Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era

by Adolph L. Reed Jr., Julian Bond. (Foreword)

Skeptical of received wisdom, Reed casts a critical eye on political trends in the black community over the past thirty years. He examines the rise of a new black political class in the aftermath of the civil rights era, and bluntly denounces black leadership that is not accountable to a black constituency; such leadership, he says, functions as a proxy for white elites. Reed debunks as myths the 'endangered black male" and the "black underclass, " and punctures what he views as the exaggeration and self-deception surrounding the black power movement and the Malcolm X revival. He chastises the Left, too, for its failure to develop an alternative politics, then lays out a practical leftist agenda and reasserts the centrality of political action.

Genres: Race, Politics, History, Theory, Nonfiction, American History, The United States Of America

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 24, 1999

About the author

Adolph Leonard Reed Jr. is an American professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in studies of issues of racism and U.S. politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School for Social Research and he has written on racial and economic inequality.

Reviews

[David Selsby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look, if you’re going to read one political scientist in America right now, read Adolph Reed Jr. He’s the best. Two things set Reed apart from most intellectuals: 1) He is a spectacular writer and 2) He is fearless. Let’s start with the first. Reed has a way of putting together words that is unique and powerful. He is also currently the most astute observer of Black politics in the last fifty years. He is the most astute and intelligent commentator on identity politics and the nexus of the progressive wing of the Demoocratic Party and identity politics and the degree to which that wing weaponizes identity politics, foreclosing advances in the electoral realm due to a performative liberalism that alienates working-class voters necessary to building a strong coalition.

Reed is the best writer of non-fiction I’ve come across in years. He uses the right words in the right spots, creating an exactitude and power that is rare. He is also refreshingly and impressively honest. It’s hard to be honest in life. When you are honest, you lose friends, you lose opportunities, and you lose money. When you are honest you act such so that the self-respect you get from the manner in which you conduct yourself trumps your desire to get the things you could get if you didn’t conduct yourself in a way that is honest and full of integrity and self-regard. Basically, honesty shows you aren’t afraid of standing alone. Reed is acerbic and aims for the mark. He is tough but fair. He knows what he feels and he knows what he’s seen, and he isn’t afraid to write it down. That is a rare trait. Most people and most writers pull punches. It’s easier to pull punches in your professional life; it’s easier to pull punches in your everyday life. In lots of cases it’s advisable to pull punches. If you’re coaching Little League and you’re talking politics with the other moms and dads, it’s okay to pull punches insofar as you don’t lower the boom of how you surmise a specific political issue. Why? Because the people around you are doing the same (pulling punches). You are acknowledging that in this powwow on the side of the field, no one’s political commitments are more important and deserve to be heard more than anyone else’s. The realm in which you are engaging in conversation isn’t necessarily political (a Little League field), so you are a buffoon if you try to transform the side of the field into a realm of political contestation.

Writing articles is a realm of political contestation. Adolph Reed is making political interventions. Many of his most spectacular articles, just absolutely fantastic material, have been published in The New Republic, Labor Notes, political science journals, and social science journals. He also publishes on the website nonsite. Most of “Stirrings in the Jug”’s pieces were originally published in political science journals and other academic journals. He has every right to be harsh, to critique, to be decisive. I don’t think he’s intentionally trying to hurt people’s feelings, but ultimately intellectuals can’t worry about the consequences when they tell things how they see it; if they are honest and the byproduct of that honesty is hurt feelings, so be it.

I’m not going to tell you what Adolph Reed’s political affiliation is if that’s even the right word (affiliation). It’s like the teenager who loves Metallica and Megadeth but also loves The Smiths and New Order. The teenager calls himself a hesher, but he also loves The Smiths and New Order. Is he a “hesher”? What “is'' a hesher”? If he is a hesher is it confusing he also likes The Smiths and New Order? We are not anything. I am not this. Reed is not that. We are human. All seven billion of us on Earth are humans. Reed has been influenced by parents, family members, authors, books, teachers, mentors. He’s also been formed in an inscrutable, non-quantifiable way by his genes, brain chemistry, etc. So it isn’t important, and perhaps it’s even distracting, to put an adjective in front of what type of professor Reed is or what kind of an academic he is. This speaks to a significant aspect of Reed’s political project and another thing that makes him an original thinker--he isn’t concerned about what sect you’re a part of; he’s not concerned about what color your skin is or what your past political commitments have been; what Reed is concerned about is people coming together in the name of achieving discrete political objectives; discrete political victories.

Some of these essays are really knotty and at times hard to follow. He goes into depth on the machinations of Black politics at the municipal level. He charts the different configurations that evolved in municipalities over time and the power dynamics that led to these configurations and the constituencies that grew to support these configurations. Reed is interested in what prevents Americans from getting good things. Why don’t we have more good things for our citizens? Regardless of some of the essays at times being digressive, they are always engaging because of the mastery of Reed’s prose.

