Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism - Adolph Reed, Jr.1
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471637
talic>New Labor Forum XX(X)Reed
2013
NLFXXX10.1177/109579601247163750 New Labor Forum 22(1)
Democrats of sexism. Indeed, just as race has to slavery’s abolition, race as white supremacy
been and continues to be unthinkable without evolved in the South as an element in the strug-
racism, today it is also unthinkable without gle over what freedom was to mean and how it
antiracism. would be harmonized with the plantocracy’s
Crucially, the significance of race and gen- desired labor system and the social order
der, and their content as ideologies of essential required to maintain it. That struggle culmi-
difference have changed markedly over time in nated in the planter-dominated ruling class’s
relation to changing political and economic victory, which was consolidated in racialized
conditions. Regarding race in particular, clas- disfranchisement and imposition of the codified
sificatory schemes have varied substantially, as white supremacist regime of racial segregation.
have the narratives elaborating them. That is, In the latter half of the nineteenth century,
which populations count as races, the criteria the West Coast fights over importation of
determining them, and the stakes attached to Chinese labor and Japanese immigration also
counting as one, or as one or another at any condensed around racialist ideologies. Railroad
given time, have been much more fluid matters operators and other importers of Chinese labor
than our discussions of the notion would sug- imagined that Chinese workers’ distinctive
gest. And that is as it must be because race, like racial characteristics made them more tractable
all ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy, is funda- and capable of living on less than white
mentally pragmatic. After all, these belief sys- Americans; opponents argued that those very
tems emerge as legitimations of concrete racial characteristics would degrade American
patterns of social relations in particular labor and that Chinese were racially “unassimi-
contexts. lable.” Postbellum southern planters imported
Chinese to the Mississippi Delta to compete
Race, like all ideologies of with black sharecroppers out of the same racial-
ascriptive hierarchy, is ist presumptions of greater tractability, as did
fundamentally pragmatic. later importers of Sicilian labor to the sugar-
cane and cotton fields.
Race emerged historically along with the Large-scale industrial production in the late-
institution of slavery in the New World. A rich nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, of
scholarship examines its emergence, perhaps course, depended on mass labor immigration
most signally with respect to North America in mainly from the eastern and southern fringes of
Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Europe. The innovations of race science—that
Freedom and Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, is, of racialist folk ideology transformed into an
Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. Both academic profession—promised to assist
focus on the simultaneous sharpening of dis- employers’ needs for rational labor force man-
tinctions between slavery and indentured servi- agement and were present in the foundation of
tude, and the institutional establishment of the fields of industrial relations and industrial
black and white, or African and English, as dis- psychology. Hugo Münsterberg, a founding
tinct, mutually exclusive status categories over luminary of industrial psychology, included
the course of the seventeenth century in colo- “race psychological diagnosis” as an element
nial Virginia.2 Race and racism took shape as an in assessment of employees’ capabilities,
ideology and material reality during the follow- although he stressed that racial or national tem-
ing century initially in the context of the contest peraments are averages and that there is con-
between free- and slave-labor systems and the siderable individual variation within groups.
related class struggle that eventually produced He argued that assessment, therefore, should be
the modern notion of free labor as the absolute leavened with consideration of individuals’
control of a worker over her or his person.3 characteristics and that the influence of “group
After defeat of the Confederate insurrection led psychology” would be significant
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only if the employment not of a single Even the New Deal embedded premises of
person, but of a large number, is in ques- racial and gender hierarchy in its most funda-
tion, as it is most probable that the aver- mental policy initiatives. The longer-term impli-
age character will show itself in a cations of the two-tiered system of social
sufficient degree as soon as many mem- benefits thus created persist to the present day.
bers of the group are involved.4 This extensive history illustrates that, as Marxist
theorist Harry Chang observed in the 1970s,
As scholarship on race science and its kiss- racial formation has always been an aspect of
ing cousin, eugenics, has shown, research that class formation, as a “social condition of pro-
sets out to find evidence of racial difference duction.” Race has been a constitutive element
will find it, whether or not it exists. Thus, race in a capitalist social dynamic in which “social
science produced increasingly refined taxono- types (instead of persons) figure as basic units of
mies of racial groups—up to as many as sixty- economic and political management.”6 Chang
three “basic” races. The apparent specificity of perceptively analogized race to what Marx
race theorists’ just-so stories about differential described as the fetish character of money.
