This certainly makes a nice contrast with this. Professor Reed writes:
Bayard Rustin’s commentary between 1965 and 1975 on race, class, and politics in the U.S. was sharply insightful and can be read profitably for cultivating a nuanced understanding of the crucial period between the victories won by the civil rights movement and institutional consolidation of the ethnic interest-group regime generally known as “black politics.”1 To the extent that naïve, inadequate, simplistic, or simply wrong narratives concerning that political moment figure significantly into current formulations of black political life, engaging with Rustin’s critiques can be a helpful corrective to mistaken or shallow assessments regarding the present as well as the past.
Rustin saw politics through a concrete, strategic lens, which provided a perspective that has become increasingly remote from both academic and activist experience. Indeed, as demonstrated in the essays selected here, he explicitly rejected the moralistic discourse that he saw undergirding much of Black Power and New Left politics, as well as the tendency to reduce the sources of inequality to psychologistic factors like prejudice, discrimination, or a generic racism. He was committed to a vision of a just society that hinged on pursuit of broad economic equality, and he was convinced, as most Popular Front-era black radicals were, that advancing toward economic equality in general was essential for black Americans both because black Americans were preponderantly in the working class and because continued improvement for blacks required being part of a broad political coalition centered on improving the lives and economic security of all working people.2 He also understood that realizing such an egalitarian agenda under American capitalism would require the efforts of a different sort of movement, a popularly based institutional politics, and that generating that movement would require a strategic and programmatic shift from the watershed moment of 1965.
For an earlier, related discussion, see this.
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