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The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
A memoir and historical account of growing up in the Jim Crow South by a renowned political theorist
Famed for his political theory and commentary on class and race in American politics, Adolph Reed guides us through the quotidian contours of the Jim Crow south. In this memoir-come-history, we see America's apartheid system from the ground up, not just the legal framework or systems of power and interests but the way these systems structured day to day interaction.
As the living memory of Jim Crow fades, its laws and horrors--and its heroic defeat--will be remembered. This book reproduces in vivid detail that everyday realm in which the rules and ideological premises of Jim Crow came up against the practicalities of getting on with life, where formal precepts didn't provide useful guidance for behavior or interaction. Flowing seamlessly between memoir and historical argument, Reed maps the ways the segregationist order buttressed ruling class power, the processes that lead to its unravelling, and the enduring legacy that is still so evident today.
The South is more than a memoir or a history. Filled with analysis and fascinating firsthand accounts of the operation of the system that codified and enshrined racial inequality, this book is required reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of America's second peculiar institution.
Famed for his political theory and commentary on class and race in American politics, Adolph Reed guides us through the quotidian contours of the Jim Crow south. In this memoir-come-history, we see America's apartheid system from the ground up, not just the legal framework or systems of power and interests but the way these systems structured day to day interaction.
As the living memory of Jim Crow fades, its laws and horrors--and its heroic defeat--will be remembered. This book reproduces in vivid detail that everyday realm in which the rules and ideological premises of Jim Crow came up against the practicalities of getting on with life, where formal precepts didn't provide useful guidance for behavior or interaction. Flowing seamlessly between memoir and historical argument, Reed maps the ways the segregationist order buttressed ruling class power, the processes that lead to its unravelling, and the enduring legacy that is still so evident today.
The South is more than a memoir or a history. Filled with analysis and fascinating firsthand accounts of the operation of the system that codified and enshrined racial inequality, this book is required reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of America's second peculiar institution.
144 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2022
About the author
Adolph L. Reed Jr.
16 books129 followersAdolph Leonard Reed Jr. is an American professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in studies of issues of racism and U.S. politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School for Social Research and he has written on racial and economic inequality.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews
January 29, 2022
This short book is primarily a series of recollections in which Reed shows the interplay between social structure and lived reality during the waning years and immediate aftermath of the Jim Crow south. He illustrates why people don’t act as courageously as we would often like, how bucking ingrained norms can risk coming unbound from our sticky social glue. At the same time, the book emphasizes Jim Crow as a system of class rule, imposing and using race as tools of domination and control. Reed wants to situate this history properly in our present context, and show how “the terms on which the white supremacist past has been acknowledged and repudiated actually obscure the sources of inequality and dispossession today.” His presentation is textured and forgiving, and through it he props the door open to a more coherent understanding of history, a more sober analysis of the present, and the possibility of a more just, shared future.
February 15, 2024
Change And Continuity In The Jim Crow South
Adolph Reed Jr., Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on race and American politics, including a study of DuBois, "W.E.B DuBois and American Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line" (1997). Influenced by Marx, Reed emphasizes the importance of class and economics in American life.
In his recent short book "The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives" (2022), Reed brings a personal approach to the study of Jim Crow in the South. Born in 1947, Reed points out that he is of the last generation with first-hand experience of Jim Crow before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He writes to preserve his own experiences of Jim Crow while he was young. Reed and I are of the same age, which enhanced my interest in his thoughts.
In some ways, Reed's experiences were atypical. He was born in New York City and also lived in Washington, D.C. before his family moved to New Orleans where he spent most of his childhood. Reed's family was solidly middle-class, and his father was a professor. The family had relatives in the South, and Reed travelled considerably through Louisiana, the Delta regions of Arkansas and Mississippi, and North Carolina. His book emphasizes throughout that Jim Crow was not monolithic. Each individual is unique, and each experienced it differently. Further Jim Crow varied throughout the South and, often, varied within individual places. New Orleans, for example, was a cosmopolitan city, where the Jim Crow rules varied from neighborhood to neighborhood and from store to store. Reed's book has a distinctly personal tone.
In "The South", Reed is a storyteller more than a political scientist. The five chapters in the book consist largely of stories of growing up in the 1950-1960 South juxtaposed with stories of his experiences when he returned to the South in the years after Jim Crow, from the 1980s and after. He reflects upon his experiences for an understanding of Jim Crow and for an understanding of how it changed and how it persisted after the mid-1960s. He describes his experiences in neighborhoods, shops, and on the road and makes the reader feel the pervasiveness yet changeable character of Jim Crow and segregation. He shows persistence of some Jim Crow attitudes in the post-1960s South and yet he is firm that the years of overt racial discrimination have largely and happily ended. His conclusion differs from many other writers who often argue that Jim Crow racism persists.
The book is at its best in its particularity and in Reed's descriptions and meditations on his experiences. He also discusses broader trends in considering Jim Crow such as the phenomenon of "passing" , which Reed tries to deflate from an issue of personal identity to one of pragmatism. He discusses as well the removal of four Confederate monuments in New Orleans in 2017. Reed was in the city at the time and discusses the significance and symbolism of this process.