racial capacities provided rationales for immi- Marx, he noted, described money as “the offici-
gration restriction, sterilization, segregation, ating object (or subject as an object) in the reifi-
and other regimes of inequality. It also held out cation of a relation called value” and as a
the promise of assisting employers in assigning “function-turned-into-an-object.” Race is simi-
workers to jobs for which they were racially larly a function—a relation of hierarchy rooted
suited. John Bodnar and his coauthors repro- in the capitalist division of labor—turned into an
duce a Racial Adaptability Chart used by a object.7 “Money seeks gold to objectify itself—
Pittsburgh company in the 1920s that maps gold does not cry out to be money.” Similarly,
thirty-six different racial groups’ capacities for “the cutting edge of racial determinations of per-
twenty-two distinct jobs, eight different atmo- sons is a social ‘imposition’ on nature,” which
spheric conditions, jobs requiring speed or pre- on its own yields no such categories.8
cision, and day or night shift work. For
example, Letts were supposedly fair with pick Research that sets out to find
and shovel, and concrete and wheelbarrow, bad evidence of racial difference will
as hod carriers, cleaners and caretakers, and
find it, whether or not it exists.
boilermaker’s helpers; good as coal passers and
blacksmiths as well as at jobs requiring speed
Although discussing race specifically, Chang
or precision; and good in cool and dry, smoky
also puts his finger on the central characteristic
or dusty conditions; fair in oily or dirty pro-
of ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy in general:
cesses; and good on both day and night shifts.5
Of course, all this was bogus, nothing more In practice, the political economic raison
than narrow upper-class prejudices parading d’etre of racial categories lies in the iron-
about as science. It was convincing only if one clad social validity that is possible if rela-
shared the folk narratives of essential hierarchy tions are objectified as the intrinsic quality
that the research assumed from the outset. But of “racial features.” Blacks as the absence
the race theories did not have to be true to be of the minimum guarantee of bourgeois
effective. They had only to be used as if they rights (against enslavement and bondage)
were true to produce the material effects that presupposes Whites as a guarantee of
gave the ideology an authenticating verisimili- immunity from such social degradation.9
tude. Poles became steel workers in Pittsburgh,
Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, and Gary not for This formulation applies equally to popula-
any natural aptitude or affinity but because tions stigmatized as feebleminded, natural-born
employers and labor recruiters sorted them into criminals, “white trash,” poverty cultures, the
work in steel mills. underclass, crack babies, superpredators, and
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other narratives of ascriptive hierarchy. Each justice and the steady, intensifying advance of
such narrative is a species of the genus of ide- neoliberalism. It suggests a kinship where many
ologies that legitimize capitalist social relations on the left assume an enmity. The rise of neolib-
by naturalizing them. The characteristic linking eralism in particular suggests a serious problem
the species of this genus of ascriptive ideologies with arguments that represent race and class as
is that they are populations living, if not exactly dichotomous or alternative frameworks of polit-
outside “the minimum guarantee of bourgeois ical critique and action, as well as those argu-
rights,” at least beneath the customary floor of ments that posit the dichotomy while attempting
social worth and regard. In practice, the latter to reconcile its elements with formalistic ges-
devolves toward the former. tures, for example, the common “race and class”
Chang’s perspective may help us see more construction.
clearly how ascriptive ideologies function. It cer-
tainly is no surprise that dominant classes oper- The rise of neoliberalism suggests a
ate among themselves within a common sense serious problem with arguments
that understands their dominance unproblemati-
that represent race and class as
cally, as decreed by the nature of things. At
moments when their dominance faces chal- dichotomous or alternative
lenges, those narratives may be articulated more frameworks of political
assertively and for broader dissemination. This critique and action.
