Doomscroll: Adolph Reed (Patreon)

This episode is three hours long — and for a good reason. It explains how we arrived at the identity politics crisis of the past decade. From the Populist movement of the 1890s, to Jim Crow, to “underclass” ideology and the racial wealth gap, we trace the emergence of neoliberal race politics in America.

My guest is Adolph Reed Jr, a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of many books including his most recent work, co-authored with Kenneth Warren, “Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality”.

In 1996, Adolph Reed was a founding member of the labor party in the US. He is a board member of Nonsite.org and a founding member of the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute.

There are three scholars whose work has been most impactful for me in understanding the strange cultural politics of the Woke era, two of whom you’ve already met, Catherine Liu and Vivek Chibber, the third is Adolph Reed.

Reed’s work has been singularly influential and early in it’s critique of what would later become recognized as professional class ideology within the left. If you’ve ever been in a room full of organizers, or even just participated on certain parts of Twitter, you’ve undoubtedly come into contact with this stuff; the suppression of class politics and a hyper-focus on racial or gender disparities.

How did neoliberalism redefine these issues as the sole definition of social justice? Was it always like this? Or did something happen along the way? Adolph Reed Jr was among the first to make the critique that these identitarian themes are not just counter-productive but that they are in fact a class politics.

A wise man once said that every episode of Doomscroll was meant to prepare you for this one. (That wise man was correct.) If you’re a loyal listener of the show — I’m asking on you to give us a strong start by astro-turfing the engagement on this video. Drop some Likes, Hypes and whatever else. Comment “Adolph” if you want us to know you’re in on the bit. The biggest thing you can do is just watch the full run time of the video. The next biggest thing is to share a link to your socials.

As we discussed in the recent Q&A episode, part of our role in this media ecosystem is to realign the left back to it’s core values. In this critical period, that means serving viewers educational content that meaningfully reshapes their understanding of key issues. This episode will equip you with the necessary knowledge and history to move forward. Bookmark the link. Share it with your friends. You will likely be coming back to this later.

Like every episode of Doomscroll, there is no “filler” here. This video is jam packed with vital information. The conclusions we begin to draw after the 2 hour mark are especially important.

On this episode, we explore the centrality of race in today’s politics, the so-called wealth gap, the legacy of Victorian race science, the rise of NGOs, the fall of American labor and much much more. Reed charts a path out of our present defeat and back toward social democracy:

Adolph Reed Jr: Race, Class and Capitalism | Doomscroll

On the private feed, we discuss Reed’s family background, his important work in the anti-war movement of the 1960s, the rightward turn of the Democratic Party, the Catholic Worker and the rise of Christian Nationalism:

Doomscroll: Adolph Reed II

Explore these related episodes:

Doomscroll: Jen Pan II

Doomscroll: Dustin Guastella II

Doomscroll: Catherine Liu 2 II