> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Doug Henwood<dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
Here's how I interpret this disagreement. Tell me if I'm wrong. Reed's basic argument is that underlining the "racial" component of some inequality produces no *objective* beneficial result - e.g., it does nothing to help combat the inequality. My sense is that the fundamental response of the anti-Reedians is that -- whether or not Reed is right about that -- *they don't care* . For them, what's important is that these inequalities are *lived* as racial inequalities, and for that reason they should be treated as such, whatever the objective results of doing so might be.
I remember being in a seminar with a historian who said the test of good historiography for him is whether the subjects of the story would have recognized their world if they could read the work in question. At the time, I thought: but what if they were mistaken about how their world worked? These are two rival approaches to writing history. I think maybe they also apply to the Reed/anti-Reed argument.
But again, maybe I'm wrong.
SA