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/)