The Families, or Disagreements We Need to Have Right Now

The family is necessarily a matrix of the contradictions and double binds that arise from the disjunction between the dispositions of the inheritor and the destiny contained within the inheritance itself.

—Pierre Bourdieu, “The Contradictions of Inheritance”

I.

Is now the time to debate the assertion that little to nothing has changed for black Americans since slavery—at of all times this moment, when Donald Trump has accused the Smithsonian Institution of undue emphasis on “how bad slavery was” and followed up that charge with an executive order that promises to “restor[e] truth and sanity to American history”?1 Is now the time to debate the iconoclasm that surged in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, to double down on the dismantling of Confederate monuments and the renaming of symbolic locations associated with slavery and Jim Crow when most every National Endowment for the Humanities grant has been rescinded and those monies redirected toward Trump’s personal “monument” project—his “National Garden of American Heroes”? Is now the time to debate the methods of black studies and the nuances of Critical Race Theory—at the very moment when Christopher Rufo takes a victory lap for driving up Americans’ negative perceptions of the phrase “critical race theory,” cheering himself for having successfully (in his words) “frozen their brand”?2

For the political scientist Adolph Reed and the literary critic Kenneth Warren, the answer to these questions is an unequivocal “yes!”

In their co-authored book, Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality: The Farce this Time (Routledge, 2025)— the product of their thirty-year collaboration (and eight years spent in an informal “two-person seminar” at a bar in Hyde Park)—Reed and Warren argue that now is without question the time to challenge the thinking of scholars Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Frank Wilderson; journalists-commentators Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nicole Hannah-Jones; filmmaker Ava DuVernay; novelists Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead; and so many others—a congeries they draw together beneath the sign “black studies.” The thinkers most celebrated in the field, in Reed and Warren’s view, traffic in outmoded and reductive views of race, having doubled down on claims of white supremacy’s totalizing scope and, by turns, black Americans’ self-interest in race as the grounds of their “corporate” or collective identity. The idea of a “race group interest” shared by everyone from black elites to the most everyday folk: this idea is, in their view, the new common sense within black studies.3

This state of affairs is the result of what Reed and Warren call the “cultural turn” in black studies—a shift in the field’s objects and methods that coincides with the institutionalization of black studies within the elite academy starting in the late 1980s/early 1990s.4 This “cultural turn” has been marked by, in their phrase, a “flight from concreteness” (BSCP, 5), in which the black studies scholar abdicates prevailing disciplinary standards of evidence and argument for the purpose of “making up claims to suit one’s fancy” (BSCP, 6). Call your method “critical fabulation” (as does Hartman) or confess that when faced with an “unreconstructable past” you “try to imagine what cannot be verified” (as Joan Dayan has been known to admit), such exhortations to “falsif[y] the past” express “an interpretivist objective of stipulating an entirely made-up, trauma porn narrative in service to an ideological program: reading race reductionism into the past as an instrument of efforts to legitimize it as interpretation of the present.”5

I was surprised to find myself caught in the dragnet of Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality (though, in truth, I shouldn’t have expected to emerge unscathed, as I attended graduate school during the alleged “cultural turn”). Reed and Warren cite some incriminating passages from my first book, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (passages that capture my early-career habit of reasoning by analogy).6 They appear not to have read my book, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life, in which I take some distance from that earlier project. Had they done so, they might have noticed some of the affinities between their critiques of black studies and my own.7 But even those affinities are limited in the current case. Reed and Warren engage the field of black studies from the perspective of critiques of neoliberalism and inequality, as well as debates over “race-versus-class,” and I have no dog in either fight. However, rather than use this space to reiterate the claims in None Like Us, I will here attend to an emergent set of concerns that were brought to the fore for me in my engagement with Reed and Warren’s book.

Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality draws into view what is arguably one of the more important debates within the field of black studies, at the crux of which lies a disagreement about race. Few critics writing at the present time theorize the concept of race in quite the explicit way that thinkers such as David Roediger, Stuart Hall, Anthony Appiah, and Charles Mills once did; race doesn’t seem outwardly in dispute within the field. But by Reed and Warren’s account, the field of black studies is riven with pernicious ideologies and logics of race (they call them “intellectual pathologies” [BSCP, 5])—their examples range from the Afropessimists’ positing of “an ahistorical ontology as the deeper truth of a generically yet distinctively black existence” (BSCP, 5) to the pursuit, in the work of some others, of “fatuous allegories between past and present to portray sameness of vulnerability to an evanescent racism” (BSCP, 251), “falsifying the past to justify race reductionism in the present” (BSCP, 247).

Reed and Warren offer, as an alternative to such falsification, “a historical-materialist critique of the ‘cultural turn’ in African American studies” (BSCP, 1). “[O]ur critique,” they continue, “is best advanced through concrete arguments and interpretations of specific texts, tendencies, and events, rather than through abstract or formalist theoretical narratives, and that is what we provide here” (BSCP, 15). Forced to ponder what exactly distinguishes “concrete” from “abstract” arguments with respect to the abstraction of race, I was brought back to something once said to me by Professor David Lionel Smith, my first instructor in American and African American literature at Williams College: “you can’t undo racial critique with more racial critique.” These words always felt like an admonition in the spirit of Auden (“poetry makes nothing happen”) and to a field sharply set against the insight; I take Smith essentially to be arguing that one cannot mobilize a critique that will free you from the very thing that is disfiguring your thinking: the fatuous idea of race. Or, as the Scarecrow laments in The Wiz (played, in painful irony, by a pre-cosmetic surgery Michael Jackson): “You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game.”8

A scan of the footnotes in Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality reveals another possible meaning to this admonition. The two authors to appear with greatest frequency in Reed and Warren’s footnotes are … Adolph Reed and Kenneth Warren. In some chapters, every other footnote references a work by either Reed or Warren (frequently work that had been published in the pages of this very publication). Given titles such as “Afropessimism, or Black Studies as a Class Project” (Reed), “Scapegoating Politics: How Fascism Deploys Race, and How Antiracism Takes the Bait” (Reed), “The End(s) of African-American Studies” (Warren), and “‘Blackness’ and the Sclerosis of African American Criticism” (Warren), it wouldn’t be a stretch to see Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality as the culmination of two very prolific scholarly careers. I’m inclined to call it a rehash of previous work, if only to underscore the hermeticism of the entire affair.

Move over to the other side of the ledger, and one encounters a black studies formation in which certain ideas have emerged as shibboleths that must be said (or can’t be said) if one wishes to establish one’s belonging in the field. Our contemporary reality constitutes

the “afterlife of slavery”

or “the new Jim Crow”

or reflects “the nonevent of emancipation”

or evidence that we “remain in the hold” of slavery

or “stay in the hold of the ship”

where “the archive is a death sentence”

“Blacks are not Human subjects”9

and “nothing has changed”

Survey the works of a younger generation of black scholars (or perform editorial service on any of the major journals in literary studies, black studies, or the social sciences), and it becomes clear that these phrases have become the lingua franca of contemporary racial thought. One hears such phrases repeated as if their meanings were self-evident—and even, at times, as objective fact. The repetition itself marks a peculiar kind of unfreedom—what James Baldwin once described as our willingness to “spring the trap” of our categorization.10 The wound of slavery’s generational history gets installed into the subject and saddles Black people with an impoverished unconscious—one that functions, as the psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou suggests, like a “granary of the past” housing only “intergenerational, ongoing affronts of racial violence.”11 Rather than an unconscious that is dynamic and malleable, Black people are seen as deserving of only an unconscious that is static and “fully filled-in (by the intergenerationally transmitted trauma of slavery, ongoing racial abuse, and police brutality).”12

My cheeky reference to “the families” was meant to highlight the hermeticism on either side of the affair—the idea that there is in fact less disagreement across this particular divide and more the hardening of positions long held, with Reed and Warren happily ensconced in their “two-person seminar,” while Wilderson, Hartman, and others continue about their business, largely indifferent to the critique, secure in the knowledge that the emerging generation of scholars in the field recites their critical maxims like church dogma. Meaningful disagreement is pushed to a distant horizon as scholarly combatants remain sealed off from one another in their research echo chambers—further evidence, perhaps, of the “epistemic closure” that afflicts our culture more generally.

I would assert that a “historical-materialist critique” of black studies is unlikely to close this gap so long as it adheres to the formula “X is really Y”—the call letters of every hermeneutics of suspicion.13 Reed and Warren appear to want to divorce black scholars from any (affective, identitarian) entanglements with their objects of study, to restore black studies to its original “intellectual seriousness” (BSCP, 2) where scholarship would adhere to “prevailing disciplinary standards of evidence, argument, and archive” (BSCP, 195)—i.e., “concrete arguments.” I, for one, am skeptical that any analysis of class can ever free us from the rip current of race. As Smith once observed, “American race thinking demands that we (black folk) constantly perform our blackness. Paradoxically, within this coercion is the mandate of self-reflective choice.”14 That was true for W. E. B. Du Bois, and it remains true for us (Reed and Warren included).

If we are going to return to the question of how race is forming (or deforming) our thinking, it seems important to confront race head on as a force with which the black scholar must always grapple—an imperative “to discover the terms of a self-address” within the “conceptual crisis” precipitated by black studies, as a young Hortense Spillers noted early in her writing career.15

At the end of this essay, I will offer a brief suggestion for where the conversation might go in pursuit of a more intellectually honest (in my view) grappling with race.

