Here, prompted in part by his new book about growing up in the Jim Crow South (which I've been reading and will write more about soon--certainly recommended). The article's headline is ironic: "The Marxist who antagonizes liberals and the left." Liberals, yes; but Reed is the left, so what in the world could "the left" refer to? I guess the "anti-racists" he excoriates, but they aren't the left, as Reed himself has written.
A brief excerpt below the fold:
In this slim book, one line in particular read to me like a manifesto: “A danger,” Reed writes, “is that, when reckoning with the past becomes too much like allegory, its nuances and contingencies can disappear. Then history can become either a narrative of inevitable progressive unfolding to the present or, worse, a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed.” I asked Reed what he had in mind. He said, “This won’t come as a surprise but one thing that was on my mind was the 1619 Project. I mean that ‘nothing has changed’ line is one I have found bemusing and exasperating.” That project, he went on, wiped away any historical specificity, so that racism operated as an unchanging force. “And so you get to say that the murder of Trayvon Martin or of George Floyd is the same as Emmett Till or of the slave patrols.”
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