In addition to preserving his own experiences of Jim Crow, Reed expands his scope to reflect on the natures of continuity and change in Southern life. As noted, he finds the particular Jim Crow codes of racial subordination largely gone. But in a deeper sense, Reed finds it persists. With his Marxist orientation, Reed finds that Jim Crow even in its heyday was less a matter of race than a matter of class with those in power trying to exploit and to use others. Reed finds that the demographics of class may have changed since the demise of racial Jim Crow. But he finds that the disparity in power and economics between various classes in the South and elsewhere remains all-too-real.
Reed's book is provocative in its understanding of historical change and continuity in the South and elsewhere. But the book is at its best on a more personal, experiential level as Reed meditates on his own life experiences.
Robin Friedman
Adolph Reed Jr., Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on race and American politics, including a study of DuBois, "W.E.B DuBois and American Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line" (1997). Influenced by Marx, Reed emphasizes the importance of class and economics in American life.
In his recent short book "The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives" (2022), Reed brings a personal approach to the study of Jim Crow in the South. Born in 1947, Reed points out that he is of the last generation with first-hand experience of Jim Crow before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He writes to preserve his own experiences of Jim Crow while he was young. Reed and I are of the same age, which enhanced my interest in his thoughts.
In some ways, Reed's experiences were atypical. He was born in New York City and also lived in Washington, D.C. before his family moved to New Orleans where he spent most of his childhood. Reed's family was solidly middle-class, and his father was a professor. The family had relatives in the South, and Reed travelled considerably through Louisiana, the Delta regions of Arkansas and Mississippi, and North Carolina. His book emphasizes throughout that Jim Crow was not monolithic. Each individual is unique, and each experienced it differently. Further Jim Crow varied throughout the South and, often, varied within individual places. New Orleans, for example, was a cosmopolitan city, where the Jim Crow rules varied from neighborhood to neighborhood and from store to store. Reed's book has a distinctly personal tone.
In "The South", Reed is a storyteller more than a political scientist. The five chapters in the book consist largely of stories of growing up in the 1950-1960 South juxtaposed with stories of his experiences when he returned to the South in the years after Jim Crow, from the 1980s and after. He reflects upon his experiences for an understanding of Jim Crow and for an understanding of how it changed and how it persisted after the mid-1960s. He describes his experiences in neighborhoods, shops, and on the road and makes the reader feel the pervasiveness yet changeable character of Jim Crow and segregation. He shows persistence of some Jim Crow attitudes in the post-1960s South and yet he is firm that the years of overt racial discrimination have largely and happily ended. His conclusion differs from many other writers who often argue that Jim Crow racism persists.
The book is at its best in its particularity and in Reed's descriptions and meditations on his experiences. He also discusses broader trends in considering Jim Crow such as the phenomenon of "passing" , which Reed tries to deflate from an issue of personal identity to one of pragmatism. He discusses as well the removal of four Confederate monuments in New Orleans in 2017. Reed was in the city at the time and discusses the significance and symbolism of this process.
In addition to preserving his own experiences of Jim Crow, Reed expands his scope to reflect on the natures of continuity and change in Southern life. As noted, he finds the particular Jim Crow codes of racial subordination largely gone. But in a deeper sense, Reed finds it persists. With his Marxist orientation, Reed finds that Jim Crow even in its heyday was less a matter of race than a matter of class with those in power trying to exploit and to use others. Reed finds that the demographics of class may have changed since the demise of racial Jim Crow. But he finds that the disparity in power and economics between various classes in the South and elsewhere remains all-too-real.
Reed's book is provocative in its understanding of historical change and continuity in the South and elsewhere. But the book is at its best on a more personal, experiential level as Reed meditates on his own life experiences.
Robin Friedman
March 22, 2022
Having read Reed's essay's I expected this to be halfway between and academic treatise and a polemic screed (which I would have been fine with). Instead, what I got was a touching and relatable series of vignettes about life in the south under Jim Crow, plucked from his personal experience, and effectively coalescing in service of a simple thesis about race and class. A much easier read than I expected and just a very moving argument and series of stories. I'm putting this next to "Racecraft" by the Fields sisters on my list of books that I can safely recommend to liberal friends who are getting sucked in by the DiAngelo/Kendi school of race essentialism. By that I mean it advances a more complete leftist analysis without so confrontational as to turn off those people. Really enjoyed this read.
June 7, 2022
A thoughtful piece of historical memory I’m thankful for, as such consciousness will not last forever. Reed’s retelling of living through Jim Crow focuses more on exploring the everyday life of how people attempted to navigate through what he refers to as “petty apartheid,” in how normal life moves somewhere in between states of looming danger and banal interactions, sometimes becoming one in the same. All of this of course buttressed by examining how Jim Crow reestablished class power in a post civil-war era, and how these effects were experienced differently based on one’s class position within such a system.
“…people make daily life under any conditions, even in such extreme circumstances as maximum-security prisons, Nazi concentrations camps, Palestinian refugee camps, long-term military occupation, or even chattel slavery.”