II.

Summing up trends in the previous half-decade of black studies, Spillers recalled, in 2003, in the introduction to Black, White, and In Color, that Ralph Ellison’s idea of the “usable past” was, in her words, “the conundrum that has hounded an entire generation of investigators.”16 Reed and Warren’s Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality takes the measure of just how far the field has drifted away from this noble idea over the course of the past quarter-century. Recent work in the field has turned away from the important and challenging concept of a “usable past” and toward an idea that Reed and Warren view with deep suspicion and doubt: “the afterlife of slavery.” From Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America to Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism, from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, “[t]he class program around which institutional black studies has cohered,” they write, “has posited as a guiding principle the idea that little to nothing has changed fundamentally for black Americans since slavery, such that our contemporary reality constitutes the afterlife of slavery” (BSCP, 18). As a sign of how broadly this program has spread (within the institution of the university and beyond), they see the idea of an “afterlife of slavery” animating works such as Nicole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, as well as the more popular writings of Ibrahim Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Wilderson and Hartman come in for a particularly harsh drubbing on account of their “claims of affinity” with the black masses. I will return to both their cases shortly.

The claim that “our contemporary reality constitutes the afterlife of slavery” (BSCP, 18). That “nothing has changed.” That emancipation was a “nonevent.” That “blacks are not human subjects.” Such claims are, according to Reed and Warren, blatantly hyperbolic and “empirically preposterous on their face” (BSCP, 124). Reed and Warren advance four arguments in their case against what they consider acts of scholarly malpractice:

1. a critique of the tendency to conceptualize black politics as an “unproblematically singular” phenomenon;
2. a critique of black studies as an “elite” affair;
3. a critique of the “ideology of race relations”; and, finally,
4. an indictment of what they call “’race-reductionist’ antiracism.”

Each claim deserves a bit of a summary:

1. Black politics:

The idea of an afterlife of slavery serves a class program in black studies; it offers, in Reed and Warren’s words, “an interpretive framework that abjures historical specificity and focuses instead on identifying similarities between past and present in service to asserting the determinative power of a generic, ahistorical racism” (BSCP, 101). This tendency to position race (or racism) as determinative forces yields a black politics that feels “unproblematically singular” across time and space.17 We know the names by which this politics has come to be know: the Black Radical Tradition, the “black liberation struggle,” or “black freedom movement.” They continue: “there has been no overarching, transhistorical ‘black liberation struggle’ or ‘black freedom movement’ in effect decreeing or guiding strategic priorities, political directions, issue selection, or patterns of alliance” (BSCP, 119). In fact, “liberation” and “freedom” are mere platitudes, in their view, which “divest black Americans’ politics of its historicity,” obscure “the differences between past and present,” and therefore inhibit our capacity to “make sense of how we got from there to here, from then to now” (BSCP, 119).

2. The elite claim:

This singular black politics is an “elite ethnic-pluralist interest-group affair,” Reed and Warren write— it expresses “the perspectives and agendas of a specific social location within the black American population” (BSCP, 2). Reed and Warren charge contemporary black scholars with being a particular type of elite that has deformed the field to serve its own interests. The grounding assumptions of the field of black studies “are little more than expressions of the interests of black political and professional elites” (BSCP, 4), modes of identification meant to buttress the black scholar’s claim in some way, as Reed and Warren phrase it, “to be ‘bone of the bone, and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil.’”18

3. The “race-relations” claim:

That conspicuous quotation of Du Bois is intended to sting, for Reed and Warren hold that contemporary black scholars have positioned themselves as “brokers” in much the same vein as Du Bois and his peers at the turn of the nineteenth century. Booker T. Washington crafted what they term “the ideology of race relations” at the dawn of the period of Jim Crow segregation; and “[d]ifferent as he was from Washington, Du Bois operated within the terms established by Bookerism” (BSCP, 159). Under the “race relations” model, the race leaders who played the role of spokesmen for the race (or brokers between a white elite and the black population) “sought to wrest or cajole what they could from white ‘ruling elements’, thereby harmonizing what they saw as black needs within what white elites presented as the necessary constraints for general prosperity” (BSCP, 159). Viewed through this lens, antiracist politics represents a move in a game of power: “[W]hen all the high-theoretical pyrotechnics and bluster are burned off,” they write, “Afropessimism is another expression of the black professional-managerial class political ideology that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and congealed largely around pursuit of managerial authority over black political aspirations” (BSCP, 50–51).

African American literature and black studies literary theory merely revitalized race relations as a model; their core function “has been to fob off a retreaded theory of race relations as a politics capable of challenging neoliberal capitalism” (BSCP, 17). “[R]ace relations is literature’s raison d’être” (BSCP, 154): “The idea of a black or African American literature was an outgrowth of and not an alternative to race relations. A literature that spoke for a race had to presume the existence of a race possessing corporate interests that could be distilled and transmitted on behalf of the whole” (BSCP, 164; my emphasis). These are not surprising sentiments coming from the author of What Was African American Literature?.

4. The “race-reductionist” claim:

Finally, to shore up the sense of black “corporate” interest, scholars in the field of black studies presuppose what Reed and Warren call a “race reductionist” antiracism. A “race-reductionist” claim is one that asserts “that all black people suffer equally and primarily from racism and that nothing has changed for black people since slavery and Jim Crow,” assumptions which “conveniently obscure the class character of the practical agendas of neoliberal black politics” (BSCP, 9). The methods and practices that currently prevail within black studies are designed to handicap any inquiry into questions of class and inequality, to put the brakes on any “agenda of downward redistribution” (BSCP, 4). The evidence is that the more prominent black scholars have only doubled down in the face of the right’s recently intensified assault. Reed and Warren write: “Hannah-Jones and DuVernay, as well as Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and only to a lesser extend [Frank] Wilderson and [Saidiya] Hartman, have brands to protect and products to sell, which can help explain their myopic commitment to race reductionism in the face of a mounting political threat” (BSCP, 7–8).

III.

Black studies is no stranger to the charge of elitism.19 So what could it mean for one set of black scholars to accuse another set of being “elites?” The accusation is intended to set in relief, arguably, what Reed and Warren view as particularly specious “claims of affinity.” The black scholar’s interpretive project of reasoning by historical analogy and allegory, pursuing “superficial analogies with earlier historical moments” (Reed, quoted in BSCP, 28), “identifying similarities between past and present” (BSCP, 101), allows her to claim affinity (even kinship) with the black masses, both past and present; and, further, working from the assumption that black Americans express their desires indirectly (whether via “hidden transcripts,” “signifyin’,” or “Aesopian black ways of being”), to position herself as the “interprete[r] of and ventriloquis[t] for the esoteric demands of a forgotten population” (BSCP, 18). For all the lines of argument in Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality, it is these “claims of affinity” that appear most to irritate Reed and Warren. And that is because the claim to affinity is meant to obscure class—i.e., evade the topic of inequality.

Reed and Warren find such evasion on display in some of the most high-profile and celebrated work in the field of black studies.

In Afropessimism, Frank Wilderson “displays this class perspective in his romanticization of ‘Black suffering’” (BSCP, 50). His theory of Afropessimism establishes an exception from the human that applies to all blacks: “Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.”20 Wilderson, it should be noted, is a second-generation PhD, the child of parents who both hold doctorates, and whose father, a professor and practicing psychologist, chaired the committee that developed the proposal for a Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Minnesota in 1969. Reed and Warren home in on one of Wilderson fils’s most often quoted statements regarding the theory of Afropessimism: “[the theory] is legitimate because it has secured a mandate from Black People at their best; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper.”21 Wilderson’s hyperbole (“Blacks are not human subjects”) nullifies his class position, leaving room for him to emerge in possession of the “mandate” to speak a rage that Black people can only whisper. We fail to receive evidence of that mandate and when and how it was issued.

Listen again to that sentence from Afropessimism: “Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.” A great deal hinges on that word “structurally,” which does most of the ideological work here, “stabiliz[ing] systems of hierarchy by giving them the appearance of reflecting things as they are” (AP, 32; emphasis mine); it allows for the stipulation that “black Americans’ legitimate concerns are exhausted by identifying what appear, or can be construed, as aggregate racial disparities” (AP, 52). These critical orthodoxies reflect a commitment to “structure”—to the “structural antagonism” that produces blackness as the antithesis of the human.22

The mode of affinity on display in Hartman’s work is even more perplexing to Reed and Warren. Hartman “has shown little compunction,” they write, “about offering herself up as something of a medium for the ideals and aspirations of the long-dead” (BSCP, 192). In her work, she sets aside conventional scholarly methods and testable formulations “in favor of conducting a séance for the victims of the past,” positioning herself as the mediating instrument “enabling voices from the past to speak from absences within archives, and even in the absence of an archive” (BSCP, 195; emphasis mine). By her own account, Hartman works within and against archives to “recreate the voices and use the word of these young women when possible and inhabit the intimate dimension of their lives.”23 It seems fair to ask how this “intimate mode of proceeding” ought to be read in light of Hartman’s earlier critique of liberal empathy toward the enslaved in Scenes of Subjection: “Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to better understand the other or ‘the projection of one’s own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one’s own emotions.’”24

One struggles to see Reed and Warren’s language of “evasion” as unfair or significantly off the mark. From Lose Your Mother (2007):

… black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that was entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.25

That last line feels like a provocation—daring any inquiry into whether one purpose of “the afterlife of slavery” might be to obscure the privileges afforded a tenured university professor. Again, the flight from concreteness, the abdication of disciplinary standards, serves an interpretivist objective and ideological program in their view—i.e., the evasion of inequality, the obscuring of class.

