Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth Warren have known each other and have absorbed each other’s work for a long time. In 2009 they co-edited an important collection of essays titled Renewing Black Intellectual History. The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought. The title makes clear where one of their main interests lies regarding African American studies. It also clarifies how they believe that field of study should be approached, by way of studying the overlapping ideology and materiality of history. Now, they took their collaboration a step further as they co-wrote a new book of essays about the state of Black Studies and the cultural politics that attends to it, especially within the American academe. Unsurprisingly, this study comes out at a time when the economic divide between the have and the have nots is unprecedented in modern history given the staggering dimension of the wealth produced around the world. In our country alone, last year’s GDP is calculated to be in the 30 trillion range, which, I confess, I would not know how to write such an amount in numbers.
What I do know, instead, is that race is neither the main cause nor the trigger of this parallel growth of wealth and inequality, a spectacular oxymoron if one recalls that human labor is what produces wealth, not the other way around as the masters of the universe want us to believe. The name of this ugly game with a different set of rules for the rich and everybody else is Neoliberalism. Reed Jr. and Warren think of it as capitalism without working-class opposition, which includes but does not redistribute as they point out in this wonderfully researched book, one of its many merits. How would one, otherwise, explain the increasingly shrinking white middle-class and the concomitant rise of Black and ethnic studies program as well as DEI initiatives in American universities in the last several decades? This is not to say that racism does not exist. Neither that slavery, segregation, and white supremacy are irrelevant factors in our society’s behaviors and structure. It means to locate and understand these factors historically in all their complexity without positing race as the predetermined explanation for them. This is what Reed Jr. and Warren repeatedly refer to as “historicity.” To put it somewhat simplistically but, I hope, clearly, the term refers to the reasons as to why people do and say the things they do and say, believe what they believe, and why things happen the way they happen. In other words, Reed Jr. and Warren tells us, history is not an option.
Such an approach is neither a reductio ad unum nor a strictly Marxist materialist explanation of historical events and periods, although Marxism is a significant part of the two Black intellectuals’ bag of tools to analyze Black Studies. It aims at identifying race’s proper role and function throughout our history, which they define as “a technology of hierarchy.” Using as a case study the South, and especially the city of New Orleans from the late 19th century to the post-Katrina years, in the first two chapters they demonstrate how race and its twin brother racism work as a mechanism that does ideological work in tangible fashion. One that impacts people’s lives and conditions, thus becoming the ideology of reality, whereby an “ascriptive difference . . . stabilizes systems of hierarchy by giving them the appearance of reflecting things as they are.” Decades and decades of “class power and cultural hegemony,” the two argue, resulted in the reification of that reality and the ideology that attends to it and, in turn, the creation of myths such as the Lost Cause. Those myths are hardly politically neutral. The so-called nostalgia for the Lost Cause, for example, helps to perpetuate the fable that Black Americans are only defined and, perhaps even more importantly, only think of themselves as Black people and therefore don’t live in the same reality as everybody else. By the same token, everybody else, which means every other race, does not think of themselves and is not defined racially. Never mind that half of the American working-class is made of non-white people, while a good part of the other half is made of the descendants of immigrants that originally were not defined or thought of themselves as being white (Italians, Irish, Jewish etc.). The end game of this discourse is that the modalities of power and class division that structured Jim Crow and the resulting contradictory social relations that impacted everyone’s daily life are either marginalized or entirely overlooked in favor of racial explanation.
And yet, Reed Jr. and Warren explain that both conceptually and historically speaking, the notion of transhistorical “anti-blackness” as the engine of world history is neither a true nor a tenable, let alone useful, position. Neither, I would add, is its corollary, the idea that race and blackness work the same way everywhere around the world (as in the citizens of Rwanda can tell you). There’s a reason, after all, why the capitalist elites of Europe and the U.S. explained the Russian revolution of 1917 as a Jewish plot against the world order, which happened to be their world order, whereas Leon Trockij, who was Jewish and wrote the most spectacular and accurate history of that revolution, detailed how class, power, the economic conditions in the cities and in the countryside, the military and international politics all played a role and a much bigger one than a handful of Jewish men to trigger that epochal moment (and by so doing he also explained the role of the Jewish Bund in that historical event). To stay much closer home and to the present time, one must only think about the scapegoating of the Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian immigrants in the 2024 presidential elections, who were falsley accused of eating dogs and cats as a marker of their inferiority and savagery, ironically a slur promulgated by people whose culinary preferences require the massive slaughtering of cows and chickens in industrial slaughterhouses . After all, it would have been impossible to accuse them in terms of economic and social relations, as these Black humans’ labor brought about a degree of economic revitalization in that small town as well as an increase in property value, as one white, female resident pointed out at the time (in the defense of those immigrants). This kind of ideological work is always done by people whose goal is to divide and conquer the lower classes. It is nothing new. The problem arises, Reed Jr. and Warren insist, when that work is done by those who should not do it and, instead, should help to prove it to be detrimental to the people and the cause they supposedly support and embrace. Because by diminishing the complexity of history and, in this specific case, of Black life to race and racism, scholars of Black identity rob their fellow black Americans and their country of their own history, beginning with divesting “black Americans politics of historicity” itself.
