"Adolph Reed doesn't understand racism." –Too many white people
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"Adolph Reed doesn't understand racism." –Too many white people
Professor Emeritus Adolph Reed pulls out his "Go Fuck Yourself" stamp to talk sense into today's activists. Plus we weigh in on Maté v. The Young Turks
“But if that doesn’t happen, then that’s gonna be the end of American democracy in the next year.” Does he mean Republicans taking the senate? The creation of a new religion of Wokery in deference to Robin DiAngelo? Duke winning March Madness in 2022?
You’ll have to watch to find out. Professor Reed has big statements and important messages for you in this informative and irreverent extended interview.
He shares with Matt and Katie his perspective on the changing progression of civil-rights activism from policy-oriented protest to squabbling over abstract moral superiority. The pre-eminent scholar on this new ideology of course being Robin DiAngelo and her new book Nice Racism, which Professor Reed awards Matt the purple heart for finishing.
It’s in this “book” (apologies to Norm Finkelstein for using the term) that DiAngelo calls for such BIPOC-infantilizing ideas as moral reparations, seeing white people collectively while seeing BIPOC as individuals. And this new teaching is quickly becoming the dominant theology. This, according to Professor Reed, is dangerous.
“What we need,” he argues, “is having frank conversations with actual people in society, not mediated through mass media, about the problems and policies in their lives that confront them.”
And he’s planning to do just that. In a Useful Idiots Breaking News Alert, Reed announced his upcoming podcast Class Matters, in which he and other scholars will discuss what society would look like if it were governed by and for the concerns of the working class.
Listen to the interview now. Learn something, laugh, but please, whatever you do, stop telling Adolph Reed he doesn’t understand the depths and intensity of racism in America. Because we’re pretty sure he does.
Plus, Matt and Katie break their silence on the Aaron Maté vs The Young Turks feud, and yes, they have some demands.
It’s all this, and more, on this substack-only episode of Useful Idiots. Listen here.
"Adolph Reed doesn't understand racism." –Too many white people
I can listen to Prof. Reed all day. I have seen a friend been called a racist because she disagreed with a headline of an article, then a black person disagreed with my friend, and my friend was asked to leave the thread because nobody can disagree with any black person anymore. My friend's point was that performative actions will not solve the problems of systemic racism unless people start paying attention to class disparities (she has been listening to Prof. Reed and Touré, among others, for a while).
Think about it: she disagreed with a headline, not with a person, but because the black person who disagreed with my friend was black, and an academic - my friend was denied a proper education because she is disabled and has been catching up to many issues by doing the work herself - she was shamed for her "white skin" (not really white)
I hear a lot of "black people are not a monolith", "people like Justice Thomas do not represent black people", but white people are [a monolith], all bad, if they disagree with that one black person who happens to be in the same place (or comment thread) at the same time
When do we get the Robyn Diangelo version of Karen The Movie? where they just take Catherine Keener’s character from Get Out and she captures gullible white libs with her microaggressive-Agressive potion.