Wilderson and Hartman’s shared sensibility—their status as “black whisperers” with the power “to ventriloquize the black population as a whole” (BSCP, 51)—betrays the capture of black studies by what Barbara Jeanne Fields and Karen Fields have termed racecraft: “the terrain of imagination and action that posits ‘race as a given distinction of human types’ in order to underwrite a ‘social, civic, or legal double standard based on ancestry.’”26 That double standard is “the mythology of black distinctiveness” (BSCP, 51), but making accommodations for a mythology in the field of black studies isn’t the worst of it, by Reed and Warren’s lights.

The race-reductionist premise of a “Racial Oversoul that guides a collective yearning” is, they put it bluntly, “quintessentially racist” (BSCP, 119). That is, in affirming white supremacy as totalizing, the “mythology of black distinctiveness” bears a certain irony: “those whose politics currently hinges on denouncing white supremacy embrace a version of the same essentialist racialism as those who a century or so earlier imposed it” (BSCP, 56). This is the problem of race in black studies, in a nutshell, according to Reed and Warren.

IV.

Reed and Warren rail against the attempts of antiracists “to turn [racism] into a social structure by affixing adjectives to it like ‘structural’ or ‘systemic,’” finding the recourse to “structural” racism inadequate. Why is that so? Such moves protect a key objective within antiracists’ politics, which is “to propagate the view that ‘race’—in the form of disembodied abstractions like racism and white supremacy—defines black existence as thoroughly [now] as it did in 1922 or 1822.”27 Condemning talk of “systems” or “structures” as reductive, they offer that racism is merely an “attitude” and “not bound to discrete material relations or policies” (BSCP, 124–25); but to me, the retreat into attitude feels unpersuasive and itself inadequate. Why is that so?

“Attitude” accounts for racism without also accounting for race. That is, there is so little available within “historical-materialist critique” to account for the subject’s experience of race, which surprises, given Reed and Warren’s citation of Barbara Fields on the inseparability of race from black subjective self-definition: “the only reason scholars conclude without thought or hesitation that every such proposed self-definition is an acquiescence in (or, as the tedious jargon has it, construction of) race is that the equation of self-definition and race for Afro-Americans—and for them alone—is an axiom.”28 The external imposition of racism and the internal subjective experience of race are inseparable, so to limit race/racism to attitudes is its own form of reduction.

Back to the families, then:

I find the thinking too rigid in one case and misattuned with the aesthetic aspect of important work in the field in the other. For Afropessimists, there is only the traumatic recurrence of slavery and antiblackness, the black psyche fully filled in with a received content; with black suffering romanticized by Afropessimism’s iron cage, the only thing the black subject can do is strain and rail against the structure. It is a vision of unfreedom. But to imply, as Reed and Warren certainly have, that this is all an alibi to evade a frank assessment of our class position as black scholars, screening us off from our class interests, is to remain deaf to the agonism at the heart of debates over slavery, black identity, and the study of the black past—i.e., to the scholar’s subjective experience of race.29

Ironically, here, in this stress on the overwhelming importance or ultimate insignificance of this “received content,” we might begin to discern what Reed and Warren share with the black studies congeries whose methods they’re so set against: a rather impoverished notion of inheritance. Both sides in this debate traffic in notions of succession and predecession that feel both ready-to-hand and insufficiently nuanced—as is evident, I would note, in the ease with which the entire lot make recourse to the trope of “afterlives.”30

V.

“the afterlife of slavery”

“the new Jim Crow”

“the memory of slavery”

“the psychic hold of slavery”

Such phrases certainly reinforce the ideological claim that “nothing has changed,” and they have, quite unexpectedly, in turn become a reservoir of “conservative ideas”—conservative not in the sense of retrograde or outdated or politically traditional, but ideas that “seek to conserve our analytic egos, to fortify our defenses by reassuring us that we know what we know” in the case of slavery and race.31 But they are also the signatures of inheritance, the idioms by which changes of belonging are expressed. As such, rather than see such language as the mere alchemical workings of racecraft, we might observe that they share an error unique to our language of inheritance.

The philosopher J. Reid Miller asks: “[I]s African chattel slavery an origin? Or is it a symptom of imperialism, greed, power, racism, moral zealotry, etc.?”32 I suspect Reed and Warren would answer, with great confidence, “a symptom!”33 But Miller asks us to ponder the entailments of inheritance as such:

What … is unique to our language of inheritance is that its explanatory value depends precisely on a suspension of this division of causal force and determined effect. African chattel slavery is distinct as an instance of a global, historical legacy of slavery as well as several other legacies. Its ability to be invoked to explain contemporary knowledge and social relations is in no way diminished by being a point of relay in these movements. Yet to identify a current dynamic (e.g., the racial-carceral system) as a legacy of slavery need not signal slavery as the singular or primary cause of that dynamic.34

As he puts it in his original formulation of a philosophy of inheritance: “Despite there being … no lineage without a legacy, that legacy … as it manifests historically for us is not intrinsically or instrumentally coincident with the lineage through which it passes” (PI, 96).

An inheritance isn’t given to you; it passes through you. It isn’t a belonging; it confers belongingness. One needn’t “make” a claim of affinity. A legacy both makes and unmakes you—as in the execution of a will, in which the “giver” is replaced by an ancestor or predecessor, “a disembodied, atemporal (non)being that cannot properly ‘will’ or give consent,” while the place of the “receiver” is held by the heir, trustee, or successor, forms of “non-being” adequate to execute the transfer (PI, 94). The raced subject is braided by various legacies of belonging (Reid Miller invokes Frantz Fanon’s notion of “ethical transit” as a prime schematic of that subject’s slippage between legacies). Blackness is an important conceptual marker of this transitivity: as “the principal point of passage between the human and the non-human world,” Reid Miller observes (quoting Spillers), blackness is “symbolic of the threshold of non-being that inheritance crosses” (PI, 101n6). Black will make you … or black will unmake you.

We might be inspired to analyze more deeply, then, the “suspension” of cause and effect, lineage and legacy, making and unmaking that is endemic to our language of inheritance; “to unwrap and make explicit the affiliations and disaffiliations between endowments that often go overlooked” (PI, 100); to tease out the convoluted entailments of the personal and the familial, the individual and the communal, the moral and the immortal that are captured in phrases such as “the psychic hold of slavery” and “the afterlife of slavery.”

That, at least, remains my hope.

Adolph Reed has been waging his polemic for long enough now that history has come around to his side. Specifically, with the second rise of the DSA, we’re seeing new conditions of possibility for the role of party intellectual. It’s against this backdrop that we might appreciate the increased resonance of Reed’s polemic. The existence of the DSA means that Reed has a platform that comes with having an affinity with a mass organization and therefore more credibility when charging other academics with purveying a false populism. At least, this is my reception theory of Reed’s belated influence. As regards its larger implications, I’m now wondering if it was primarily the lack of mass left organizations between the end of the Cold War and 2016 that made it possible for academics to once sincerely believe that the act of writing theory was directly and immediately political. The belief certainly went far beyond Black studies, the central target of Reed’s longstanding criticisms. And insofar as this variety of methodological idealism was general to a broad swath of the humanities, Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality’s distinctive focus on the heavy responsibility of cultural studies reflects the disciplinary vantage brought by Kenneth Warren to this book. The result of this collaboration between Reed and Warren is a story in which literature and literary studies are assigned an especially large, villainous role.

I don’t myself teach in Black studies. But I do teach in an adjacent field (Asian American studies)—proximate enough to feel some accountability for the woeful state of affairs Reed and Warren describe. As far as that goes, the dim view that Reed and Warren take of racial justice projects is not what distinguishes them from Afropessimism but rather what explains these projects’ failure. For them, Afropessimism is a “response to the legitimation problems confronting dominant race-reductionist ideology”—wherein the latter includes everything from antiracism trainings led by corporate HR to anti-disparitarian government remedies to radical Afrofuturist and racial capitalist theory in academic Black studies.1 Their provocation lies in the brutal gesture of including the Black elite radical academics who no less reflect a “managerial and investor class politics” (BSCP, 55). Though Reed and Warren’s explicit address is to the “enterprise of black studies,” I, too, am their reluctant addressee in that Asian American studies follows Black studies, is a field where Black Marxism and Afropessimism are refracted as though a cracked mirror, and where can be found varieties of racial capitalism theory and worries about Asian antiBlackness. As in Black studies, McCarthyism has cast a long shadow over Asian American studies, encouraging dissociation from Marxist theory and socialist identification, so much so as to make their disavowal the point of departure for aspirations to methodological innovation.

