Adolph Reed

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  • January 31, 2017 at 6:03 pm #64602
    wv
    Participant

    Some Reed:

    January 31, 2017 at 7:08 pm #64603
    wv
    Participant

    Reed on Obama. This is from back in the nineties.
    —————–

    Adolph Reed’s 1996 assessment of Obama, shortly after the latter won his
    first Illinois state senate race:

    “In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”

    “The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996—reprinted in
    Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
    (New Press, 2000)

    January 31, 2017 at 7:39 pm #64604
    Zooey
    Moderator
    wv wrote:

    “In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”

    Well. He called that, didn’t he?

    February 1, 2017 at 12:18 am #64612
    zn
    Moderator

    Some Reed:

    That was good.

    .

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