“…people make daily life under any conditions, even in such extreme circumstances as maximum-security prisons, Nazi concentrations camps, Palestinian refugee camps, long-term military occupation, or even chattel slavery.”
March 30, 2024
I started this in BHM and finished it this week. Reed writes a captivating book about conceptions and misconceptions around slavery, Jim Crow and racial politics today. I learned plenty in this book and the biggest lesson I’ve taken is around Jim Crow and it’s class based discriminations.
May 23, 2022
Brilliant stuff: Reed mixes personal experience with a deep awareness of history and political theory to create a thoughtful, accessible read. I found him very moving and the book educational. Strongly recommended.
March 7, 2022
"Longevity can be a source of corrective optimism. I recall an occasion early in the George W. Bush presidency when my friend and former physician, Quentin Young, was confronted at a talk by a medical student who lamented that she couldn't imagine being able to win any progressive objectives because the right had been in power all her conscious life. Quentin, who was then about eighty years old, responded that a virtue of having lived so long as he had was that he knew that almost no one, no matter how far left or how optimistic, standing in 1950 would have predicted that the back of the Jim Crow system would be broken within fifteen years. He was correct, and that's a good lesson for us all to keep in mind in this most perilous time in this country and the world."
Read
January 22, 2023I’m not sure what rating to give this book—although a very short book, I still felt for much of it that I was just trying to get through it. My experience could have been largely due to where my head was at when reading, which is why I’m not giving it a rating, but for most of the chapters I was not getting what I had hoped for.
One section earlier in the book that stood out was the last segment of Quotidian Life in the ‘50s and ‘60s, with his discussion of his claim that “segregated black communities were not separate reservations; they were excluded from political and civic life, not southern economic life. The point was not to remove them from the mainstream economy but to enforce their subordinate position within it,” saying that middle-class families were able to create a buffer between themselves and the worst parts of the Jim Crow regime. Mehrsa Baradaran explores this aspect of segregation well in her book The Color of Money.
For most of the book, though, rather than featuring the insights I had expected from Reed, the stories he was telling did not feel particularly meaningful. I kept waiting for more commentary like the thoughts I referenced above, but it wasn’t there.
However, my already lacking confidence in this assessment—that being my underwhelmed reception of the work—withered further, and my overall view of the book was saved, by the last chapter. The insights I had expected from Reed—ones which I feel he could’ve built up or laid the foundation for throughout the book—were present finally. It’s one of those chapters that fits so much quotable work into a small number of pages that you feel it necessary to go back over it at least once more. My only wish is that all of the valuable content was not condensed into the very last pages.
In discussing the large debate that took place a few years ago over Confederate statues and their removal, Reed says that the monuments’ “deeper historical significance is not that they celebrate the Confederacy.” Rather, they are meaningful because they were erected at the same time the Jim Crow regime was being imposed and the Lost Cause ideology was being created and spread. “The monuments were intended to memorialize the myth of a distinctive (white) southern identity and tradition then being invented and imposed by force and made common sense “truth” through unchallenged repetition.”
I had often read and thought about how slavery and apartheid in the U.S. inhibited the formation of any kind of labor party or general class-consciousness—thinkers like James Baldwin argued similar things, while today there is plenty of commentary on the left about the implications of white resentment in neglected communities in Appalachia and the Midwest—but the way Reed lays out the ruling-class agenda here, describing the mythology of the Solid South being employed to stifle dissent, is the best argument on the subject I have heard. He explains how history is flattened out into a polarity of racism/anti-racism, or a contest between black and white, in a way that ignores the history of a generation of struggle against ruling class power over “defining the political and economic character of the post-Emancipation South.”
The claim that I appreciate the most, though, is one he makes about the monuments controversy speaking to the region’s continuity and change: “Just as the monuments were erected in service to specific historical objectives, the campaign for their removal memorializes its time and context and affirms the current social and cultural order.” His argument is that the repudiation of the white supremacist past obscures the sources of inequality today because it was never about white supremacy for its own sake alone. Celebrating progress in “narrow, moralistic terms” of overcoming racial exclusion and replacing it with ideas of diversity and inclusion has enabled politicians to uphold the same economic order, with some of those politicians now being black—and civil rights tourism now being a multi-billion dollar industry.
One section earlier in the book that stood out was the last segment of Quotidian Life in the ‘50s and ‘60s, with his discussion of his claim that “segregated black communities were not separate reservations; they were excluded from political and civic life, not southern economic life. The point was not to remove them from the mainstream economy but to enforce their subordinate position within it,” saying that middle-class families were able to create a buffer between themselves and the worst parts of the Jim Crow regime. Mehrsa Baradaran explores this aspect of segregation well in her book The Color of Money.
For most of the book, though, rather than featuring the insights I had expected from Reed, the stories he was telling did not feel particularly meaningful. I kept waiting for more commentary like the thoughts I referenced above, but it wasn’t there.
However, my already lacking confidence in this assessment—that being my underwhelmed reception of the work—withered further, and my overall view of the book was saved, by the last chapter. The insights I had expected from Reed—ones which I feel he could’ve built up or laid the foundation for throughout the book—were present finally. It’s one of those chapters that fits so much quotable work into a small number of pages that you feel it necessary to go back over it at least once more. My only wish is that all of the valuable content was not condensed into the very last pages.