And yet more Marxist theory is just what we need to be better at doing what Reed and Warren would presumably agree is important to do, which is to work out how racism as an ideology—as something that is false and yet real like the money form—has been so effective at disorganizing working class consciousness, in the perpetuation of U.S. class society. While Reed and Warren declare “race” to be an analytical category unfit for critical purpose (BSCP, 32), by their own definition of it as a mechanism or technology of hierarchy, race is a social force in history. It’s true that Reed and Warren throw in with a “pragmatic” understanding of ideology, but does the chapter have to be closed on the project of theorizing the relationship between racism and capitalism (whether or not one likes the term “racial capitalism”)? A theory of a systemic relationship between racism and capitalism need not exclude incidence of historical and geographical variability.

Moreover, one wonders, if it really is the case that ideas make nothing happen, why waste so much energy arguing? In the examples given, literary studies has provided a particularly powerful assist to race reductionist ideology because in these quarters the disciplinary incentives to discover the “inherently esoteric nature of all black art” (BSCP, 194) dovetails with a longer tradition of antisocialist claims about the cultural inassimilability of Black migrants. Disagreeable as all this may be for literary scholars to hear, even if they are telling us the opposite, Reed and Warren are showing us that there is still more ideology critique yet to be done. It’s also something literary scholars have the skill set for. All grandiosity about the isomorphism between the defense of our academic fields and the pursuit of social justice has been fatally punctured by the arrival of actual right-wing authoritarianism. Unfortunately, this is the condition under which the necessity of class struggle has become obvious again.

We can only hope that those potential readers who are unfamiliar with the authors’ previous work and political positions will not assume from the title of the latest study—Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality: The Farce this Time—that it is not some conservative rant against black studies as a field of social inquiry written by some anti-woke Trumpites. Far from it! Adolph Reed, Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren most certainly offer a spirited critique of black studies in this work, but one from the left, not from the right, hence the “evasion of inequality” in the title. However, the work is far more than a critique of black studies; it is a demonstration of how its very premises have contributed to the fascist onslaught that the United States is currently facing. This is indeed a tall claim and one that warrants an explanation of the links the authors draw between scholarship and politics and vice versa.

Reed and Warren could well have included some reference to race reductionism in the title, since the study is arguably first and foremost a counterargument to its tenets. At its most basic level, race reductionism maintains that racial identification, stratification, and exploitation (in the broadest senses of the word) have been and continue to be the motor forces of American society. As Reed and Warren describe race reductionists, they are those who believe that racism is “encoded in the nation’s DNA” and that “humanity’s most enduring injustices derive from what are presumed to be deep-seated racial and cultural differences.”1 Other components of race reductionism either support or derive from these core beliefs. These include: the conviction that there are discrete racial populations that share collective attributes; that the cultures of other peoples are fixed and threatening; that culture groups exist primarily in states of conflict with rival populations, as a consequence; that a group’s notables, charismatic, elected, and/or credentialed are best equipped to voice and advance group aspirations; and that, although typically not admitted or acknowledged by black race reductionists, an underclass serves as both proof of racism’s effectiveness and the embodiment of unrespectable blackness. As the authors note: “Underclass ideology, which posits a general black population mired in cultural pathologies that stymie individuals’ abilities to take advantage of such opportunities for upward mobility as do exist, was—and remains, though now thoroughly embedded as tacit, commonsense presumption—a crucial component of the ideological glue around which that politics cohered” (BSCP, 8–9). And which maintains “community” cohesion as well, with the underclass forming the lower boundary of blackness.

Reed and Warren trace the last two mentioned components of race reduction and their interplay to the self-promotion and positioning of Booker T. Washington. Emerging from the twin deaths of Frederick Douglass and the Populist Movement, Washington advocated black withdrawal from the political arena contra Douglass and from interracial working-class struggle contra the Populists. In so doing, the White House and Wall St. crowned him the Negro leader and the chief race relations officer in the United States. As much as W.E. B. Du Bois challenged and contested Washington’s leadership, Reed and Warren remark, he never questioned the race reductionist idea that black America requires a single spokesperson and strategist. This, our authors contend, has been one of the troubling legacies of race reductionism that continues into the present.

A related problematic inheritance of race reductionist leadership is the tendency on the part of typically self-appointed leaders to pretend that their class position and interests are, if not the same, then only marginally different from those of their constituency. Black studies professionals and proponents engage in the same class craft through race, contend Reed and Warren. Much like the black mayors and representatives who were voted into office in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and partnered with corporate America to provide jobs to their unemployed constituents, black studies scholars and cultural producers present their research and creations as representations of and in the service of black people writ large. The first problem with this contention is that it is based on an illusion. “This notion of a racial group culture,” our authors argue, “is a homogenizing principle that makes claims to speak for a larger population without consultation or evidence of popular participation seem plausible by grounding them a priori on a presumption of transcendent ontological unity as the essential truth of black American life” (BSCP, 122). And, as they state earlier in the work, if, according to race reductionists, “the ultimate source of black inequality is white racism—or transhistorical ruling-class commitment to white supremacy—then whatever factors differentiate black people’s concerns and interests from one another are less consequential than the putative reality that they are a collective object of racism and a collective subject of antiracism” (BSCP, 101).

These passages prefigure the authors’ second objection to the pseudo class collapse in race reductionism: it temporarily occludes the class-specific visions of what is and how to achieve economic wellbeing. Whereas those who make their living from political office, the podium, and/or from publications have opportunities to increase their income through investments and promoting their brands, wage earners can typically only increase their take-home pay through collective efforts towards that end. Consequently, whereas wage earners have more to gain from “social-democratic norms of equality based on broad social solidarity, markets regulated in line with public needs, downwardly redistributive tax and social policies, and de-commodified public goods,” notables look to increase their wealth through “upwardly redistributive, rent-intensifying” investments (BSCP, 55, 87). These are class facts. And, considering that “roughly three-quarters of so-called black wealth is held by the richest 10 percent of black people, and [that] roughly the same proportion of so-called white wealth is held by the richest 10 percent of white people,” not only have some black notables done quite well for themselves, but their wealth gives lie or at least pause to the slogans that little or nothing has changed for black people since slavery or that phrases such as the “black freedom movement” accurately captures the historical trajectory of all of black America (BSCP, 91). As Reed and Warren note, “evidence of blacks’ active and systemic participation in crafting the processes that reproduce inequality” complicate race reductionist narratives (BSCP, 101).

Yet, this concentration of black wealth is the logical outcome of race reductionist policies that privilege racial representation or inclusion over redistribution, argue the authors. Regardless of how radical-sounding the political program or policy proposal, if its primary aim is to put “black faces in higher places,” then the targeted institution will continue to operate as it did when it excluded blacks, only now with some blacks in it. Different or darker faces in exclusive institutions do not render these entities any less exclusive. As Reed and Warren note, “[D]emands for inclusion and equitable participation on groupist terms can be satisfied entirely within the framework of capitalist-class governance. Indeed, for ruling class interests … representation on ascriptive group terms can be, and has been, an acceptable accommodation to blacks’ dissatisfaction because it is a concession that does not necessarily disrupt governing-class power and priorities or the substantive framework for policymaking; nor, of course, does it require substantial economic redistribution” (BSCP, 102) Only working-class movements are those that aim to transform or even to overturn institutions for the purposes of redistributing capitalist wealth.

In addition to convincingly demonstrating the ways in which race reductionism buttresses anti-labor neoliberalism in making the goal of political mobilization entry into previously whites-only spaces rather than reconfiguring those entities for collective ends, Reed and Warren crafted the essays that comprise their book as a response to recent political events. In particular, they were dismayed by the “antiracist activists’ and pundits’ insistence during the 2016 and 2020 election campaigns that Bernie Sanders did not address black concerns … [despite the fact that] nearly every item on the Sanders campaign’s policy agenda—from the Robin Hood tax on billionaires to free public higher education, to the $15/hr. minimum wage, a single payer health care system, etc.—would disproportionately benefit black and Hispanic populations that are disproportionately working class.” (BSCP, 55) To Reed and Warren, these are clear cases of race reductionism’s privileging racial symbolism over policy substance. However, it seems fair to ask, if racial symbolism is important to at least some portion of the black electorate, could the Sanders campaigns not have provided some? Or would such gestures have been far too great concessions to black voters that would have alienated or risked alienating a considerable percentage of white working people?

On the subject of the white working class, historically and in more recent times, Reed and Warren are notably terse, save for when they reference interracial class struggles, such as the Populist movement and the CIO-inspired mobilizations during the Great Depression and the New Deal era. This reticence is somewhat surprising considering that an explicit aim of their essays is to “work actively to instantiate a serious, grounded, working-class based alternative” to race reductionism (BSCP, 56). For the case can be made that black political choices and cultural production are directly and indirectly impacted by white collaboration with or contestation of capitalist designs. (From this perspective, I question the authors’ contention that black politics “[i]s the study of politics among black people,” independent of the larger political-economic context within which black people operate [BSCP 254].) Moreover, when works that address twentieth century political economy and ideologies, like the one that Reed and Warren have written, leave white working people out of the story, that absence sustains the myth that white workers are first and foremost class-conscious actors and secondarily members of a racial group. For workers of color, just the opposite is typically assumed by many in academia and in the media. Yet, if the vast majority of white working people were motivated primarily by their class interests, in the strictest meaning of the term, racist appeals and policies would not be as effective as they are. This is simply to say that white workers engage deeply in identity politics, even if it is frequently not labelled as such.

