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Class Notes Quotes
Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
by
Adolph L. Reed Jr.396 ratings, 4.41 average rating, 45 reviews
Class Notes Quotes
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“Despite its affective packaging, the disposition to catalogue and aggregate neatly rounded-off identities is in no meaningful way radical. Not only is it evocative of nineteenth-century essentialisms, it also reproduces the mindset of the mass information industry, which, though public opinion and market research, sorts the population into the demographic equivalent of sound bites—market shares, taste communities—all in service to the corporate sales effort and management of the national political agenda.”
― Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
― Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
“At bottom, identity politics rests on problematic ideas of political authenticity and representation. These derive from the faulty premise that membership in a group gives access to shared perspective and an intuitive understanding of the group's collective interests. This leads to two related beliefs that are wrong-headed and politically counterproductive: that only a group member can know or articulate the interests of the group, and that any group member can do so automatically by virtue of his or her identity.
Clarence Thomas should have been evidence enough to invalidate the premise linking group membership and perspective. Embarrassingly, people like Maya Angelou and Catherine MacKinnon initially cut Thomas slack based on the silly belief that because he's black and once was poor, putting him on the supreme court would turn out OK.
The simplistic belief that any credible member of a group can automatically represent that group's interest feeds a tendency to reduce political objectives to a plea for group representation on decision-making bodies or in other councils of power. That's the Clinton trick: to accept pleas for group representation or "access" while repudiating demands for an issue-based program. The dominant elites can happily satisfy such pleas; token egalitarianism is no threat at all.”
― Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
Clarence Thomas should have been evidence enough to invalidate the premise linking group membership and perspective. Embarrassingly, people like Maya Angelou and Catherine MacKinnon initially cut Thomas slack based on the silly belief that because he's black and once was poor, putting him on the supreme court would turn out OK.
The simplistic belief that any credible member of a group can automatically represent that group's interest feeds a tendency to reduce political objectives to a plea for group representation on decision-making bodies or in other councils of power. That's the Clinton trick: to accept pleas for group representation or "access" while repudiating demands for an issue-based program. The dominant elites can happily satisfy such pleas; token egalitarianism is no threat at all.”
― Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