In discussing the large debate that took place a few years ago over Confederate statues and their removal, Reed says that the monuments’ “deeper historical significance is not that they celebrate the Confederacy.” Rather, they are meaningful because they were erected at the same time the Jim Crow regime was being imposed and the Lost Cause ideology was being created and spread. “The monuments were intended to memorialize the myth of a distinctive (white) southern identity and tradition then being invented and imposed by force and made common sense “truth” through unchallenged repetition.”
I had often read and thought about how slavery and apartheid in the U.S. inhibited the formation of any kind of labor party or general class-consciousness—thinkers like James Baldwin argued similar things, while today there is plenty of commentary on the left about the implications of white resentment in neglected communities in Appalachia and the Midwest—but the way Reed lays out the ruling-class agenda here, describing the mythology of the Solid South being employed to stifle dissent, is the best argument on the subject I have heard. He explains how history is flattened out into a polarity of racism/anti-racism, or a contest between black and white, in a way that ignores the history of a generation of struggle against ruling class power over “defining the political and economic character of the post-Emancipation South.”
The claim that I appreciate the most, though, is one he makes about the monuments controversy speaking to the region’s continuity and change: “Just as the monuments were erected in service to specific historical objectives, the campaign for their removal memorializes its time and context and affirms the current social and cultural order.” His argument is that the repudiation of the white supremacist past obscures the sources of inequality today because it was never about white supremacy for its own sake alone. Celebrating progress in “narrow, moralistic terms” of overcoming racial exclusion and replacing it with ideas of diversity and inclusion has enabled politicians to uphold the same economic order, with some of those politicians now being black—and civil rights tourism now being a multi-billion dollar industry.
September 30, 2022
At turns a sweet memoir, but mostly a clear-headed personal history with Jim Crow used to illustrate what Reed finds important — recognizing and confronting problems of class, and saving history from becoming allegory (used especially to serve those in power) — all while giving a living account of an infamous time in America. It’s a short book. It’s a sweet book. It’s a sad book. And it’s a book that makes an important point not to let the neoliberal agenda take full control of history, culture, and what constitutes progress. I’m an admirer of Adolph Reed. Happy to have given this the time.
February 25, 2023
If you’re from NOLA - you’ll especially will like this book.
October 4, 2024
Feeling grateful for the work Adolph Reed has done and continues to do! A little rambling at times but I’m so glad he wrote this semi-memoir.
August 25, 2022
Dr Adolph L. Reed, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, a former faculty member at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School for Social Research, and a prolific writer, whose work focuses mainly on American politics, race, and inequality. He was born in the Bronx in 1947, and he and his family moved to New Orleans when he was a child, where he lived until he matriculated at the University of North Carolina in the late 1960s. He recalls his childhood spent in New Orleans and with relatives in Arkansas, and this forms the background of this book, which evaluates the institution of legal segregation and discrimination against African Americans from the post-Reconstruction period until the mid 1960s, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began the dismantling of the Jim Crow system that crippled the aspirations of Black people and enforced White supremacy in the Deep South for more than 75 years.
The book begins in the early 2000s, as Dr Reed returns to the South after having left it during the beginning of the Ronald Reagan presidency, and marvels at how the region has changed dramatically in two decades, yet remained the same in many ways. Blacks were now in positions of power in politics, medicine and other professions, but the old order and many of its customs still persisted.
For me the most interesting part of the book was his description of growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s and 1960s, when schools, neighborhoods, public accommodations and places of business were segregated to varying degrees. As a child of the middle class in a large, diverse and relatively tolerant Southern city he and his family were protected from the worst aspects of Jim Crow, although segregation and discrimination were still constantly present until the mid 1960s, and still persisted until at least the early 1970s in smaller towns in Arkansas and Louisiana. He subsequently describes harrowing experiences as a passenger on public transportation in the mid 1960s, when legal segregation had ended but local practices of discrimination against African Americans persisted, and his life as an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when Black student enrollment at UNC was relatively small but increasing rapidly, and fear of Black men on campus by White women and resultant false reports of crimes committed by them were on the rise. He was involved with the Civil Rights and anti-war movements as an undergraduate student, which he continued when he and his wife moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, followed by Atlanta, where he earned his PhD at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University).
In later chapters Dr Reed discusses the cultural changes that took place in the South, the dissolution of the importance of Black skin color as a marker of status, along with the phenomenon of “passing,” as some of the lightest skinned African Americans passed as White in order to obtain jobs and participate freely in other activities that were shut off to them as Blacks under Jim Crow, the dismantling of public monuments in New Orleans which honored the Confederacy such as the Robert E. Lee Monument that was visible every time I took the St Charles streetcar from the Tulane University campus to the Central Business District when I was a student there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the resurgence of White supremacy, pride in the Confederacy and overt racism during the Trump administration.
