The latest from Professor Reed; an excerpt:
Inattentiveness to racial inequality’s embeddedness in capitalist political economy links directly to the fact that antiracist discourse posits “racism”—rather than historically specific political-economic and legal institutions, relations, and practices—as the causal source of (unjust) inequality affecting black people past and present. Racism, however, notwithstanding efforts to represent it as something more concrete via modifiers like “structural” or “systemic,” is an abstract idea, an attitude or belief, and is therefore incapable of causing anything.4 Insofar as the idea is regarded as the motive force determining blacks’ position in society across time and context, persistence of black people’s disproportionate representation among the most vulnerable, marginalized, and impoverished populations today can appear continuous with slavery and Jim Crow. According to that idealist reasoning, which also underlies Afropessimism’s ontological devil theory and is the essence of race reductionism, racism is the cause, rather than the result, of slavery, of the Jim Crow regime, and of contemporary inequality as well.
As usual, the whole essay is worth your time! I'll also be posting before long about his book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, which I also commend to readers.
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