This article is really dishonest, but it does point to one problem in Reed's recent work that he needs to fix, if only to avoid caricatures like this in the future. More on that below. There are so many things wrong with it that one can only bullet point the biggest misrepresentations. I hope Reed responds. A minimum standard for intellectual honesty in criticism is accurately representing your opponent's views and body of work, especially if you uphold him/her as exemplar of the new colorblind left-liberalism.
* First, I find it shocking that he lumps Bourdieu/Wacquant with this supposed resurgence of colorblind leftists/left-liberals Anyway, as I read it, the Bourdieu and Wacquant article had nothing to do with what Roediger claims. If I recall, B & W were criticizing European and American scholars for imposing their nations' notions of 'race' onto other regions where different categories of differentation existed, like Brazil. That doesn't sound anything like turning a blind eye to racism/racialized inequality/injustice and wanting to erase it from analysis. Moreover, how can he indict Wacquant like this? Isn't Wacquant's latest project African-American incarceration rates, and more broadly, the central role of the modern American prison in what he thinks is a qualitatively new phase of racial domination? (I'm not sure if I buy into his whole new project, btw.) Are these really the words of a colorblind leftist? <http://newleftreview.org/A2367> This suggests superficial reading of the B & W essay and little familiarity with Wacquant's writings.
* This is a real dishonest shot at Barbara Fields (he does the same strawman on her two articles in both Wages of Whiteness and the the anthology that followed it) and attempt to mold her into someone who thinks "class" trumps "race," and who thinks that strategy-wise, we ought to take the early-20th century Socialist Party position of concentrating on the former to in the process eradicate the latter. Fields in fact has said in several essyas something like: "Arguing over whether class trumps race is like arguing over whether the denominator the numerator is more important in a fraction." He's doing the same number on Reed here. He did it to Oliver Cromwell Cox in Wages of Whiteness (Reed called him on it in the intro to the retrospective edition of Cox put out by MR, actually)
Cox doesn't say that all. He, preceding Edmund Morgan et. al for two decades+, states that racial ideology in the US grew out of labor relations, it has had very real material consequneces, and even if we decide we'll all play nice and drop "race," those consequences are still going to remain (i.e. 'racism without racists,' 'possessive invetsment in whiteness,' etc.). Race can't be divorced from broader political economy, and vice versa, so taking either stance is a problematic way of framing the debate. (If you want to get Cox in a few pages, check out his response to the modern bible of "race relations"/"diversity"/"sensitivity training"-huckster discourse, the Myrdal Report, where Cox blasts Myrdal's prescriptions using this analysis.)
How does this relate back to Reed? One of his critiques in the Katrina pieces and elsewhere is that "race" and even "racism" are becoming, at best, overly general proxies, and at worse, imprecise abstractions that obscure broader political-economic structures and changes. The "racism" point is especially well-taken given the astonishing changes in post-1965 African-American demography where the long-standing bifurcation among the African-American population has been exacerbated enormously, and that has created a substantial African-American "middle class" with significant accumulated capital at its disposal. Does "racism" apply to this new class the same way it does to a working class African-American making minimum wage and holding down to jobs? "Racism" obscures these intra-racial group dynamics. Only viewing things through the rubric and language of "race" and "racism" obscures the fact that a black member of the rentier, creditor, and investor classes is still probably going to act in predatory ways. This is a call for analytic precision, not the kinds of superficial generalities in which people like Roediger love to traffic. And it's hardly, as my next point suggests, a call for ignoring the particular concerns of poor African-Americans.
* It's also wrong for him to contrast Reed unfavorably to Mike Davis, whose Nation piece on Katrina noted the electoral consequences of the de facto denial of return to the displaced might pose. But Reed in his co-authored piece with Stephen Steinberg on the liberal sociologists who signed the "Move to Opportunity" petition said just that. <http://www.blackcommentator.com/182/182_cover_liberals_katrina.html> And I think a reading of this article rebuts Roediger's characterization of Reed more generally. This excerpt from it sure doesn't sound like what a colorblind left-liberal would write: "Left behind are masses to fend for themselves, particularly since the .moving to opportunity. programs are themselves used as an excuse to disinvest in these poor black communities that are written off as beyond redemption."
* For all the citations to it, people still don't really seem to read Fields' articles that carefully. Why is this "race"/"class" either/or formulation still the boundaries of most debates? Reed has a whole essay ripping apart the assumptions beneath it in a recent Politics, Culture, and Society (http://web.mit.edu/dusp/ppst/vol15edintro.html) and I somehow don't think Roediger has read it. If he had, he'd have seen that Reed thinks the whole "race" trump "class" or "class" trumps "race" formulations are both really stupid ways of describing the complexities of American political economy and social structure.
* This all said, I think Reed needs to do a better job at more carefully distancing himself from the colorblind Rortyites. His attacks on bankrupt narrow ethnic politics AND colorblind liberalism are too important to get shoved into the latter, and a superficial reading of his work makes him seem like the second coming of Bill Wilson.
On 7/14/06, MICHAEL YATES <mikedjyates at msn.com> wrote:
>
> I guess you can say anything on the internet. But the heading of A.
> Blanqui's message to the list is remarkable. No chapter, no verse. Just
> a
> smear headline and a web link. Is Blanqui really M. Pugliese?
>
> I edited the MR summer issue. A variety of views on race and class are
> expressed. Mr. Blanqui, if you want to challenge Roediger and defend Reed,
> send me a detailed critique and I will forward it to Roediger. If that's
> not too much work, of course.
>
> Michael Yates
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <../attachments/20060714/0d180eae/attachment.htm>