I’ve spent nearly half of my life in the Deep South, three years in New Orleans and nearly 25 years in Atlanta, and in both cities I was able to attend universities (Tulane and Emory), live in neighborhoods, and work, as a hospital-based pediatrician, in places that would have been impossible for me as an African American during my childhood, which is a testament to the monumental changes that have taken place. On the other hand there is a backlash that is currently underway in many cities and states, as politicians are making it more difficult for Blacks to vote, books by African American authors are being banned by school districts, and the teaching of American history, the Civil Rights Movement and racism is being restricted by those who want to protect their children from learning the truth about the pervasive effects of discrimination in the past as well as the present day.
The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives is a superb contribution to African American history, and it would be of great interest to anyone who lived in the Deep South in general or New Orleans in particular during and after the Jim Crow era.
The book begins in the early 2000s, as Dr Reed returns to the South after having left it during the beginning of the Ronald Reagan presidency, and marvels at how the region has changed dramatically in two decades, yet remained the same in many ways. Blacks were now in positions of power in politics, medicine and other professions, but the old order and many of its customs still persisted.
For me the most interesting part of the book was his description of growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s and 1960s, when schools, neighborhoods, public accommodations and places of business were segregated to varying degrees. As a child of the middle class in a large, diverse and relatively tolerant Southern city he and his family were protected from the worst aspects of Jim Crow, although segregation and discrimination were still constantly present until the mid 1960s, and still persisted until at least the early 1970s in smaller towns in Arkansas and Louisiana. He subsequently describes harrowing experiences as a passenger on public transportation in the mid 1960s, when legal segregation had ended but local practices of discrimination against African Americans persisted, and his life as an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when Black student enrollment at UNC was relatively small but increasing rapidly, and fear of Black men on campus by White women and resultant false reports of crimes committed by them were on the rise. He was involved with the Civil Rights and anti-war movements as an undergraduate student, which he continued when he and his wife moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, followed by Atlanta, where he earned his PhD at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University).
In later chapters Dr Reed discusses the cultural changes that took place in the South, the dissolution of the importance of Black skin color as a marker of status, along with the phenomenon of “passing,” as some of the lightest skinned African Americans passed as White in order to obtain jobs and participate freely in other activities that were shut off to them as Blacks under Jim Crow, the dismantling of public monuments in New Orleans which honored the Confederacy such as the Robert E. Lee Monument that was visible every time I took the St Charles streetcar from the Tulane University campus to the Central Business District when I was a student there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the resurgence of White supremacy, pride in the Confederacy and overt racism during the Trump administration.
I’ve spent nearly half of my life in the Deep South, three years in New Orleans and nearly 25 years in Atlanta, and in both cities I was able to attend universities (Tulane and Emory), live in neighborhoods, and work, as a hospital-based pediatrician, in places that would have been impossible for me as an African American during my childhood, which is a testament to the monumental changes that have taken place. On the other hand there is a backlash that is currently underway in many cities and states, as politicians are making it more difficult for Blacks to vote, books by African American authors are being banned by school districts, and the teaching of American history, the Civil Rights Movement and racism is being restricted by those who want to protect their children from learning the truth about the pervasive effects of discrimination in the past as well as the present day.
The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives is a superb contribution to African American history, and it would be of great interest to anyone who lived in the Deep South in general or New Orleans in particular during and after the Jim Crow era.
February 16, 2024
I enjoyed this short memoir of life in the Jim Crow South, by the esteemed Professor Adolph Reed, particularly the part set in my home town, New Orleans. Reed describes the psychological effects of Jim Crow, both what the policies were trying to achieve and how they were experienced (and either internalized or resisted, or both.) Anyone from New Orleans of Reed's generation or mine (eleven years his junior) will recognize the neighborhoods and streets and stores he describes, and may well have connections to people and places he mentions. The small details of segregated life have a greater emotional impact than any fiery rhetoric or grand historical theory. He describes how residential segregation was different and less in New Orleans, then worsened during the twentieth century. He also adds his voice to those who insist that issues related to that imaginary construct "race" were not, are not, and should not be, at the forefront of consciousness for most people, whether living under Jim Crow or today. Sympathetic and reasonable discourse about the effects and significance of racism are in short supply, and his ideas may not be welcome in all quarters. As the endorsements from Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West suggest, this book presents a thoughtful discussion of an important topic, and a rich life experience.
March 2, 2022
Adolph Reed Jr. is the most important--has been the most important--American intellectual who explores the nexus of race and political economy. This is an interesting book because it isn't until the end of it that Reed starts flexing his intellectual muscle. Which is not to the say the first ⅚ of the book are breezy or light, or devoid of intellectual rigor, but it’s only in the last part that Reed presents the type of robust analysis on race and political economy that his many fans, for lack of a better word, have long admired in his writing.
I strongly recommend “The South.” It’s an edifying read. If you’ve never read anything by Adolph Reed Jr. and you like “The South,” then I recommended “Class Notes,” “Stirrings in the Jug,” “The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon,” and the myriad articles he’s written for nonsite.org, New Labor Forum, Labor Studies Journal, Jacobin, and Common Dreams. For a certain segment of the American “Left” (I can’t use that word in anything other than quotation marks now) that is above all else interested in class, the balance of class forces and the way it constitutes political economy and the success or failure of discrete political projects, and how discourse about ascriptive identity groups (races) mystifies as much as it clarifies our understanding of political economy, Reed is the non-pareil voice in American political writing.
