3rd Word magazine
March 1995
By Danny Postel
Adolph Reed, Jr. teaches political science and history at Northwestern University in Evanston, and for almost a decade has been building his reputation as a provocative, acerbic critic, not only of social and political affairs but also of his fellow intellectuals. Among the many whose buttons he's pushed with his controversial writings is the Nation of Islam, an organization not exactly known for its appreciation of its critics or a spirit of open debate.
Two of Reed's books will be published in the coming months. Fabianism and the Color Line: The Political Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press) is a study of one of Reed's major influences, the towering pioneer of radical black scholarship in America. Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (University of Minnesota Press) is a meditation on the direction and meaning of black political struggles since the civil rights movement.
Reed first gained widespread attention with his controversial 1986 book The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon, in which he argued that image and rhetoric aside, Jackson was an opportunistic, self-appointed pseudo-leader of the black community whose presidential ambitions had accomplished essentially nothing for African-Americans. Indeed, according to Reed, the energy around Jackson's presidential juggernaut had an ultimately narrowing and demobilizing effect on concrete black political struggles.
Reed progressed from provoking intense, at times hostile debate with the Jackson book to inviting the deadly wrath of the Nation of Islam with the publication of a lengthy, two-part essay about its leader, Louis Farrakhan, in The Nation. In "False Prophet: The Rise of Louis Farrakhan," and Part II, "All for One and None for All," Reed argued that despite Farrakhan's posturing as a militant opposition figure empowering black people, in reality Farrakhan's message is reactionary, unthreatening to the established system, and ultimately disempowering for African-Americans. Reed also accused Farrakhan of being behind the assassination of Malcolm X, calling attention to the fact that six weeks before Malcolm was killed, Farrakhan wrote an article in the Nation of Islam's bulletin, Mohammed Speaks, calling for Malcolm's death. (Reed was also critical of director Spike Lee for erasing Farrakhan's role in Malcolm's assassination in the film Malcolm X.)
"False Prophet" earned Reed unofficial "infidel" status with the Nation of Islam. (He was informed of this by a friend who heard Reed's name mentioned, among others, by a Farrakhan supporter disturbed by black criticisms of the Minister.) He's uncertain just how dangerous this makes things for him, but being all too familiar with the Nation's history of dealing with infidels, he plays it safe by maintaining a reasonably low profile and keeping his address and phone number unlisted. "I decided not to list the phone in my name, but not because I feel there's any reason to be concerned. I think it would be megalomaniacal for me to think that Louis Farrakhan's down in the compound worrying about me." Asked how he would react, however, if he were to notice someone he didn't recognize sporting a bow tie in his classroom, "I'd duck," he admitted.
More recently his central focus has been the issue of poverty and the so-called underclass in relation to public policy. Reed is extremely critical of the ways in which social scientists, media pundits, and what he calls the "poverty research industry," based out of universities and think tanks, have painted a picture of a self-perpetuating "culture of poverty" or "urban underclass" whose morally degenerate behavior keeps it stuck, the theory goes, at the bottom of the socioeconomic barrel. Reed considers this prevailing wisdom about poverty a mystifying, "victim-blaming" ideology that demonizes poor minorities while distracting public attention away from the crucial question of why poverty exists and how it can be eliminated. The real issues, in Reed's view, are not the lifestyles of the poor and infamous, but rather the structural economic forces that generate the conditions of poverty by limiting opportunities. Discussions of poverty, Reed argues, should be focused on public policy initiatives and the economy, not the sensationalized, distorting imagery of inner-city nihilism and savagery projected by the mass media and pop social commentary.
This focus in Reed’s work came to a boiling point in October of 1994 with the media splash following the publication of The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein, who argue that blacks are poorly represented amidst the ranks of successful Americans because they are genetically predisposed to wind up at the low end of the IQ spectrum. Reed joined scientists like Stephen Jay Gould in denouncing The Bell Curve as deeply flawed science and racist social theory with an exhaustive review in The Nation. Reed sees this new wave of reactionary ideology and its reception in the media as symptomatic of the profoundly ominous situation of contemporary American political culture.
Reed has aimed his critical analysis at targets as close to home as his employer, Northwestern University, whose Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research receives millions of dollars annually to undertake studies of the poverty phenomenon. Reed calls this and the many other operations of the poverty research industry “upscale welfare fraud” and calls his academic colleagues who engage in it “poverty pimps.” “Poverty research,” he claims,” is a huge academic business,” and while “many of its practitioners are motivated by benign intentions, the bottom line is that they make money off the existence of poverty, and those good intentions often seem to be just so much petit-bourgeois self-aggrandizement.”
Despite his gloomy diagnosis, however, Reed refuses to sit on the sidelines and watch the political action in the passive role of academic critic. Unlike most professors, his commitments take him beyond the walls of academia and into the realm of concrete, practical struggles. He currently co-chairs the Chicago-based Coalition for New Priorities, an umbrella network of almost 100 organizations from labor unions to community groups fighting to reorder public policy and federal budget priorities. He’s also on the steering committee for the embryonic Labor Party.
Many think that with the publication of Reed’s two forthcoming books, and with his visibility as a vocal participant in debates about The Bell Curve and public policy, the media will turn to him as the next major figure on the horizon of black intellectual life. Reed says he would “resist this mightily.” He’s already been invited to speak on a number of “superstar” panels and colloquia, and “could feel the beginnings of being turned into the next Henry Louis Gates, Jr. or Cornel West.” Reed sees this kind of packaging and marketing of black intellectuals for mass audiences as deeply problematic. “Our energy should go into mobilizing politically, not worshiping at the shrines of media-generated intellectual stars with no constituencies.”