Talk:Adolph L. Reed Jr.

Controversy

Recent revisions have stripped this article of an important as well as referenced section. Under the guideline of Wp:BRD, I have put the section back, and await other contributor's opinions as to its worth. FWiW Bzuk (talk) 22:41, 9 June 2013 (UTC).

I've long lost interest in fighting about this stuff on Wikipedia, but this page is absurd as an entry on Reed. Like, couldn't whichever exercized-by-the-outrage-of-the-moment conservative who wrote up the controversy about one op-ed as Reed's "political views" have bothered to put a few other things in to make it a little less obvious what they were doing? I mean, for one thing, this suggests Reed writes mostly about conservatives. Try Googling "What are the drums saying, Booker?" Kalkin (talk)

Biographical information

Numerous sources exist for information about Reed's biography, which includes time outside of academia doing organizing work and his sources of politicization. I propose that section be drawn up that details Reed's biography using these sources, which include autobiographical articles written in journals like Telos as well as numerous interviews on shows like Dead Pundits Society. --Joeyvandernaald (talk) 15:59, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

September 2018

I've just rearranged the "Political views" section and added a quote to one reference in that section. I think this helps, but that section is still quite poor, IMO.

The quote I added is:

These days, however, Reed’s focus has, in large part, shifted to what he calls “left identitarians” — an array of figures whom, he argues, seem motivated by a desire not to eliminate inequality, but merely to redistribute it in order to ensure diversity among the ranks of the elite.

Maybe we should put a quote like this in the article body?

Possible alternative quotes (both would need careful trimming for length):

From the same article:

The politics of antiracism results in a tendency to misinterpret class differences as manifestations of “race.” The consequence is a pervasive misunderstanding about the causes and contours of the problem. Thus, Black Lives Matter, Reed argues, ignores the non-black victims of police violence and mass incarceration, excluding big chunks of society, including groups that are part of a natural constituency for left politics. With such a narrow base for its politics, BLM can never generate the kind of coalition necessary to mount a successful challenge to the American ruling class or its policies — in fact, it is an impediment to such a movement.

The basic analytic framework put forward by Black Lives Matter, as well as by contemporary antiracists more broadly, of focusing on the disparities in things like poverty, health, or police violence between black and white Americans, forecloses class politics by implicitly endorsing inequality as long as it is fairly distributed between the races. This ensures that these movements remain limited to efforts to establish racial equality — an equal representation of racial groups across the rungs of class hierarchy. These movements thereby ignore economic inequality, and let neoliberal capitalism off the hook.

The last para of a recent essay by Prof Reed:

Nevertheless, we continue to indulge the politically wrong-headed, counterproductive, and even reactionary features of the “representative black voice” industry in whatever remains of our contemporary public sphere. And we never reckon with the truly disturbing presumption that any black person who can gain access to the public microphone and performs familiar rituals of “blackness” should be recognized as expressing significant racial truths and deserves our attention. This presumption rests on the unexamined premise that blacks share a common, singular mind that is at once radically unknowable to non-blacks and readily downloaded by any random individual setting up shop as a racial voice. And despite what all of our age’s many heroic narratives of individualist race-first triumph may suggest to the casual viewer, that premise is the essence of racism.

What do other editors think? Cheers, CWC 09:18, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

Obama quote year

Is the 1996 year for the Obama quote correct? Obama entered the state senate in 1997. Dhawk790 (talk) 21:18, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I think it's a self-perpetuating error, too. I can't find any references to this article that aren't linked to a compilation (class notes), and a search on Village Voice's website turns up nothing. It sounds like a correctly attributed quote, but there's nothing to point to the Village Voice. Iroll (talk) 03:07, 1 July 2024 (UTC)