What’s charming about the last part of “The South” is the diplomacy and care with which Reed addresses the above issues. Gone, or at least in abeyance in this text, is his trademark acerbic wit and lancing of liberal sacred cows. Maybe Verso said, Just cool it for this one; or maybe having turned 75 this year, Reed is feeling justifiably nostalgic. The premise of the book is an interesting one: Reed, being born in 1947, and having lived most of his childhood before the end of de facto segregation in 1964 and 1965, is a member of the last cohort alive who remembers what it was to grow up circumscribed by the rituals and restrictions of Jim Crow. Because this is Adolph Reed Jr., however, even prosaic remembrances of growing up in New Orleans are shot through with keen analysis. One point he returns to is that how we remember the past is constituted by our present political commitments (by and large). Where other public intellectuals write fast and loose with generalizations, clichés, and hoary sentimentality, Reed is attuned to the discrete contingencies of historical and political-economic dynamics, and he is committed to a critical, historical grounding of his analysis. There is no other writer alive in whose hands a just-so story dies such a quick death.
The thing that’s always blown my mind about Reed is how spectacular of a writer he is. He’s truly one of the great non-fiction writers of the last 40 years. A lot of intellectuals have interesting thoughts; a lot of intellectuals make astute observations that go against the grain of conventional thinking; very few intellectuals consistently, almost with ease, repeatedly make astute observations cutting against conventional thinking and do so in language that is simultaneously easy to follow and intellectually robust. I had to smile at the end of the book because although most of the book was quite good, it wasn’t Adolph Reed good until the last chapter or so. Then I felt like for the preceding 100 pages I had been getting measuring love-tap jabs from Muhammad Ali and now in the final chapter he snapped off a business jab and I realized, Oh, yeah, this is Adolph Reed Jr. writing.
I strongly recommend “The South.” It’s an edifying read. If you’ve never read anything by Adolph Reed Jr. and you like “The South,” then I recommended “Class Notes,” “Stirrings in the Jug,” “The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon,” and the myriad articles he’s written for nonsite.org, New Labor Forum, Labor Studies Journal, Jacobin, and Common Dreams. For a certain segment of the American “Left” (I can’t use that word in anything other than quotation marks now) that is above all else interested in class, the balance of class forces and the way it constitutes political economy and the success or failure of discrete political projects, and how discourse about ascriptive identity groups (races) mystifies as much as it clarifies our understanding of political economy, Reed is the non-pareil voice in American political writing.
What’s charming about the last part of “The South” is the diplomacy and care with which Reed addresses the above issues. Gone, or at least in abeyance in this text, is his trademark acerbic wit and lancing of liberal sacred cows. Maybe Verso said, Just cool it for this one; or maybe having turned 75 this year, Reed is feeling justifiably nostalgic. The premise of the book is an interesting one: Reed, being born in 1947, and having lived most of his childhood before the end of de facto segregation in 1964 and 1965, is a member of the last cohort alive who remembers what it was to grow up circumscribed by the rituals and restrictions of Jim Crow. Because this is Adolph Reed Jr., however, even prosaic remembrances of growing up in New Orleans are shot through with keen analysis. One point he returns to is that how we remember the past is constituted by our present political commitments (by and large). Where other public intellectuals write fast and loose with generalizations, clichés, and hoary sentimentality, Reed is attuned to the discrete contingencies of historical and political-economic dynamics, and he is committed to a critical, historical grounding of his analysis. There is no other writer alive in whose hands a just-so story dies such a quick death.
The thing that’s always blown my mind about Reed is how spectacular of a writer he is. He’s truly one of the great non-fiction writers of the last 40 years. A lot of intellectuals have interesting thoughts; a lot of intellectuals make astute observations that go against the grain of conventional thinking; very few intellectuals consistently, almost with ease, repeatedly make astute observations cutting against conventional thinking and do so in language that is simultaneously easy to follow and intellectually robust. I had to smile at the end of the book because although most of the book was quite good, it wasn’t Adolph Reed good until the last chapter or so. Then I felt like for the preceding 100 pages I had been getting measuring love-tap jabs from Muhammad Ali and now in the final chapter he snapped off a business jab and I realized, Oh, yeah, this is Adolph Reed Jr. writing.
May 3, 2023
I couldn't rate it 5 stars due to my history of past interactions with Reed or Reed's Twitter mouthpiece, Doug Henwood. (More on that at the bottom of the review.)
The book itself on an island? Four stars. Contra at least one 3-star review, I thought the autobiographical part, as small as it might be, might be a bit better than the analysis part. It's not just the personal anecdotes, but the sharing of them, and noting that his is the last Jim Crow generation.
The analysis? He's good overall, but not everywhere, on how Jim Crow partially flattened intra-Black class issues, with references to the likes of Homer Plessy himself. But, he tries to "run" too much with this too much, IMO. (More below.)