logic, for example, underlay the antebellum shift,
in the face of mounting antislavery agitation, This sort of historical materialist perspective
from pragmatic defenses of slavery as a neces- throws into relief a fundamental limitation of
sary evil—a stance that presumed a ruling class the “whiteness” notion that has been fashion-
speaking among itself alone—to essentialist able within the academic left for roughly two
arguments, putatively transcending class inter- decades: it reifies whiteness as a transhistorical
ests, namely, that slavery was a positive good. It social category. In effect, it treats “whiteness”—
also may be seen in the explosion of racialist ide- and therefore “race”—as existing prior to and
ology in its various forms, including eugenics, in above social context.10 Both who qualifies as
justifying imperialist expansionism and consoli- white and the significance of being white have
dating the defeat of populism and working-class altered over time. Moreover, whiteness dis-
insurgency in the years overlapping the turn of course functions as a kind of moralistic exposé
the twentieth century. That same dynamic was at rather than a basis for strategic politics; this is
work displacing the language of class and politi- clear in that the program signally articulated in
cal economy by culture and culturology in the its name has been simply to raise a demand to
postwar liberalism that consolidated the defeat of “abolish whiteness,” that is, to call on whites to
CIO radicalism. Later, racial essentialism helped renounce their racial privilege. In fact, its fixa-
reify the struggles against southern segregation, tion on demonstrating the depth of whites’
racial discrimination, inequality, and poverty embrace of what was known to an earlier gen-
during the 1960s by separating discussions of eration’s version of this argument as “white skin
injustice from capitalism’s logic of reproduction. privilege” and the inclination to slide into teleo-
Poverty was reinvented as a cultural dilemma, logical accounts in which groups or individuals
and “white racism” singled out as the root of “approach” or “pursue” whiteness erases the
racial inequality. real historical dynamics and contradictions of
In this way, Chang’s perspective can be help- American racial history.
ful in sorting out several important limitations The whiteness discourse overlaps other argu-
in discussions of race and class characteristic of ments that presume racism to be a sui generis
today’s left. It can also help to make sense of the form of injustice. Despite seeming provocative,
striking convergence between the relative suc- these arguments do not go beyond the premises
cess of identitarian understandings of social of the racial liberalism from which they
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commonly purport to dissent. They differ only because the historical circumstances are so radi-
in rhetorical flourish, not content. Formulations cally different.12
that invoke metaphors of disease or original sin
reify racism by disconnecting it from the dis- Rigorous pursuit of equality of
crete historical circumstances and social struc- opportunity exclusively within the
tures in which it is embedded, and treating it as
terms of capitalist class relations
an autonomous force. Disconnection from
political economy is also a crucial feature of has been fully legitimized under the
postwar liberalism’s construction of racial rubric of “diversity.”
inequality as prejudice or intolerance. Racism
becomes an independent variable in a moralistic From the historical materialist standpoint,
argument that is idealist intellectually and ulti- the view of racial inequality as a sui generis
mately defeatist politically. injustice and dichotomous formulations of the
This tendency to see racism as sui generis relation of race and class as systems of hierar-
also generates a resistance to precision in analy- chy in the United States are not only miscast but
sis. It is fueled by a tendency to inflate the lan- also fundamentally counterproductive. It is par-
guage of racism to the edge of its reasonable ticularly important at this moment to recognize
conceptual limits, if not beyond. Ideological that the familiar taxonomy of racial difference
commitment to shoehorning into the rubric of is but one historically specific instance of a
racism all manner of inequalities that may genus of ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy that
appear statistically as racial disparities has stabilize capitalist social reproduction. I have
yielded two related interpretive pathologies. argued previously that entirely new race-like
One is a taxonomies could come to displace the familiar
ones. For instance, the “underclass” could
constantly expanding panoply of neolo- become even more race-like as a distinctive,
gisms—“institutional racism,” “systemic essentialized population,
racism,” “structural racism,” “color-blind
racism,” “post-racial racism,” etc.— by our current folk norms, multiracial in
intended to graft more complex social composition, albeit most likely including
dynamics onto a simplistic and frequently in perceptibly greater frequencies people
psychologically inflected racism/anti-rac- who would be classified as black and
ism political ontology. Indeed, these Latino “racially,” though as small enough
efforts bring to mind [Thomas S.] Kuhn’s pluralities to preclude assimilating the
account of attempts to accommodate group ideologically as a simple proxy for
mounting anomalies to salvage an inter- nonwhite inferiors.13
pretive paradigm in danger of crumbling
under a crisis of authority.11 This possibility looms larger now. Struggles
for racial and gender equality have largely
A second essentialist sleight-of-hand divested race and gender of their common sense
advances claims for the primacy of race/racism verisimilitude as bases for essential difference.
