BROADCASTS.com

Published: April 5, 2022, 11 a.m.

b'

Hi everyone:

Today it\\u2019s just me, Andy, talking with guest Adolph Reed, Prof. Emeritus at University of Pennsylvania, about his new book The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives. Drawing from personal experience, he argues that racial segregation cannot be fully explained through abstract ideas about white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It was a coherent social order animated by ruling class power.\\xa0

We talk about what he calls \\u201cneoliberal race politics,\\u201d the charge against him of \\u201cclass reductionism\\u201d (NYT), and the broader usefulness of this analysis to contexts across the US and the world. Also, a bit of NBA banter.\\xa0

* See: our conversation with Merlin Chowkwanyun (2020) on his work with Reed on racial disparity discourse (their piece on Covid reporting here)

* Also: Adolph\\u2019s new podcast Class Matters

* and Adolph\\u2019s essays on nonsite.org

0:00: The premise of the book and its reception (The New Yorker, Common Dreams, Harper\\u2019s podcast). Adolph periodizes Jim Crow from the 1890s-1960s, and he speaks about his formative years in Louisiana, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Atlanta. He first drafted the book in the 2000s after realizing his would be the last generation with clear memories of the Jim Crow order. Jim Crow, he argues, has been conspicuously overlooked in contemporary discussions about race and slavery, which flatten history (\\u201cthe bad old timey-times\\u201d).

20:20: An aside on Adolph\\u2019s polemic (2013) on Hollywood \\u201crace movies\\u201d such as Django Unchained and The Help.

28:30: Adolph describes the Jim Crow racial order as a practical and pragmatic strategy of class power over all workers, rather than an abstract hatred of one group. And why it is counterproductive to frame it as a binary story of all white versus all Black people.

\\xa0It\\u2019s not like white people had a meeting around the campfire and said, \\u201clet\\u2019s go put some Jim Crow on some Black people\\u201d

36:30: Framing Jim Crow as unrelenting oppression in fact mirrors, ironically, the very vision laid out by segregationists themselves. This view, found today in liberal anti-racism discourses, attributes everything to an abstract \\u201cwhite supremacy\\u201d and \\u201canti-Blackness.\\u201d Class is disavowed. The effect is to help sustain an elite stratum of racial spokespeople. But also, why does this race-first worldview have such broad appeal?

53:15: Adolph responds to charges that his argument is class reductionist. We reference an older exchange with the late political theorist Ellen Meiskins Wood (2002) to clarify the distinctions in Adolph\\u2019s arguments (see the original text here, esp. the \\u201cRejoinder\\u201d). Race, he argues, is one of many ideologies to sustain accumulation and class power that rest on \\u201cascriptive differences,\\u201d or, putative ideas about the natural differences between people: if not race, then sex, gender, religion, caste, tribe, mental and physical abilities, etc.\\xa0

* Also see Adolph\\u2019s concise summary in New Labor Forum (2013).

1:03:50: Wrestling with common objections, such as, \\u201cethnocentrism predates capitalism, so race is autonomous from class\\u201d; or, \\u201cupper-class Black people are subject to police violence too, so class doesn\\u2019t explain racism.\\u201d

1:14:20: Adolph on the broader generalizability of his analysis for other groups, in the US and globally (see Clare Kim on comparative analyses of Asian American/Black racial ideology). And where Adolph got his Marxism.

I wouldn\\u2019t say I\\u2019m the most cosmopolitan world traveler. But the thing I will say is that, in every place that I\\u2019ve been, what I\\u2019ve noticed is that most people are scuffling trying to work for a living. It doesn\\u2019t matter what kind of food they eat or the music they listen to. I mean that\\u2019s all interesting, more or less. But the basic human condition is that, right?

1:30:30: NBA banter.

Thanks for listening! Please get in touch via timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or https://twitter.com/ttsgpod

You can subscribe via substack or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod

This is a public episode. If you\\u2019d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe'