and concerns,” it undermines support for policies that would disproportionately benefit Black and brown people." (https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-danger-of-race-reductionism?)