as an explanation of inequalities in the present Moreover, versions of racial and gender equal-
by invoking analogies to regimes of explicitly ity are now also incorporated into the normative
racial subordination in the past. In these argu- and programmatic structure of “left” neoliberal-
ments, analogy stands in for evidence and ism. Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity
explanation of the contemporary centrality of exclusively within the terms of given patterns
racism. Michelle Alexander’s widely read and of capitalist class relations—which is after all
cited book, The New Jim Crow, is only the most the ideal of racial liberalism—has been fully
prominent expression of this tendency; even she legitimized within the rubric of “diversity.”
has to acknowledge that the analogy fails That ideal is realized through gaining rough
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parity in distribution of social goods and bads was no less determinist than its Darwinian alter-
among designated population categories. As native, which posited strictly biological deter-
Walter Benn Michaels has argued powerfully, minism. As Stocking notes, Lamarckians’
according to that ideal, the society would be just dependence on a “vague sociobiological inde-
if 1 percent of the population controlled 90 per- terminism” made it all the more difficult to
cent of the resources, provided that blacks and challenge their circular race theories.16 In any
other nonwhites, women, and lesbian, gay, event, narrow approaches that reduce ascriptive
bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people were ideology to reified notions of race/racism are
represented among the 1 percent in roughly not at all up to the challenge posed by this new
similar proportion as their incidence in the gen- determinist turn.
eral population.14 Finally, the adamant commitment to a race-
Given the triumph of racial liberalism, it is first perspective on inequalities that show up as
entirely possible that new discourses of ascrip- statistical disparities has a material foundation.
tive difference might take shape that fit the folk The victories of the civil rights movement car-
common sense of our time and its cultural ried with them a more benign and unavoidable
norms and sensibilities. Indeed, the explosive political imperative. Legal remedies can be
resurgence in recent years of academically sought for injustices understood as discrimina-
legitimated determinist discourses—all of tion on the basis of race, gender, or other famil-
which simply rehearse the standard idealist iar categories of invidious ascription; no such
tropes and circular garbage in/garbage out faux recourse exists for injustices generated through
scientific narratives—reinforce that concern. capitalism’s logic of production and reproduc-
The undergirding premises of intellectual tion without mediation through one of those
programs like evolutionary psychology, behav- ascriptive categories. As I have argued
ioral economics, genes and politics, and neuro- elsewhere,
criminology are strikingly like straight-line
extrapolations from Victorian race science— this makes identifying “racism” a techni-
although for the most part, though not entirely, cal requirement for pursuing certain
scholars operating in those areas are scrupulous, grievances, not the basis of an overall
or at least fastidious, in not implicating the strategy for pursuit of racial justice, or, as
familiar racial taxonomies in their deterministic I believe is a clearer left formulation,
sophistries. Some scholars imagine that racial equality as an essential component
“epigenetics”—a view that focuses on the inter- of a program of social justice.17
play of genes and environment in producing
organisms and genotypes—avoids determinism Yet, for those who insist that racial reduc-
by providing causal explanations that are not tionism is more than a pragmatic accommoda-
purely biological. Recent research purporting to tion to the necessities of pursuing legal or
find epigenetic explanations for socioeconomic administrative grievances, something more is at
inequality already foreshadows a possible play. A historical materialist perspective can be
framework for determinist “underclass” narra- helpful for identifying the glue that binds that
tives that avoid the taints associated with bio- commitment to a race-first political discourse
logical justifications of inequality and references and practice.
