At the same time, I side with Doug and Reed in their analysis of the political futility of the vast majority of institutionalized and many many movement efforts to combat racism pure and simple. What's most confusing to me, and I think to Ravi, is that absolutism of Reed's argument. On the one hand, he wants to acknowledge that racism-as-prejudice still exists while simultaneously saying that its existence is politically unimportant and ought not to be anyone's focus. On the other hand, I can't quite figure out if it is politically acceptable for people who see neoliberalism, the war on drugs, the death penalty, etc. reproducing racial inequalities to emphasize the racial consequences of these things and to call them racist... among other things. Somehow, Doug and Reed want to say that racial inequality exists and is reproduced by structural (read: class) features in contemporary neoliberal society but they want, simultaneously, to say that this situation doesn't meaningfully reproduce already-embedded (read: racist) cultural prejudices.
Most of my students' racism is classist at root these days... they verge on holding no racial prejudice against historically oppressed minorities of color on campus (or in their neighborhoods) while holding classically racist prejudices towards the historically oppressed minorities of color who live in Flint, Detroit, Gary, Chicago, etc. - and being racially prejudiced against historically less oppressed sub/urban minorities (think Jews and that gloriously disaggregated group, Asians) from places with which they are not familiar. Part of the reason these are meaningfully racist prejudices is because they are informed by a blindness to the fact that the vast majority of poor people on public support in the US are white. Under these conditions the classist racism of my students would seem to connect to the ability of juries, judges, parole boards, governors, etc., to be more likely to impose the death penalty - or longer sentences or... - on historically oppressed minority individuals... which, of course, further reproduces the inextricable mix of class and racial oppression within these communities.
Why can't we have a really robust critique of liberal discourses on race - those which reify it and treat it as at-best "intersectional" with other reified social categories - and those who take such positions without denigrating the intelligence or politics of critiques of the neoliberal denial of structurally reproduced racial inequalities and the ways that the denial of structural racism not only has racialized consequences but rejects class analyses which contain a politics which refuses to reify race as something discrete from class, gender, sexuality, history, space, etc?
Last, if we take what we know about the key participants in such a wide swath of the civil rights movement and the significant number of them who came from, were recruited by or hung out with large numbers of people who came from the Marxist left isn't it staggering ahistorical to make the kinds of claims that Reed and Doug are making about the civil rights movement only having liberal reformist goals and intentions? I not sure I'm comfortable taking the argument this far but if I pushed a bit it would seem that the interpretation of the civil rights movement adopted by Reed and Doug is one which accepts the white liberal account of the movement over and above a great deal of what we know about its far deeper left sympathies and tendencies. The position kinda treats King's radicalization as if it came from nowhere, or from places outside the civil rights movement... To do this, possibly, in the name of critiquing reified, brain-dead, identitarian and apolitical multiculturalism - a phenomena that deserves pretty much every critique it gets from the left - strikes me as really problematic. In short, I don't think Reed's caveats are enough to save his position - a huge percentage of which strikes me as spot on - from eliding the complexity of history and the diversity of contemporary efforts variously oriented to the structurally racist characteristics of neoliberalism/neoconservatism.
Alan