I’ve realized in my old age one of the things, perhaps the most important thing, that makes writing great is truth and honesty. However, putting into words exactly what one is feeling and thinking is incredibly difficult. We hedge at every moment; at every word, we are susceptible to hedging. It’s very, very, very difficult and very rare for someone to write things exactly how he or she is feeling them. Reed’s writing has a specificity and exactitude that is exhilarating. When you read Reed’s essays, especially the longer ones where he takes the time to stretch out his arguments, you feel you are reading someone who is very, very intelligent. It’s nice reading the work of someone whom you feel is so so smart; so sharp.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Does anyone actually read Adolph Reed's scholarly work? It's a question well worth asking because the contents of this collection present a rather different and more complex picture of him than his more recent mediagenic activities, which mostly seem to revolve around announcing repeatedly that we should all use the word "race" less and the word "class" more. Instead, through these essays from the 1980s up to the 1990s we see him trying to grapple with the changing -- but by no means declining -- significance of race through the height of the neoliberal period, as the formal market equality achieved by the Civil Rights movement gave way to new forms of racialized inequality and a new Black elite.

Chief among the bogeymen Reed attacks is the idea of a "corporate racial subject" -- the idea that all Black people have a more or less identical set of interests, against which anything else represents inauthenticity or betrayal. Reed traces the ways in which this idealist understanding of race continued to mold Black politics well after the fall of Jim Crow. He locates it in the nationalist and Marxist-Leninist tendencies of the Black Power era which decided to forgo an analysis of the changing material construction of race, and opted instead for creating quasi-theological "Black value systems" that served largely to prop up the personal authority of individual leaders. He finds it in Black municipal elected officials who promoted a "pro-growth" agenda of attracting corporate investment to deindustrializing cities through generous incentives and advertised this as a way of advancing the "racial interests" of Black people. He finds it in the resurgent popularity of Malcolm X iconography in the 80s-90s, which he says is a form of nostalgia for a bygone era of Black activism and ascendance, a process of ventriloquism through a dead subversive leader where (similarly to Black Power mysticisms) any hot take on a disorienting present can be justified as being "what Malcolm would have done".

And of course, there is his hatred for Jesse Jackson, who Reed denounces as the apotheosis of all of this -- a Black politician who self-consciously took up the "race leader" mantle in his 1984-1988 Presidential campaigns, compartmentalized the Black vote and in doing so relieved the other candidates of the responsibility to address racial inequality themselves, drew the uncritical fawning support of white leftists, and used his minimal achievements to consolidate his relationships with the Democratic establishment. Reed's distaste for Jackson is so powerful that he makes a deliberate detour to take shots at him in his essay on Malcolm X, which is pretty funny.

These takes are solid and hard to disagree with. The trouble with all this is, Reed's critique is grounded largely in the ideological terrain of his adversaries. He expends so much energy denouncing mystifications as mystifications that his efforts to understand why they are being deployed, and what interests they serve, are significantly weakened. He announces repeatedly that there is an urgent need to analyze the material situation and advance a concrete political program to transcend it, but these appear only to be gestures -- at least in this collection, he makes only halting efforts to do so himself. Surely he knows that the crowd of navel-gazing academics and leftist intellectuals who he attacks in these essays have no intention of doing so themselves. He seems to have made a career of denouncing these people, and worries that he will jeopardize it if he goes any further than denunciation. I'm reminded of how Ruth Wilson Gilmore has self-consciously identified herself as part of the "prison-industrial complex" because she has made a career of critiquing it. Similarly, one might say Reed is a member of the "race leadership-industrial complex".

The kernel of a more complete materialist critique seems to exist in Reed's analysis of the "Black urban regime" -- a phenomenon in which mass "white flight" from urban cores resulted in heavy concentrations of Black people, and Black electoral power, as cities were deindustrializing. The "Black urban regime" consists of a new set of professional Black politicians making deals with white business elites to attract capital back into cities -- largely, in this period, in the form of corporate administrative offices -- while pacifying a largely working-class Black base. In Reed's telling, the political program of such regimes usually consists of (1) incentives for real estate developers with (2) affirmative-action stipulations for "minority" hiring and contracting, and (3) some modest material improvements for the Black working class, such as hiring by the municipal government and improved service delivery.

According to Reed, the affirmative action program is largely of benefit to the Black entrepreneurial and professional class. I think he could have made much more of this fact because it seems that this class is the true social base of the Black politicians Reed attacks, and this pro-development program with racial stipulations has made a lot of its members fairly rich. Doing this could have helped him to expose racial ideology as specifically a bourgeois ideology, and to analyze the ways racial policing and mass incarceration have benefited this Black bourgeoisie by enabling lucrative urban redevelopment. When Detroit's first Black mayor, Coleman Young, ran on his pro-growth platform, the only alternative he could offer to his white opponent's "law and order" slogans was the slogan "law and order, with justice".