For the same reason, I think, Reed Jr. and Warren take the South and especially New Orleans as their starting point of analysis. It was in post-Reconstruction New Orleans, after all, that in 1892 black workers joined their white counterparts in a general strike that “withstood employers’ and white suprematist politicians’ effort to break solidarity through racist agitation.” It was in that same decade that the campaign for disenfranchisement increased because of “the dominant merchant-planter class’s concerns that black and white poor farmers and workers could align to challenge ruling class power.” Likewise, it was in the South that Democrats opposed “black freedmen because they were republicans and not because they were black” but did not oppose, and indeed welcomed Cooper’s description of the Black worker as gentle, naturally obeying to the authority in Voice From The South,and that of European and Asian immigrants as evil promoters of political revolutionary ideas such as anarchism and communism.
The point of recalling these and other historical moments and voices is to unmask the platitudes that a generic and indemonstrable “Racial Oversoul” guides “a collective yearning,” which is false because, simply put, such a thing does not exist. Just like the teleological assertion that historical figures such as “Booker T. Washington, Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. – were all . . . pursuing the same goal” is false, claimed simply because they all shared the desire to end Jim Crow. Instead of “examining or explaining distinctions and change,” Reed Jr. and Warren write, “the substantive intent of this approach is more to deny they exist or explain them away.” The sad irony is that these teleological platitudes do exactly the work of erasing difference, the one factor upon which the entire discourse of Black identity scholars is supposedly predicated, of course with the self-serving exception of class difference. Consequently, albeit unsurprisingly, gone is the complex humanity of Black people, their diverse dreams and aspirations as well as their multiple interests and desires, their humanism, which is exactly what neoliberalism requires to avoid conflict, address those concrete differences in actuality, maintain unbalanced power relations, and accumulate maximum profit. What is welcomed, instead, is the idea of explaining everything according to “the disembodied universality of whiteness.”
To complement and expand on their argument, in the third and fourth chapters the authors address the same questions they start with in the previous two essays, this time by way of literary analysis. Specifically, the third chapter, entitled “Faulkner, Morrison, and the Rehabilitation of Race Relations,” focuses on Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust and Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, whereas chapter four tackles “Slavery and the Politics of African American Literature” by focusing on Frederic Douglass’s autobiographies and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. The focus on one of Faulkner’s less achieved novels, aesthetically speaking, makes sense given that the book is at its core a mystery story, a genre devoted to epistemology. In fact, Intruder In The Dust offers what Reed Jr. and Warren phrase “some sense of peoplehood” as the subject that resists Northern capital financed processes of modernization that turned the South into a consumerist economy and culture in place of a specific ideological and class-based opposition. Thus, the door is opened to make race relations the centerpiece of literary analysis of the American Dickens’ fictions and sideline the manifest class aspect of the work of a writer who, after all, came of literary age during the Great Depression and the rise of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. In the hands of “African American contemporaries and successors” race relations become African American “literature’s raison d’etre.”
For example, Morrison, who paints fuller portraits of Black life and Black people, in The Bluest Eye has Claudia ascribe to Black folks in the North the same values that Stevens does in Intruder in the Dust in the South, “a preference for sensuousness and the things of the earth over marketplace commodities, an almost instinctual commitment to the communal raising of children, and a deep and abiding relationship to the black music of the south.” But while at least a reader who is unconvinced of this kind of politics, or lack thereof, can appreciate the aesthetic achievement of Morrison’s language, when the same approach becomes the conceptual foundation and scholarly pursue of, say, Afropessimists, we are left with the idea that a sympathetic Black scholar will be the best way for working-class Americans to “find the path to power” rather than “through solidarity with their fellow citizens” of all colors, “all of whom,” Reed Jr. and Warren conclude, “might come to see that their self-appointed racial spokesperson are, also necessarily, their class enemy.”
This depressing paradox, and paradoxes are the ciphers of history, comes full circle in the essay on Douglass and Whitehead, to me the most gratifying of the chapters, where the two Black scholars take the reader on a masterful tour de force that maps the trajectory that goes from anti-slavery to African American literature. They draw this map by starting with Douglass’s analysis of slave songs as “protest” and his autobiographies, continuing with Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folks, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, William Wells’ Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter, Melville’s Billy Budd, the Sailor and White Jacket, and concluding with Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. African American literature, they write, is defined by the belief that “slavery rather than emancipation defines the primary relationship of black Americans to a past that refuses in any real way to remain the past.” In other words, 160 years of history are essentially inconsequential. They either disappear or are explained by way of analogy.
Of this kind of literature Whitehead’s award-winning novel is the mirror. It is not fortuitous, Reed Jr. and Warren point out at the very end of their essay, that Whitehead “sidelines the event that was most consequential in shaping the fortunes of African Americans, namely, the Civil War that brought slavery to an end.” This absence in Whitehead’s celebrated book ushers in the idea that slavery ended thanks to fugitives and the group solidarity necessary to help those fugitives. While those did exist and were a significant part of the effort to end slavery, Reed Jr. and Warren conclude, life and work remind us that it is necessary to understand and come to terms with the fact that what determined the fate of slavery was “a collective political movement of black and white Americans to marshal the power and the resources of the state for the purposes of achieving and maintaining liberation, justice, and equality.” The rest, Martin Scorsese would quip, is bullshit. And you know it.
