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Chrishayden
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Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 2941
Registered: 03-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 04, 2006 - 11:43 am: | 
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http://www.boggscenter.org/reedjr.htm
Why Black Radical Politics Has Failed
Stirrings in the Jug by Adolph Reed Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, l999
This is a collection of hard-hitting critiques of black liberal and radical politics in the post-segregation era by Adolph Reed Jr., a Professor of Political Science at the New School for Social Research. Reed is not an easy read. But he is worth careful study because he had a good grasp of how reality has changed since the l960s and his writings go a long way towards explaining why there has been no radical opposition to today’s black elites and why last year’s Black Radical Congress was far from radical.
Repression, Reed says, may have contributed to the extermination of radical opposition, but the real reason is the combination of opportunism and idealism with which blacks adapted to the new reality of black integration into the power structure that developed in the wake of the success of the civil rights and black power movement. By the l970s the black elite had become the "Bantustan administrators" for pro-growth capitalism. The nationalist/integrationist dichotomy which had been the conceptual foundation of black power activity was no longer relevant. The narratives that had collectively defined the discursive arena of black radicalism (Pan Africanism, Karenga’s Cultural Nationalism and Marxist-Leninism) were removed from reality. They "rested on fundamentally idealist intellectual commitments that supported summary rejection of the actually existing forms of black political action in favor of more desired alternatives in a millenial future," and "offered neither conceptual space nor analytical roads that could be brought to bear on making sense of the dynamics shaping the new black politics."
"By the mid-1980s black regimes - black-led and black dominated administrations backed by solid council majorities - governed thirteen U.S. cities with populations over 100,000." Like Coleman Young in Detroit and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, they all pursued "programs centered around making local governments the handmaiden to private development interests...with little regard to the disadvantageous impact of their constituencies."
In these positions black politicians and administrators were able to make symbolic concessions to black nationalists and veterans of the l960: access to public schools to lecture on the "Movement" and on African liberation, endorsing holidays and annual events, even subrosa staff assistance from municipal agencies. Spectacle replaced the collective, purposive action of politics. Politics was redefined by "culture" - clothing, popular songs, fashion. The "gestural" was elevated over purposeful struggle.
Meanwhile, the black political elite continued to talk about black unity and the "black community" as a coherent entity with an identifiable standpoint, a mystification that "systematically fails to take account of the operations of political processes among black people, within the black American population and discrete black communities."
Reed proposes two ways to break through this mystification by black elites.
1. "The spoken-for must come to master political speech and to articulate their own interests, free of the intermediation of brokerage politicians and the anti-rational, anti-democratic conformism preached by charismatic authority. This mastery can develop only through unrelenting critique of the elite’s program."
2. "The aggressive mobilization of black citizens to pursue specific interests in concert with articulating a larger programmatic agenda centered in the use of public power - the state apparatus - to realize and enforce concrete visions of social justice."
In Detroit grassroots mobilization against black mayors serving as handmaidens to private development interests has begun with the Graimark and Brush Park struggles and over the choice of casino operators and casino sites. That is why Detroit is the seed-bed of a new community-based radicalism.
Meanwhile, having lost contact with the emerging community movement, black intellectuals have retreated "hermetically into the university so that oppositional politics becomes little more than a pose livening up the march through the tenure ranks. In this context the notion of radicalism is increasingly removed from critique and substantive action. Disconnected from positive social action, radical imagery is also cut loose from standards of success or failure; it becomes a mere stance, the intellectual equivalent of a photo-op." In his 1997 book, W.E.B.DuBois and American Political Thought, Reed especially criticized Henry Louis Gates Jr. for hi-jacking the legacy of black radicals like DuBois, divorcing him from his active engagement in social policy debates.
Reed’s critique of Jesse Jackson is equally devastating. Since the early 1970s, he says, Jackson has been campaigning to be appointed "National Black Leader." "Through two campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination Jackson has produced few benefits besides his own aggrandizement - no shift in public policy, no institutionalized movement, not even a concrete agenda (except, again, Jackson’s aggrandizement) around which to mobilize."
In his critique of Malcolmania, first published in l992 when Spike Lee’s film created a huge market for Malcolm X caps and medallions, Reed warns against the depoliticizing allure of dead heroes. A teenager in the early l960s, he reminds us that "the Malcolm who engaged us was moving inside the history that we were living. He responded to it, tried to understand it and describe it, to shape its course. Malcolm emboldened us, or those of us whom he did, because he was an interlocutor with current orthodoxy, expressing forbidden black silences of our time; he energized us by playing the dozens on the official narratives of race and power under which we strained."
"Only a dead Malcolm X is available to young people today. He was killed five years before the birth of the typical member of the 1991 college graduating class. {Also before Watts, the Black Power movement, the Detroit and Newark rebellions, the anti-Vietnam War movement}. More important, though, is another sense in which their Malcolm is dead. He has no dynamic connection to the lived reality of the youth who invoke him. He is grafted onto their world of experience as a frozen icon to be revered, a reification of other people’s memories. This Malcolm does not encourage by providing a running critique of the prevalent narrative of oppression as it evolves. His voice is like that of a biblical figure or a computerized toy; a set of prepackaged utterances that can be accessed arbitrarily and that seem more or less pertinent depending on listeners’ interpretive will." "Nothing can be learned from a decontextualized icon except timeless wisdom. And timeless wisdom is less than useless for making sense of social life inside real history. It inevitably boils down either to tag phrases and slogans or to allegorically driven platitudes."
On Friday, October 22, at 3 p.m. Reed will be speaking at the North American Labor History Conference meeting in the Woodcock Room of the Reuther Archives of Wayne State University.
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Cynique
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Username: Cynique
Post Number: 5724
Registered: 01-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 04, 2006 - 07:12 pm: |
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I agree with much of what Reed contends especially with what he says about Malcolm X. And I find it interesting that Reed's criticism of black leaders is not that removed from what the much-maligned Juan Williams has said. Reed also chides his colleagues in black academia for retreating behind the halls of ivy while offering nothing more than perfunctory lip service. But, - that's what intellectuals like Cornel West and Henry Gates do; they rest of their laurels while basking in the admiration of those they mesmerize with their dazzling rhetoric. Reed, himself, is not necesssarily immune from the intricacies of rhetoric, but he makes clear the importance of grass roots movements, apparenting realizing that all politics are local and that blacks have to determine their own destinies at the community level. This article was written in 1999 and apparently didn't have much of an impact of black politics at the national level because the status quo has changed very little. In Washington DC, the term "political reform" is pretty much an oxymoron. |
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