There also seems to me to be a strong comparison to the ways postcolonial capitalists of the Global South have wielded state power and their hegemony over local populations to attract Western investment in the neoliberal period. Reed dismisses one theorist who calls Black urban regimes "quasi-neocolonial", on the grounds that Black politicians are often affirmatively "pro-growth" themselves and are not somehow coerced into their relations with white business interests. But isn't that what "neocolonialism" really is -- the dominion of Western finance enforced by a profit-hungry postcolonial bourgeoisie? And despite this uneasiness with colonial comparisons, Reed has no trouble denouncing Black politicians as "Bantustan administrators" elsewhere. There is a lot that could be explored here (such as the antagonism between Black bourgeois interests and white financial interests), and some contradictions left unresolved, but Reed seems quite limited here by his focus on politicians as the exponents of a racial ideology he detests.

Relatedly, there's some other stuff in here about "underclass ideology" -- a popular way of theorizing about the racialized urban poor in the 80s-90s, which largely revolved around assigning some section of the population with pathological cultural traits that supposedly kept them poor, largely about the alleged breakdown of "the family", "welfare dependency", and "drugs". Core to this ideology was the idea that these populations needed to better internalize dominant "social norms" in order to "integrate" with society. These theories were endorsed by both liberals and conservatives, both Black and white, and while they served to justify state violence and crackdowns against largely poor Black communities, they also reinscribed the "leadership role" of the "Black middle class" in managing and controlling them. This seems to make it clear that it was Black capitalists, and not Black politicians, who were the true "race leaders" all along.

[Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This perhaps is the most essential reading one can undertake in Black politics I can imagine. The comprehensive analysis done be professor Reed in this collection of essays is masterful and literally brilliant. I know few Black academics who have exposed how intra-class conflict within the Black community breads a leadership model completely incompatible with the interests of large segments of the African American population. Adolph Reed, Jr. challenges almost every accepted trope of Black politics and black activism with a refreshingly merciless honesty. All sacred cows are slaughtered and sent to the butcher in this book. Professor Reed should not be ignored. Frankly, in today's milquetoast political consensus, such acerbic critique is more than necessary; particularly with today's insipid and merit-less Black political triumphalism. Without a doubt, this is a must read.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart, original, and insightful, Reed's writing has been incredibly helpful to me in thinking about the lessons I've learned from my work in city politics. Stirrings is denser and more singularly focused on the internal dynamics of Black politics than Class Notes, which I would absolutely recommend as a primer, but are essential readings for those seeking to shift our policies, politics, and political economy.

[GMO Burt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves a five star rating for several reasons. One is that Adolph Reed is an excellent writer. Each sentence in this book is laden with meaning and I re-read many of them finding subtleties that I did not notice the first (or second, or- let's face it- third) time through. Reed's meaning is always clear but often- for me, anyway- required closer scrutiny to detect. His prose style is straightforward and unadorned- which I truly appreciate with a subject matter such as this. Furthermore, there's really no fat in this book. It didn't seem to me like any sentence was really superfluous, which I also appreciate.

Another reason this deserves a five star is that Reed's arguments are so clear. I know there are many who do not agree with him regarding the subject matter of this book but it cannot be on the basis of obscurity. He does not seek to hide the rooting of his arguments in a historical materialist (i.e. Marxist) viewpoint nor his assessment of what is pragmatically possible in the political realm even when such an assessment might underwhelm an excited historical materialist reader. An example:

"Ironic though it may seem to many on the left, cultivating a liberal democratic popular politics is also the clearest and likeliest way to redirect the focus of black political debate along more substantive lines by making its class content explicit."

Here he shows both his commitment to a materialist interpretation of history as well as his honest assessment of how to begin to bring about political change in the near term. His perspective is clear and his critiques of the current ideological trends in this field of study are astute, pointed, and made with an earnestness to get this academic (and political) endeavor on what he believes to be the proper footing.

Finally, Reed gave me a new way and framework to think about this subject in American politics. My eyes were opened to new ways of thinking about a subject I really care about. This is ultimately why I rate this book so highly. Sharing both Reed's historical materialist perspective and his desire for strategies of pragmatic action in the here-and-now, I was most happy with this book because it suggested to me that there is something that can be done, critiques that can be made, and a positive political program that can be enacted. In times as dispiriting as ours, this is worth everything.

Though this book is over 20 years old, it still resonates so well with the current era. In fact, one can see the continuation and enlargement of just the sort of political tendencies which congealed after the Civil Rights movement achieved its ultimate success- the end of the Jim Crow and de jure white supremacy in the United States. One can see the elements of what Reed laments in political figures such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Barack Obama as well as right wingers such as Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas, and Ben Carson. This is at once dispiriting and encouraging. It is dispiriting to see how entrenched and dug-in this form of politics has become but it is encouraging to see that Reed's ameliorative suggestions might still have salience in our contemporary moment.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's Adolph L. Reed, so there isn't any doubting the quality of research, or the underlying disregard for accepted ideas about Black America, Black Politics, Black Power, basically Black Anything. Even so, I found this less interesting than my other readings of Reed's scholarship. It is possible I have read too much of him lately, and while I find his positions strong and unassailable, even the best academics can start feeling repetitive after a while. Not a good place to start with Reed, but not to be avoided, just be prepared for some mundane, albeit intelligently supported, academic writing.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

2/3 done, lost the book