to currently recognized racial categories.15 All politics in capitalist society is class, or at
Ironically, some enthusiasts for this epigenetic least a class-inflected, politics. That is also true
patter expressly liken it to Lamarckian evolu- of the political perspective that condenses in
tionary theory, which stressed the heritability of programs such as reparations, antiracism, and
characteristics acquired after birth, as though insistence on the sui generis character of racial
this were insulation against determinism. As injustice. I submit that those tendencies come
historian of anthropology George Stocking, Jr., together around a politics that is “entirely con-
and others have shown, Lamarckian race theory sistent with the neoliberal redefinition of
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equality and democracy along disparitarian et al., Renewing Black Intellectual History: The
lines.” That politics Ideological and Material Foundations of Black
American Thought (Boulder, CO & London:
reflects the social position of those posi- Paradigm Publishers, 2010).
tioned to benefit from the view that the 2. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, Ameri-
market is, or can be, a just, effective, or can Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975)
even acceptable, system for rewarding and Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty
talent and virtue and punishing their Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race,
opposites and that, therefore, removal of and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill &
“artificial” impediments to functioning London: University of North Carolina Press,
like race and gender will make it even 1996). As her title indicates, Brown examines
more efficient and just.18 as well the interplay of race and gender in the
constitution of distinctions between slave and
This is the politics of actual or would-be race servant, black and white.
relations administrators, and it is completely 3. Legal historian Robert J. Steinfeld in two
embedded within American capitalism and its important books examines the latter conflict.
structures of elite brokerage. It is fundamentally See Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The
antagonistic to working-class politics, notwith- Employment Relation in English and American
standing left identitarians’ gestural claims to the Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill &
contrary. London: University of North Carolina Press,
2002) and Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor
Declaration of Conflicting Interests in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cam-
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter- bridge University Press, 2001).
est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or 4. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial
publication of this article. Efficiency (Boston & New York: Houghton Mif-
flin, 1913), 130. Münsterberg criticized what
Funding
he considered a widespread tendency among
The author(s) received no financial support for the
industrial firms’ employment officers to use
research, authorship, and/or publication of this
group characteristics too freely and to depend
article.
on superficial stereotypes (130-131).
Notes 5. John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P.
Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and
1. See Adolph Reed, Jr., “Unraveling the Relation Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Urbana & Chi-
of Race and Class in American Politics,” Politi- cago: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 240. On
cal Power and Social Theory 15 (2002): 265- the history and logic of race science, see Jonathan
274; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Class, Race and Marks, What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee:
Capitalism,” Political Power and Social Theory Apes, People and Their Genes (Berkeley & Los
15 (2002): 275-284; Maurice Zeitlin, “On the Angeles: University of California Press, 2003),
‘Confluence of Race and Class’ in America,” and pertinent recent histories of the eugenics
Political Power and Social Theory 15 (2002): movement include Edwin Black, War Against
285-288; Steven Gregory, “The ‘Paradoxes’ of the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to
Misplaced Concreteness: Thinking through the Create a Master Race (New York: Dialog Press,
State,” Political Power and Social Theory 15 2012), and Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic
(2002): 289-300; and Reed, “Rejoinder,” Politi- Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding
cal Power and Social Theory 15 (2002): 301- in Modern America (Berkeley & Los Angeles:
315. See also my chapter, “The ‘Color Line’ University of California Press, 2005). For exam-
Then and Now: The Souls of Black Folk and the ples of race scientists’ proliferation of races, see
Changing Context of African American Poli- Daniel G. Brinton, Races and Peoples: Lectures
tics” in Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth W. Warren, on the Science of Ethnography (Philadelphia:
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David McKay, 1901), 17-50; Joseph Deniker, 14. Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diver-
The Races of Man: An Outline of Anthropology sity: How We Learned to Love Identity and
and Ethnography (New York: Charles Scribner, Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan
1900), 280-298; William Z. Ripley, The Races of Books, 2007). It is telling that the reduction
Europe: A Sociological Study (London: Kegan of concern with economic inequality to racial
Paul, 1900); and William P. Dillingham, A Dic- disparities leads to responses—for example,
tionary of Races or Peoples (Washington, DC: Sheradeen’s proposed Individual Development
GPO, 1911), 3. Accounts—that seek “to create competitive
6. Paul Liem and Eric Montague, eds., “Toward individual minority agents who might stand
a Marxist Theory of Racism: Two Essays by a better fighting chance in the neoliberal rat
Harry Chang,” Review of Radical Political Eco- race rather than a positive alternative vision of
nomics 17, no. 3 (1985): 43. a society that eliminates the need to fight con-
7. Ibid., 38. stantly against disruptive market whims in the
8. Ibid., 39. first place.” Reed and Chowkwanyun, “Race,
9. Ibid., 44. Class, Crisis,” 166. We note as well that “Within
10. For a critical examination of the “whiteness” the racial context specifically, such proposals
literature, at least as it has taken shape among exude more than a whiff of racial communitari-
historians, see “Scholarly Controversy: White- anism and collective racial self-help, along with
ness and the Historians’ Imagination,” Inter- a dollop of republican nostalgia.”