I further wish that the authors’ characterization of black studies had been additionally informed by communications with those (living) whose work they deem representative of black studies scholarship. This would have given these writers the opportunity to state how they define black studies and how they situate (or not) their work within that body of scholarship. For in defining black studies scholarship as that which upholds the main tenets of race reductionism, the authors exclude the work of scholars who feel that their work is representative of black studies but not according to the authors’ definition of the field. How do the authors label those writers? And does their definition of black studies scholarship mean that studies on black populations that underscore class distinctions, interests, and divisions (such as Preston H. Smith II’s Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago, which our authors rightly praise) cannot be located in black studies but in fields of longer standing, such as history, sociology, political science, etc.? And, if that is indeed the case, has not black studies always taken a “cultural turn,” not just in the 1980s and 1990s, as the authors assert?

Race Reductionism; Or, What Some Twenty-First-Century Academics Have in Common with Fin-de-Siècle Segregationists

In researching my recently published book, Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), I discovered that many scholars, including some of my fellow historians, fault Karl Marx for failing to prioritize the problem of racism. Insofar as Marx opposed slavery, they argue, he did so merely because he thought abolition would create conditions that enhance white working-class power. In this, they mistake Marx’s famous line from Capital—“Labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor in the black skin is branded”—as proof that he only cared about white workers, instead of what it actually represents: evidence that he cared about working-class power writ large. As a further indication of Marx’s disregard for black people, these scholars cite the fact that on a rare few occasions he used the English slang word for black people in his private German correspondence, such as when he wrote to his best friend and longtime collaborator Friedrich Engels that Abraham Lincoln should arm enslaved blacks because a “single nigger regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves.”1

Even as we recognize that Marx used this notoriously derogatory term to mock the slavers for their fragile egos, we should accept that he held biases that shaped his understanding of events across the Atlantic. During the Civil War, Marx paid more attention to Abraham Lincoln and the German Forty-Eighters fighting in the Union Army than he did to enslaved black people, even though slaves formed the colossal working-class rebellion at the heart of Union victory, what W.E.B. Du Bois later described as a “general strike.” And yet, acknowledging that Marx, a nineteenth-century European, was far from a perfect antiracist by the hyper-virtuous standards of twenty-first-century academia, does not entail that we should ignore his advocacy for arming black people, a truly radical position in the context of the Civil War or in any context for that matter. Marx genuinely believed in the revolutionary promise of a multiracial working class—even as he focused on class to the near exclusion of race and other categories by which people might relate to one another.2

Unlike antebellum slaveholders and unlike many contemporary academics, Marx was not obsessed with race. Yet he developed ideas about capitalism and revolution that later informed anti-colonial revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, across what Du Bois termed the “color line.” Marx advanced ideas that remain powerful to this day as a vision for freedom for black and brown people. Maybe the practical consequences of Marx’s theories are more significant than what he felt in his heart. (For those compelled to reconcile a respect for Marx with righteous antiracism, just know that Marx thought enslaved blacks were human beings deserving of dignity. Of course, he thought that about all working people, a potential disqualifier for some current-day progressives.)3

Had I not been an avid reader of Adolph Reed, Jr. since the 1990s, when his “class notes” column was regularly featured in The Progressive Magazine, or, more recently, had I not read Touré F. Reed’s penetrating book, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (Verso, 2020), I might have been shocked by my discovery that ostensible leftists held negative views of Karl Marx. Thanks to the iconoclastic Reed men, I was not caught off guard by the large number of avant-garde academics eager to dismiss Marx as merely another dead white man with pathological biases intrinsic to being a dead white man. (I was, however, surprised to find that right-wingers, always on the hunt for new ways to denigrate the old Rhinelander, also disparage Marx as a racist, not to mention an antisemite—or more accurately, self-loathing Jew.) Sober analyses of the current situation, minus the mystical trappings of race reductionism, are always welcome, but particularly in dangerous times like now, when diagnostic clarity is a necessary antidote to the reactionary maneuvers of those in power. Which is why we should all be happy about the publication of a new book by Adolph Reed, Jr. and his longtime co-conspirator Kenneth Warren. If we were to build a Mt. Rushmore for “class reductionists”—a label meant as a term of opprobrium that should be worn as a badge of honor—Reed and Warren have a good case for having their likenesses carved into stone (alongside Marx and Engels, the OGs of class reductionism).4

Reed and Warren describe Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality: The Farce This Time as the apogee of a thirty-year conversation that doubles as a “historical-materialist critique of the ‘cultural turn’ in African American studies.” I describe it as easily the most thorough, sophisticated, and passionate debunking of race reductionist discourses like Afropessimism—discourses that have dominated black studies for several decades. Reed and Warren contend that contemporary black studies operates as a “defense of neoliberal inequality” because its practitioners, funhouse mirror renderings of fin-de-siècle segregationists, invoke race to downplay, ignore, and evade calls to redistribute wealth downwards. In this, the authors relate the assumptions and sensibilities of the field to the “expressions of the interests of black political and professional elites” (BSCP, 1, 3, 4).

Ultimately, Reed and Warren hope to convince readers that inequality is the result of capitalist exploitation, not “attitudes about difference” (BSCP, 4). By focusing on the latter to the exclusion of the former, black studies helps “undercut possible support for social-democratic initiatives that would disproportionately benefit black and Hispanic working people” (BSCP, 9). Regardless of Karl Marx’s innermost feelings about black people, if more people acted on his idea that working-class solidarity was the most effective counter to the power of capital, the lives of most black people would improve, since most black people are working people.

Perhaps the most common form of analytical misconduct that Reed and Warren attribute to black studies is its ignorance about capitalism. Chalking up nearly all forms of injustice to racism is only possible by disregarding capitalism, which is most often the root cause of unfair social arrangements. According to Reed and Warren, such intellectual obliviousness frequently reflects a scholar’s class position or class aspirations, as in the case of Isabel Wilkerson, author of the fêted book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.5 Wilkerson’s antiracism, or her theory about how racism in the United States is predicated on a caste system, rests upon class bigotry:

For Wilkerson, among the key “tells” of the caste system we are supposedly living in are the instances when a white person has assumed that a black person is an employee in the grocery store, drug store, restaurant, parking garage, or the like when that person is in the role of guest or consumer. Such moments play out a presumption of rank and superiority based on perception. But what subtends this phenomenon is something that should not pass unnoticed—the presumption that the job itself betokens inferiority, diminished social standing, or the like. That some jobs are lesser than others and should be remunerated at lower wages is the undiscussed facet in Wilkerson’s account. (Consider the likely reaction to being taken for a doctor.) This hierarchy is not a feature of caste but of capitalism. (BSCP, 13)

Wilkerson’s sophistry is the product of what Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields term “racecraft,”6 what Reed and Warren succinctly define as “the alchemy that enables simultaneous denunciation of the former regime of inequality and affirmation, even idealization, of the current one” (BSCP, 38). Wilkerson engages in racecraft by masking the actual cause of inequality—capitalism—with her race reductionist conception of caste, which is grounded in a race reductionist conception of the good life. For Wilkerson, the ideal society is one where black people are proportionally distributed amongst the elite, where a black professional has an equal right to demean a lowly service worker. As Reed and Warren write, “in contending that strict equality of opportunity—expressed as ascriptive group parity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society—is the definitive standard of social justice, the anti-disparitarian notion of a just society is compatible, even symbiotic, with neoliberal inequality” (BSCP, 47). I cannot imagine a harsher criticism of a self-avowed social justice warrior.

Reed and Warren’s stubborn insistence on materialist forms of analysis, their dogged opposition to transhistorical approaches like the “black radical tradition”—approaches that substitute crude metaphors like “stamped from the beginning” for causal explanation—is what makes their new book so edifying. When they resort to using historical analogies of their own, they do so to great effect, such as in their comparison of the “suprahistorical commitment to white supremacy” on the part of Afropessimists to the suprahistorical commitment to black inferiority on the part of the Lost Causers who built Jim Crow (BSCP, 29). This incendiary historical analogy shapes how Reed and Warren scrutinize efforts to remove the Confederate statues that dot the landscape of the American South. The anti-statue crusade sprang to life as an understandable response to the 2015 massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina. Reed and Warren acknowledge their scorn for Confederate monuments. Yet they also contend that a race reductionist understanding of the history that produced such monuments has conditioned people to believe that removing statues and similar performative actions serve as a substitute for a social movement that might improve the material lives of most black people.7

By focusing its historical lens on the Jim Crow South, Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality builds an analytical layer upon the descriptive work done by Reed in The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives (Verso, 2022). Citing a decades-old historiography that links the emergence of segregation to the populist revolt of the late nineteenth century, Reed and Warren argue that the Jim Crow South was never very solid. A class of southern Bourbons consciously designed social codes to separate white workers from their black counterparts to rid the region of the populist impulse. At its most promising, populism brought together white and black farmers and workers into an alliance against the powers of immiseration, both national corporations and regional elites. In this way, Reed and Warren argue that Jim Crow, buoyed by representations of Lost Cause nostalgia, was a forward-thinking “assertion of ruling-class hegemony dressed up in racial camouflage” (BSCP, 34). Jim Crow was the product of class power. Capitalism was the underlying cause; racism was the tool.

