>He's basically saying that calling out someone as racist is not
>politics because, again in the part you clipped, "It doesn't lend
>itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about
>what counts as racism."
I meant to include this. Reed also says:
My point is that it's more effective politically to challenge the inequality and injustice directly and bypass the debate over whether it should be called "racism."
I do recognize that, partly because of the terms on which the civil rights movement's victories have been achieved, there is a strong practical imperative for stressing the racially invidious aspects of injustices: they have legal remedies. Race is one of the legal classes protected by anti-discrimination law; poverty, for instance, is not. But this makes identifying "racism" a technical requirement for pursuing certain grievances, not the basis of an overall political strategy for pursuit of racial justice, or, as I believe is a clearer left formulation, racial equality as an essential component of a program of social justice.