On "passing"? I thought he gave this largely surface-level treatment. It's quite interesting that he didn't even mention "Passing" for investigative reasons, like Walter White, who isn't even mentioned by name.
But, beyond that? Reed shows glimpses of the thesis he hammers heavily elsewhere, namely that most issues of race reduce partially, if not entirely, to class.
This shows up in his discussion of class control of Jim Crow. And, now we get to the behind the scenes. Henwood, even more than him, from what I have read, claims that Jim Crow was institutionalized as the South industrialized and to stick a wedge between black and white southern workers. That's overstated. First, Jim Crow was "solid" by 1890, six years before Plessy's case hit the Supreme Court. Friction within southern Populists was also apparent by 1890, though it continued to grow after that.
And, on southern industrialization? Birmingham wasn't even founded as a city until 1871. The Sloss Furnace, its first, opened in 1882. (The old Tredegar in Richmond, or antebellum Atlanta ironworks, were dated.) Plus, note the first attempt to expand railroads in the south largely died out for a number of reasons. This isn't to say that Jim Crow wasn't in part tied to an attempt to de-organize industrial labor. It IS to say that this is not nearly the full story.
Of course, this is the same Reed who claimed, against Black Lives Matter a few years ago that, re police brutality in general, and specifically, people killed by cops, that New Mexico was one of the whitest states in the nation, riffing on its high death by cop rate. That would be news to the large numbers of American Indians in a state that's been "majority-minority" for decades. (American Indians have an even higher death-by-cop rate than Blacks.)
So, that's why 3 stars: A warning to others to look under the hood on Adolph Reed.
The book itself on an island? Four stars. Contra at least one 3-star review, I thought the autobiographical part, as small as it might be, might be a bit better than the analysis part. It's not just the personal anecdotes, but the sharing of them, and noting that his is the last Jim Crow generation.
The analysis? He's good overall, but not everywhere, on how Jim Crow partially flattened intra-Black class issues, with references to the likes of Homer Plessy himself. But, he tries to "run" too much with this too much, IMO. (More below.)
On "passing"? I thought he gave this largely surface-level treatment. It's quite interesting that he didn't even mention "Passing" for investigative reasons, like Walter White, who isn't even mentioned by name.
But, beyond that? Reed shows glimpses of the thesis he hammers heavily elsewhere, namely that most issues of race reduce partially, if not entirely, to class.
This shows up in his discussion of class control of Jim Crow. And, now we get to the behind the scenes. Henwood, even more than him, from what I have read, claims that Jim Crow was institutionalized as the South industrialized and to stick a wedge between black and white southern workers. That's overstated. First, Jim Crow was "solid" by 1890, six years before Plessy's case hit the Supreme Court. Friction within southern Populists was also apparent by 1890, though it continued to grow after that.
And, on southern industrialization? Birmingham wasn't even founded as a city until 1871. The Sloss Furnace, its first, opened in 1882. (The old Tredegar in Richmond, or antebellum Atlanta ironworks, were dated.) Plus, note the first attempt to expand railroads in the south largely died out for a number of reasons. This isn't to say that Jim Crow wasn't in part tied to an attempt to de-organize industrial labor. It IS to say that this is not nearly the full story.
Of course, this is the same Reed who claimed, against Black Lives Matter a few years ago that, re police brutality in general, and specifically, people killed by cops, that New Mexico was one of the whitest states in the nation, riffing on its high death by cop rate. That would be news to the large numbers of American Indians in a state that's been "majority-minority" for decades. (American Indians have an even higher death-by-cop rate than Blacks.)
So, that's why 3 stars: A warning to others to look under the hood on Adolph Reed.
December 23, 2022
The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives by Adolph L. Reed Jr. is an interesting book. He writes about his life, much of it was the South where he grew up in the era of Jim Crow. Well, the system was slowly coming to an end, but we still have the Lost Cause that people keep wanting to resurrect. Moving around the South was clearly dangerous. But like the era of de facto desegregation in the North that I am writing about, you have to watch carefully and negotiate environments.
Reed’s observations about the North and South are interesting, since we see similar behaviors, but they are grasped differently. Now that the South has changed, he can go places that were off limits in the past. Or family members sent “fair” relatives to get foodstuff. Now at times, he talks with men in his age group, in ways that would never have happened in the 1960s. I think as he notes, that such men do not acknowledge the privileges of the past, so that they can “pretend” there is a shared past.
Life was precarious in his space and era. He was shoplifting and the owners talked with him about the path that this behavior could lead. He took the warning seriously. Another friend has a transgression as young men are apt to do, but he faced jailed for it. With professional parents and even grandparents who had been teachers, he was middle class in the South. That made for tensions with Black peers. He also leaves for college but returns for community work and other events. With family clearly in the Louisiana, he is back frequently traveling the roads often a night. His story is very different than mine but gives me much to think about as I write my own. The Black middle-class built an environment, they shared many spaces with people across class lines, but did differentiate themselves by social class. They could do more to shield themselves, but it did not always work.