The crusade to tear down Confederate statues, ideologically consistent with black studies, is widely understood as a symbolic strike against racism. For Reed and Warren, though, the campaign performs racecraft. Or, as they word it in typically biting fashion: “contemporary antiracists’ insistence on reducing the complex class and political-economic component of the Jim Crow order to its white supremacist dimension both unhelpfully flattens out our sense of that historical moment and, in enabling separation of racial subordination from political economy, facilitates linking repudiation of white supremacist inequality with celebration of neoliberal inequality” (BSCP, 39).

If antiracism is indeed a misdirection that reifies upward mobility, then it makes sense that Nikki Haley, the Republican Governor of South Carolina at the time of the church massacre, endorsed removing the Confederate battle flag from its spot in front of the state capitol in Columbia. Although the base of her political party was awaiting capture by Trumpist-style revanchism, Haley, the child of Indian immigrants, identified with the crumbling Mitt Romney wing of the GOP (which overlapped with the Bill and Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party). Haley and the so-called moderates in both parties supported any and all efforts to advance neoliberal capitalism, including “woke” efforts to diversify the ruling class.

Where a black studies practitioner differs from an alleged meritocrat like Haley is in the belief that America is redeemable, that American racism can be overcome. Haley adopts a borderline post-race view of American society. In contrast, black studies scholars advance an Afropessimistic theory of American history that, although seemingly radical in comparison with a naïve neoliberal like Haley, is equally faulty. By ignoring changing material conditions, by eliding shifting power dynamics, the Afropessimistic theory of history mirrors the right-wing Christian doctrine of “original sin.” Due to the centrality of race-based slavery, the United States is a nation born in sin, and it will remain fallen. Whereas a gullible liberal might think things are constantly improving, a wizened Afropessimist thinks things never change. The United States was racist in 1789; it was racist in 1860; it was racist in 1865; it was racist in 1950; and it remains racist in 2025.

For Reed and Warren, the problem with the movement to remove Confederate statues is its race reductionism. Contemporary antiracist crusaders function like the race reductionists who ruled the Jim Crow South. Both iterations fabricate racial unanimity as a means for evading class struggle. Race reductionism is a discourse that enables elites to “ventriloquize” for a race-based population in its entirety: progressive antiracists for black people, reactionary Lost Causers for southern whites. Racial solidarity, which works to the benefit of elites, conquers class solidarity, which works to the benefit of the working masses (BSCP, 51).

The original sin thesis of American racism is especially present in the work of noted Afropessimist Saidiya Hartman. Reed and Warren excoriate Hartman, including for the way she distorts Frederick Douglass’ reflections on suffering. Whereas Douglass wrote about his suffering as a product of his circumstances as a slave, Hartman elevates that particular claim into a universal contention. For Hartman, “black suffering” is an ever-present condition of the black experience. Black bodies are put on earth to suffer, period. The flip side to such an elocution is Hartman’s notion of an essential “black art,” yet another racialized transhistorical force like the “black radical tradition.” Whereas Douglass treated race as a social construction, a contingency of history, as “ideological through and through,” Hartman and her fellow Afropessimists handle race as if it were ontological. They might not believe in the immutability of race. They undoubtedly teach their students that race is a social construction. But because they believe in the immutability of racism, race operates in essentialist ways. Advancing such a theory tends to back the Afropessimist into indefensible corners—for example, Hartman’s extraordinary claim that emancipation in 1865 was a “nonevent.”8

Using Douglass to prop up an ontological conception of race seems particularly problematic given the famed abolitionist’s deeply materialistic interpretation of slavery. “Color,” Douglass argued, “was a very unsatisfactory basis for slavery.” Rather, he contended, it “was not color, but crime, not God, but man, that afforded the true explanation of the existence of slavery.” Such an understanding of slavery left Douglass optimistic about the future since “what man can make, man can unmake.”9 In this, he shared an explanatory framework with his fellow nineteenth-century materialist, Karl Marx, who argued that slavery was not a fixed condition premised on race but rather a relation within a larger hierarchical matrix calculated to coerce people to work. As Marx wrote in 1849, “A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar.”10 Race, and ascribed identity writ large, was constructed by people compelled by social relations, compelled by material conditions. As relations change, as conditions transform, how we conceptualize race also shifts. For Douglass, Marx, and materialists everywhere, there is nothing permanent about race or racism. Anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of freedom.11

Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality is particularly relevant in our current Trump-fueled dystopia. The most common response to Trumpism by liberals and academics has been to double down on race reductionism while dodging a politics built around shared working-class concerns, even though it seems patently obvious (at least to this class reductionist) that the reactionary right has taken power not because of any remarkable appeal of its own but rather because the neoliberal Democratic Party is increasingly loathed by the working class. In fact, leaders of the Democratic Party have weaponized race reductionism and other forms of identity politics to shunt aside a class-based agenda that offends their big money donors.

In the summer of 2015, Black Lives Matter activists disrupted a Bernie Sanders rally about healthcare because they wanted him to focus on fighting racism. In response, a conciliatory Sanders asserted economic inequality and systematic racism were “parallel problems” and declared that he was willing to do something about both. At a rally of her own in the spring of 2016, Hillary Clinton dismissed the notion that these problems ran parallel. Clinton asked the crowd, “If we broke up the banks tomorrow,” a frequent Sanders demand, “would that end racism?” Clinton’s cynical cooptation of Black Lives Matter to deflect Bernie’s populist rhetoric resonated. This was a time, after all, when a 2014 article making “The Case for Reparations” launched its author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, into the intellectual stratosphere. By demanding, in the words of Touré Reed, that “we must treat race as a force that exists independently of capitalism,” Coates had become, according to Reed, “neoliberalism’s most visible black emissary.” Proving this point, Coates criticized Sanders in 2016 for prioritizing universal programs that would help the entire working class, like healthcare and parental leave, over race-specific issues like reparations.12

2025 is not 2016. A growing number of people are starting to recognize that the best way to fend off American-style fascism is a social democratic politics of class. Which helps explain the meteoric rise of newly elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Race reductionism of the sort advanced by black studies is not going to get neoliberals out of this mess. Mamdani might sound a lot like the class reductionist extraordinaire Bernie Sanders, but as a young brown immigrant, he is not easily targeted by liberals. Because the charges of socialism and Marxism fell on deaf ears for many New York City voters, neoliberals like Mamdani’s chief rival, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, were forced to bring back an even older trope: Mamdani is unacceptable because he is antisemitic. But even this old standby, usually effective—especially when coupled with Islamophobia—is no longer the rhetorical weapon it once was, given that Mamdani’s chief sin in this regard is a lifelong critique of Israel’s oppressive treatment of Palestinians. To wit, exit polls showed that over one-third of New York City’s Jewish population, overrepresented by young Jews, voted for Mamdani. The antisemitic trope might have worked with some New Yorkers, but as a whole, it has fallen flat in the face of Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza. Perhaps we are approaching a moment in time when misleading political discourses, including race reductionism, are losing their hold on people. If race reductionism goes out of fashion, Reed and Warren can take some credit. Nobody has been more consistent, nor more stringent, in their critique of race reductionism than these two scholars.

“All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”

— Karl Marx, Eighth Thesis on Feuerbach

We thank Professors Best, Hartman, Lye, and McAuley for their generous commitment of time and effort to engage with our book. We are gratified by their thoughtful comments, which provide us the opportunity to clarify and amplify aspects of our argument and the overall project of which it is an expression. Indeed, given that our interlocutors share with us a sense of the political urgency of the current moment, we hope that this continued conversation will help clarify why, despite large areas of agreement with our respondents, the points where we depart from them matter to the extent they do.

Partly for this reason, we begin with Best, who expresses some surprise at having been “caught up in the dragnet” of our argument, given what he sees as various “affinities between the critiques of black studies in our volume and his 2021 book,” None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, and Aesthetic Life, which, as he notes, we don’t mention or take up in our volume. In that book, Best describes himself as having moved away from some of the arguments of his earlier work, particularly his joint effort with Saidiya Hartman to elaborate “the particular character of slavery’s violence that appears to be ongoing and constitutive of the unfinished project of freedom.”1 In Best’s account, None Like Us emerged from his “urge … to dissent from my own, earlier investments in this approach and to question the epistemological frame this view of history compels on me, not least a tort historicism that views slavery as a site of wrongful injury.”2 For what it’s worth, we were quite aware of None Like Us as we wrote our volume. Our familiarity with it was one of the many reasons we were pleased to hear that Best had agreed to write for this forum, and indeed, an earlier draft of our third chapter included several paragraphs on the book’s argument. That those paragraphs disappeared in favor of a lengthy engagement with Best’s The Fugitive’s Properties does not constitute a dismissal of his more recent book but rather our conclusion that the two are more continuous than discontinuous, such that Best’s further observation that the “affinities” he identifies between None Like Us and our book “are limited in the current case.” On this point, we agree with him. What he presents as a significant move away from aspects of his earlier work sounds to us like a modulation of the same melody. Whether in The Fugitive’s Properties, None Like Us, or “The Families, or Disagreements We Need to Have Right Now,” Best remains focused on reckoning with black Americans as a race (however problematic he acknowledges that enterprise as being) rather than teasing out and critiquing the confluence of forces and interests that make it seem natural and inevitable to regard black Americans as such.