national Labor and Working-Class History 60 15. On evolutionary psychology, see Susan McK-
(Fall 2001): 1-92, with an introduction by Judith innon, Neo-Liberal Genetics: The Myths and
Stein and articles by Eric Arnesen, James Bar- Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology (Chi-
rett, David Brody, Barbara J. Fields, Adolph cago: Prickly Paradigm, 2005). On genes
Reed, Jr., Victoria C. Hattam, Eric Foner, and and politics, see Evan Charney, “Genes and
a response by Arnesen. See also Barbara J. Ideologies,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no.
Fields and Karen Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of 2 (June 2008), with responses from John R.
Inequality in American Life (New York & Lon- Alford et al.; Rebecca J. Hannagan and Peter
don: Verso, 2012). K. Hatemi, and a rejoinder by Charney in Per-
11. Adolph Reed, Jr., and Merlin Chowkwanyun, spectives on Politics 6, no. 2 (June 2008). For
“Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial an illustration of state of the art in neurocrimi-
Disparity and its Analytical Discontents,” nology, see the work of University of Pennsyl-
Socialist Register 48 (2012): 167. We argue as vania criminologist Adrian Raine at www.crim.
well that “left-seeming defenses that insist on the upenn.edu/faculty/profiles/raine.html. James J.
importance of race and class” are only attempts Heckman’s rather disingenuously titled essay
to deny the rhetorical force of the race line. “Promoting Social Mobility,” Boston Review,
12. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass September/October 2012, illustrates the nexus
Incarceration in the Age of Color-Blindness of epigenetics and behavioral economics. See
(New York: New Press, 2010). For a system- also Daniel A. Hackman and Martha J. Farah,
atic critique of the limits and counterproductive “Socioeconomic Status and the Developing
features of this approach, see James Forman, Brain,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 2
Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: (February 2009): 65-73. Jiannbin Lee Shiao,
Beyond the New Jim Crow,” New York Uni- Thomas Bode, Amber Beyer, and Daniel Sel-
versity Law Review 87 (2012): 21-69. See also vig, “The Genomic Challenge to the Social
Reed and Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis” Construction of Race,” Sociological Theory
and Adolph Reed, Jr., “Three Tremés,” July 4, 30 (June 2012): 67-88 appropriates—crucially
2011, available at http://nonsite.org/editorial/ misappropriates, actually—scholarship on the
three-tremes. geography of human genetic variation in sup-
13. Reed, “The ‘Color Line’ Then and Now,” 261. port of explicitly racialist arguments.
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16. George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Author Biography
Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropol-
ogy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Adolph Reed, Jr., is a professor of political science
Press, 1968), 265. at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent
17. Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Limits of Anti-Racism,” book, coauthored with Kenneth W. Warren, is
Left Business Observer #121, September 2009, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological
available at www.leftbusinessobserver.com/ and Material Foundations of African-American
Antiracism.html. Thought. He has a forthcoming book on Obamania
18. Ibid. as a symptom of the demise of the American left.
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