> Adolph has written this many times, I've quoted it many times, I've had him say it in interviews many times - yet people just can't hear it. What's the problem?
Because it's incoherent? I think Reed's argument is ultimately idealist (for lack of a better term): He wants us to pretend that the racial stratifications of capitalism don't exist, that they can abstracted from a pure capitalism that can do without them. And he's probably right. But who cares? He's assuming a phantasm, he's positing a world that doesn't exist, while people who dispute his take are arguing with the world in which, for example, as Miles points out, black children are more than twice as likely to be poor as white children.
This notion of targets is very interesting. For one, it seems to reject the economic and focus exclusively on the political: Jim Crow and lack of voting rights presented specific, identifiable targets, but income inequality, for example, doesn't? (Also, his scheme would seem to ignore the contemporary mass incarceration of black men.) For another, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is a hint of analysis-is-paralysis to his argument: Because the fact of black economic inequality does not directly lead to a direct political program, racism is not a significant political concern.
There's also teleological aspect to this argument that's wrong. "Jim Crow" is for us now coherent, useful shorthand for a whole series of laws, regulations, and practices that restricted black people during a certain historical era. But black people at the time did not live under "Jim Crow"; they lived under those laws, regulation, and practices in their singularity, and each person or group of people lived them differently depending on the geographic location, gender, class standing, etc. "Jim Crow," as a totality ("target"), didn't exist at the time; it only existed after it was fought and defeated. Reed's pretending that those targets existed in the past is completely ahistorical.