To take one example, in section IV of his response, Best says that we have misunderstood the implications of a passage from Barbara J. Fields’ “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity,” which we quote at some length.3 In that passage, Fields observes that although black Americans have continually sought to “create a sense of peoplehood, in opposition to the prevailing racial (that is, racist) assignment” imposed on them, those who practice good old American racecraft have continually strived to make sure that attempts toward self-definition by “persons of African descent, all reduce to race, a life sentence for them and their issue in perpetuity.” In Best’s reading, Fields has asserted the “inseparability of race from black subjective self-definition,” leading him to wonder why we don’t account “for the subject’s experience of race” given that the “external imposition of racism and the internal subjective experience of race are inseparable.” This, however, is a misreading. In fact, more than a misreading, it seeks to turn Fields’ argument on its head. The entirety of her essay, which critiques the idea of whiteness, unmasks the alignment of racism with internal subjective experience as a shell game in which the ruse of race serves the ends of racism. “Racism,” Fields writes,

unseats both identity and agency, if identity means sense of self, and agency anything beyond conscious, goal-directed activity, however trivial or ineffectual. The targets of racism do not “make” racism, nor are they free to “negotiate” it, though they may challenge it or its perpetrators and try to navigate the obstacles it places in their way. … There is no voluntary and affirmative side to racism as far as its victims are concerned.

She then adds:

That is why well-meaning scholars are more apt to speak of race rather than racism. Race is a homier and more tractable notion than racism, a rogue elephant gelded and tamed into a pliant beast of burden. Substituted for racism, race transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of the object. And because race denotes a state of mind, feeling, or being, rather than a program or pattern of action, it radiates a semantic and grammatical ambiguity that helps to restore an appearance of symmetry, particularly with the help of a thimblerig that imperceptibly moves the pea from race to racial identity.4

Best is nothing if not well-meaning, but his misconstruing of Fields slips a poison pill (unwittingly, we presume) into his offer of “meaningful disagreement” between us and the scholars we critique. To ask that we see race “as a force with which the black scholar must always grapple—an imperative ‘to discover the terms of a self-address’” is to demand a concession to the bad arguments of the other side as the ante for further discussion. And these arguments are not improved by being sieved through the musings of the philosopher J. Reid Miller, with which Best concludes his remarks. We were not aware of Miller’s work before reading Best’s response, and so we attended to Best’s references to it with interest and took some time to acquaint ourselves briefly with Miller’s arguments. To the extent that we understand Miller’s claims, it is clear why they appeal to Best, who recommends that, rather than seeing persistent reiterations of race by black studies scholars as “mere alchemical workings of racecraft, we might observe that they share an error unique to our language of inheritance.” Following Miller, Best holds that if race is an error, it is an error we can’t help but make because we “inherit” race—along with so many other aspects of who we are—as a condition of being able to make any evaluative ethical judgments whatsoever about human action. On Miller’s account, every “performer is constituted by its location within ethical inheritances like race such that any enacted deed belongs at once to the subject and its affiliative relations.”5 It would take more time and space than we have here to give all the reasons for our disagreement with Miller’s analysis, but what should be clear to anyone who reads Black Studies, Cultural Politics is that Best’s turn to Miller is an attempt to sidestep the entirety of the book’s argument. Our essays analyze at length how, since the nineteenth century, class interests have been advanced by reducing the problem of inequality to race. In response, Best has sought out a vein of thought that requires isolating the error of race from material interests (and from racism as well6).

Best takes great pains to describe race as many things: “inheritance,” “legacy,” “lineage,” “affinity,” “subjectivity.” But he avoids the painful truth that race is ideology and that, more particularly, it is the ideology of those who champion such notions as “the black radical tradition” or the “racial wealth gap,” which is to say, those for whom the inadequacy of class analysis for understanding inequality must be stipulated as a point of departure inquiry. What we mean by ideology is not something like “false consciousness” but rather the mechanism that harmonizes the principles you want to believe you hold with what advances your material interest.” As our volume shows, race, which has nothing to recommend it as an accurate way of accounting for human variety, has proved enormously useful, whether in enabling a nineteenth-century U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice to believe he genuinely upheld human rights even as he underwrote the needs of slaveowners by denying those rights to Africans in America or in enabling post-Katrina black political elites in New Orleans to believe they acted on behalf of all of the city’s black inhabitants even as they pursued a recovery plan that ignored the interests of renters, a group comprising the majority of black New Orleanians, in favor of those of homeowners. Although a great deal distinguishes the racial attitudes of Justice Taney from those of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s ruling coalition, the ideology of race lends both their effectivity. The economic insecurity for all working Americans, black, white, and otherwise, that has “intensified since the Great Recession” and the barbarous politics that now hold sway in the U.S. and in many other nations cannot be chalked up to the inevitable persistence of racism and white supremacy. Rather, the neoliberal right has continued to obscure the class character of its assault on the material wellbeing of working people in the U.S. and around the globe by scapegoating immigrants and those who embody “un-American values,” while the neoliberal left plays handmaiden to its agenda by sounding the alarm of class reductionism whenever broadly solidaristic working-class measures do not proceed by first delineating the various ways that people may become the target of social prejudices.

In contrast to Best, Colleen Lye’s response acknowledges the anti-Marxist currents that flow through cultural studies as she seeks both to distance herself from and correct those tendencies. We appreciate that she has used the occasion of engaging with our book to reflect skeptically on the import of academic leftism’s association with the rise of cultural studies and the decline of “mass left organizations” outside the university. That’s a very important point, one from which to begin discussion of the real dangers that confront us, including the role of the academic ersatz left.

We hope, therefore, that we don’t seem sectarian in insisting that the dearth of Marxist theorizing is not the problem. The problem is the dearth of a left committed to a politics of class struggle. It’s not for nothing that we begin this response with Marx’s Eighth Thesis on Feuerbach. We were also given pause by Lye’s view that Reed “has been waging his polemic for long enough now that history has come around to his side,” which seems to reflect an underdeveloped sense of the dynamism of historical processes. Reed’s polemic, after all, has been, for at least a decade, partly a warning about the counterproductive and dangerous entailments of the ersatz left’s stances and practices. (Since Trump’s victory last November, Reed has considered changing the subtitle of his book on the decline and transformation of the U.S. left to What the Fuck Did You Think Was Going to Happen?) Lye’s view of the connection between Reed’s “polemic” and the “second rise of the DSA” is similarly curious, though perhaps not an entirely off-the-wall speculation. But DSA qualifies as a “mass organization” only from a standpoint grounded within the country’s various leftoid Brooklyn-ish enclaves and academic cloisters, and Reed’s connections with DSA are tangential at best. Their audience is not his, and he is not theirs. His principal direct encounter with DSA notoriously blew up before it took place.

All that said, Lye is astute to wonder what “made it possible for academics to once sincerely believe that the act of writing theory was directly and immediately political.” And she is certainly correct to note that that belief “went far beyond Black studies” and “was general to a broad swath of the humanities.” (Between the two of us, there is enough vestigial Catholicism to appreciate Lye’s mea culpa and generally penitent posture.) Whether it suffices to attribute the tendency to “methodological idealism” is another matter. More was involved, in our view, than naïve exuberance. Positional struggle in battles over allocation of university resources encouraged appending cultural studies’ garbled association with channeling the hidden voices of the oppressed to what Warren has described as the “community service” legitimations claimed by black studies from its Black Power origins, and insurgents in cognate fields—e.g., as Lye observes that Asian American studies “trends after” black studies—found that approach similarly useful materially. In concert with the retreat of an extramural left, it was an intramural class program filtered through identitarian reductionism that fed the righteous fervor of those who converged around the will to “sincerely believe that the act of writing theory was directly and immediately political.”

Appearance of the figure of the black “public intellectual” reinforced the notion that writing “theory” was a significant politics while expanding the potential revenue streams for entrepreneurial representatives of the voices of the oppressed in the academy. Already by the beginning of the current century, we each had begun to encounter applicants to our respective doctoral programs who indicated that they wanted to obtain the PhD to enhance their pursuit of careers as “public intellectuals.” In this light, “methodological idealism” looks a lot more like the ideological halo that sacralizes the expression of class interest.

Lye is not alone in wishing that something of value might be found in the formulation “racial capitalism.” There isn’t. And there isn’t because the racial capitalism construct itself is a ploy to validate race reductionism by cloaking it in ecumenical-seeming garb. As we argue, though, “‘Race’ is an instance of a category of discourses of ostensibly natural hierarchy that solidify and stabilize capitalism’s reproduction as a quotidian cultural order. It is one historically specific expression of that more general mechanism that equilibrates class contradictions and sustains order in capitalist— or for that matter other hierarchical— societies. These ideologies reinforce capitalism’s dynamics and do not qualitatively alter them; they do not, as proponents of racial capitalism contend, mark distinctive forms or modifications of capitalism” (BSCP, 61n41).

Also, as we have noted above in our response to Best, when we join the Fields sisters in arguing that race is unhelpful as an analytical category, we mean first of all, as they argue as well, that it functions to provide a “surface camouflage” on both inequalities and the dynamics that reproduce them. It doesn’t explain the concrete mechanisms through which inequalities are generated. Lye’s observation, presumed to refute our view, actually makes our point. Racism precisely does not explain the disorganization of the U.S.’s multiracial working class. It is an alternative to an explanation, one that identifies no structural or institutional mechanisms that produced that outcome. Finally, we thank Prof. Lye for the seriousness and open-mindedness with which she has engaged our work. And we wholeheartedly endorse her concluding paragraph.

