At risk of boring you by repeating myself, IMHO, this is a purely academic and reductionist argument on Reed’s part. What he is saying is [the equivalent of saying] that he can describe the details of racism using the more atomic terms of general inequality (or some such), so racism is a useless term/concept. Following Hilbert and Russell, this might help strengthen the analytical foundations of political theory, but this is in no way that I can see a problem of political [in]action. It only brings to mind the pun about the bumblebee that keeps flying though scientists have proven it lacks the wingspan for it.
For we know as a fact that racism is a term and concept that people find politically useful. Using the concept, they describe the problem with clarity, they organise under a banner, they define means to identify/measure the problem, and at times even solve it. Reed is in fact aware of this, for he acknowledges (IIRC) that “antiracism” was one of the pillars of the civil rights movement. He then attempts to save his case by reasoning that those movements, however, were targeted. But that argument only stands because he can find strawman groups that have generic or even vapid positions that employ the term or concept (among all sorts of other ‘isms’). Note that Reed is not saying that “racism” is no longer a political meaningful concept (that would echo the position of “enlightened” conservatives) - he is (from what I can tell) saying that it is fundamentally useless.
Also, I do not see the validity of the criticism of “moralising” without the ever-present psychoanalytical claim that it is about “celebration of [one’s] own virtue”. I find it a stretch to think that MLK or a wide range of leaders before him were not “moralising” in the ordinary, non-psychoanalytical sense of the word (it seems to me, figuring out whether someone is merely posturing is simple enough: are they doing anything about the positions they preach about). In fact, I suspect it would be difficult to find a single historical instance of human progress that did not involve some sort of conscious prescriptive element that aimed to change the minds of people.
> On income disparities, there are cumulative effects of race, e.g., the fact that black people have only a fraction of the wealth of white ones at the same income level. But again, having identified that, what do you do? The liberal foundations are into promoting saving among black families, but where's that going to get, really?
What of affirmative action, say at around 1975?
I do acknowledge the much discussed dangers of identity politics. Identity politics as an attitude (“get off my back”) can be congruent with libertarianism. But it is equally libertarian, I submit, to throw the baby (of powerful descriptive notions) out with the bathwater, in order to achieve technical correctness.
My 2 cents,
—ravi