Along similar lines, we were also in tune with much of Professor Christopher McAuley’s response, which seems generally to get what we’re arguing in the book. But when we reached the moment of this query: “if racial symbolism is important to at least some portion of the black electorate, could the Sanders campaigns not have provided some?” and its follow-up: “Or would such gestures have been far too great concessions to black voters that would have alienated or risked alienating a considerable percentage of white working people?,” we realized that perhaps he hasn’t sufficiently registered the import of a key aspect of our analysis.

An implication of our argument is that constructs like “the black vote” or “the black electorate” are reifications, in part products of the race-reductionism that effectively obscures material distinctions and vast differences in social location among black Americans and demands that we accept, notwithstanding poll data that indicated the popularity of Sanders’ program among black voters, that what “black people” want instead is, as Joy Reid put it, “the racial discussion” and “a reckoning; they want to acknowledge the past and to reckon with it.” And what that empty gestural politics, the “racial symbolism,” comes down to in practice—as Racial Voices like Reid, Coates, Clint Smith, and others have demonstrated time and again—is puffery that melts away like cotton candy, airy, moralizing psychobabble about “healing” etc. and no concrete policy program at all, except maybe random fatuities of racial trickle-down like “baby bonds.”7

And McAuley’s follow-up presumes the race-reductionist/Clintonite neoliberal Democrat political calculus according to which “black” issues must be traded off against those of “white working people.” The Sanders campaign, by contrast, proceeded from advocacy of a policy agenda that would address important material concerns of the broad working population—black and nonblack alike. From that perspective, McAuley’s two questions together have the quality of the classic “Are you still beating your wife?” interrogatory. (And, of course, Sanders did advance an explicitly antiracist program; he simply refused to embrace empty slogans like reparations or defund the police merely to satisfy self-declared Racial Voices who were likely as not stalking horses for his opponents anyway.)

We don’t believe McAuley is disingenuous in his expression of appreciation of our argument. We suspect it’s more a matter of not fully taking in the argument’s implications or of wanting the rain without thunder and lightning or the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters, or perhaps simultaneous affection for hares and hounds. Nevertheless, we find his concern that we “leave white working people out of the story” curious and perhaps itself revealing. (In this regard, it’s also curious that he dissents from what he characterizes as our “contention that black politics ‘[i]s the study of politics among black people,’ independent of the larger political-economic context within which black people operate” because we make no such claim. In the phrase he quotes, we are lauding Preston H. Smith II’s “object lesson in how to approach black politics as the study of politics among black people” in his magisterial case study, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago [Minnesota, 2012]. The subsequent clause, as its punctuation indicates, is entirely McAuley’s invention. We don’t ever imply, much less assert, that black politics should be assessed independently from the larger political-economic context; indeed, it would fly in the face of the book’s entire project—not to mention the corpus of either and both of our work over several decades—for us to have done so. We suspect that for McAuley, the mid-twentieth-century focus of our account of William Faulkner’s role in rehabilitating race relations makes that discussion inadequate in addressing what he seems to be concerned about. But if so, he hasn’t grasped the full force of the race relations regime as a response to and a way of managing class antagonism among white southerners. As we note, “[c]lass conflict is built into the structure of Faulkner’s fiction,” which offered race relations and the idea of regional integrity and homogenization against the accelerating incorporation of the south into an expanding capital order that was not only sharpening differences between “white laborers” and the “members of the owning classes” but also widening the rifts within the population of white laborers and small holders [represented by the fratricide in the Gowrie family] as some managed to get ahead and others remained mired in material deprivation and want [BSCP, 167].)

McAuley’s concern that we are not focusing on white working people is a failing that “sustains the myth that white workers are first and foremost class-conscious actors and secondarily members of a racial group” worries about a demon in his head, not ours. We subscribe to no such myth and never have. That paragraph amounts to a deflection, a substantive contention that we must accept black race-reductionism as at least a defensive product of white race-reductionism.

McAuley’s concluding frustration that we did not “communicate” with the writers whose work we criticize to give them the “opportunity to state how they define black studies and how they situate (or not) their work within that body of scholarship” just seems like an odd reach, and one that also misunderstands the book’s point. Equally odd is his complaint that we “exclude the work of scholars who feel that [sic] their work is representative of black studies” but not according to our view that limits the field to scholars who embrace race reductionism. Our point was and is not to construct a canon of black studies and certainly not to produce a scorecard of good v. bad black studies. The point of the book instead is to demonstrate how the field has been implicated in the articulation of a race-reductionist class politics that undermines broad struggles for equality.

This point is not lost on Andrew Hartman, whose thoroughgoing review of Black Studies, Black Culture, and the Evasion of Inequality highlights many of the key aspects of our analysis. He notes and agrees with our demonstration of how “Jim Crow was the product of class power” and quotes approvingly our argument that the crusade against Confederate monuments across the South further revealed how the “separation of racial subordination from political economy[] facilitates linking repudiation of white supremacist inequality with celebration of neoliberal inequality.” His paraphrase of our critique of Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, and Afropessimism is worth repeating:

Hartman and her fellow Afropessimists handle race as if it were ontological. They might not believe in the immutability of race. They undoubtedly teach their students that race is a social construction. But because they believe in the immutability of racism, race operates in essentialist ways. Advancing such a theory tends to back the Afropessimist into indefensible corners—for example, Hartman’s extraordinary claim that emancipation in 1865 was a “nonevent.”8

And in making this observation, Hartman (Andrew) draws attention to the tortured line of reasoning and the selective use of evidence required to transform Frederick Douglass into an avatar for the permanency of race.

We also fully understand Hartman’s hope that Zohran Mamdani’s election as Mayor of New York augurs better things politically. Given that the efforts by Mamdani’s opponents to scare away voters by using “socialism and Marxism” as bogeymen “fell on deaf ears for many New York City voters,” it would be nice to think that “we are approaching a moment in time when misleading political discourses, including race reductionism, are losing their hold on people.” Certainly, Mamdani’s victory is cause for celebration, and we should strive to learn all there is to learn from it as we move towards the midterm elections. But this lesson must also include recognizing how thoroughly race-reductionism and the brokerage politics of race relations have become incorporated into the governing structure of the nation’s cities and the Democratic Party as a whole. Post-election vote totals indicated that Mamdani received support from a sizeable majority of the city’s black voters (57 percent to 38 percent for Cuomo), but as indicated by a recent New York Times article by Jeffrey C. Mays, news that none of Mamdani’s deputy mayors are black and only one is Latino has been flagged as a major problem by the various “black leaders” quoted in the article.9 Treating their direct access to the mayor as the only reliable indicator that the needs of the black population are being met, these leaders take as given their embodiment of black interest. So, although a majority of black voters supported Mamdani, the head of the New York State NAACP, L. Joy Williams, has already asserted, “It is clear from the lack of conversation and engagement that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of focus and attention on the needs of Black New Yorkers in the city.” This response to Mamdani’s victory underscores our point, made in our response to McAuley, about the corrosiveness of the idea of making concessions to the political abstraction that is “black voters.” To be sure, governance is always a matter of jockeying for position and influence, but what has already been dissolved into this elixir of black needs are the competing interests of landlords, private equity, renters, etc. The reminder here is that race relations is not merely a discourse but also a framework enacted by and acting on those who see themselves as representing the larger good and which must be met at every turn by efforts to push the line of contestation in the direction of class struggle.

Hartman’s response also provides occasion for us to congratulate him on the publication of his new book, Karl Marx in America, which does much-needed work towards exposing the rickety basis upon which routine charges that Marxism is not up to the task of helping us understand and attack racial inequality. As Hartman suggests, some of this skepticism rests on thinly supported speculations about what Marx really thought or felt about black people, while other portions of it derive from the curious expectation that Marx should have demonstrated what he thought about racism and slavery outside of the dynamics of class struggle. If Karl Marx in America helps dismantle the components of this line of thinking, its publication is certainly an occasion for celebration.

If we have a concern here, it is one that applies to all of us who work in the broad domain of intellectual history—namely, the temptation to value or validate thinkers by calling the roll of subsequent thinkers or political actors whom they are said to have inspired or influenced. There is no doubt that Marx, “developed ideas about capitalism and revolution that later informed anti-colonial revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, across what Du Bois termed the ‘color line’” and “Marx advanced ideas that remain powerful to this day as a vision for freedom for black and brown people.” But much mischief has been done by seeking to assimilate the various ways in which those who were inspired by a line of thinking sought to enact their interpretations of it. As Reed has pointed out, there is much to be admired in W. E. B. Du Bois’ classic Black Reconstruction, which Hartman cites approvingly, but that book’s description of whiteness as a psychological wage “has become a significant touchstone for those who contend that whites’ commitments to white supremacy are stronger than their openness to interracial class solidarity” (BSCP, 35). The reality before us now is that the prevailing politics for attacking inequality have proved ineffectual at thwarting the regime that currently holds power, and as we said in our response to Lye, the lesson of the moment is the need to build a left committed to a politics of class struggle.

All of this being said, we are truly grateful for Hartman’s insightful reading of Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality: The Farce This Time.