His comments about the new South, where many cities have mixed race leadership, but the paths are practices can reinforce powerful political and economic interests that still leave racial minorities at risk. Gentrification takes different shape that Northern practices. The whole Civil Rights tourism is a case in point. Even Clint Smith’s book looks at the various practices, some are addressing the racial legacy, while some are still reaching for the Lost Cause. Yet, getting taking down monuments to people who worked to keep slavery in the South is part of a bigger picture as we now celebrate diversity. Even if only a minority of those people who are diverse enjoy the fruits.
Reed’s observations about the North and South are interesting, since we see similar behaviors, but they are grasped differently. Now that the South has changed, he can go places that were off limits in the past. Or family members sent “fair” relatives to get foodstuff. Now at times, he talks with men in his age group, in ways that would never have happened in the 1960s. I think as he notes, that such men do not acknowledge the privileges of the past, so that they can “pretend” there is a shared past.
Life was precarious in his space and era. He was shoplifting and the owners talked with him about the path that this behavior could lead. He took the warning seriously. Another friend has a transgression as young men are apt to do, but he faced jailed for it. With professional parents and even grandparents who had been teachers, he was middle class in the South. That made for tensions with Black peers. He also leaves for college but returns for community work and other events. With family clearly in the Louisiana, he is back frequently traveling the roads often a night. His story is very different than mine but gives me much to think about as I write my own. The Black middle-class built an environment, they shared many spaces with people across class lines, but did differentiate themselves by social class. They could do more to shield themselves, but it did not always work.
His comments about the new South, where many cities have mixed race leadership, but the paths are practices can reinforce powerful political and economic interests that still leave racial minorities at risk. Gentrification takes different shape that Northern practices. The whole Civil Rights tourism is a case in point. Even Clint Smith’s book looks at the various practices, some are addressing the racial legacy, while some are still reaching for the Lost Cause. Yet, getting taking down monuments to people who worked to keep slavery in the South is part of a bigger picture as we now celebrate diversity. Even if only a minority of those people who are diverse enjoy the fruits.
December 26, 2022
I sometimes struggle with autobiography, and this book was no exception. On the one hand, Adolph Reed's account of growing up in New Orleans during the dying days of the Jim Crow era depicts a complex picture of race, class and political power from the eyes of a youth and young man; on the other hand, the stories from his youth are less interesting than Adolph Reed's analysis and explanation of this complexity.
From the standpoint of autobiography, Reed sets out to tell the stories from his life and how it was impacted living in the deep south beyond the imagery of separated lunch counters, drinking fountains and bathrooms. In this, we get stories of youthful indiscretions like shoplifting and the fear that went with being caught one day by a white shop owner, who could have had him sent to prison but instead urged him to pick a different course; of planning trips to avoid stopping in some localities while making for other safe havens; and of the continuous testing of limits of the Jim Crow order that could be both comic and tragic, with the threat of obscene forms of violence always floating in the background.
But the book does not shine with these stories. The real richness of the book lies with the explanations of how and why the Jim Crow south became the Jim Crow south, how it was steadily dismantled as unsustainable, and the acts of opposition both open and by subterfuge that lead to its dismantling. Here we get stories that illustrate what passing for white meant, the utility of African Americans in a small town in Georgia passing for Native Americans and the legal stratagems other "nonwhites" used to find a niche within the binary opposition of black and white. The final chapters are outstanding, with Reed's explanation of how Jim Crow was used to obscure class relations and exploitation by the rich and powerful, and how these same class relations persist in present day America. These sections, sometimes significant parts of chapters, sometimes smaller reflections are where the best of the book lies. I left wanting to read more by Reed, but something more focused on this type of analysis and explanation.
From the standpoint of autobiography, Reed sets out to tell the stories from his life and how it was impacted living in the deep south beyond the imagery of separated lunch counters, drinking fountains and bathrooms. In this, we get stories of youthful indiscretions like shoplifting and the fear that went with being caught one day by a white shop owner, who could have had him sent to prison but instead urged him to pick a different course; of planning trips to avoid stopping in some localities while making for other safe havens; and of the continuous testing of limits of the Jim Crow order that could be both comic and tragic, with the threat of obscene forms of violence always floating in the background.
But the book does not shine with these stories. The real richness of the book lies with the explanations of how and why the Jim Crow south became the Jim Crow south, how it was steadily dismantled as unsustainable, and the acts of opposition both open and by subterfuge that lead to its dismantling. Here we get stories that illustrate what passing for white meant, the utility of African Americans in a small town in Georgia passing for Native Americans and the legal stratagems other "nonwhites" used to find a niche within the binary opposition of black and white. The final chapters are outstanding, with Reed's explanation of how Jim Crow was used to obscure class relations and exploitation by the rich and powerful, and how these same class relations persist in present day America. These sections, sometimes significant parts of chapters, sometimes smaller reflections are where the best of the book lies. I left wanting to read more by Reed, but something more focused on this type of analysis and explanation.
April 24, 2022
When I was 8 years old, I travelled with my parents to Goodman, Mississippi to meet my paternal grandmother. She had returned there after her husband died. The year was 1949. Over one July 4th weekend there I learned the words (and brief descriptions) of the Civil War, slavery, segregation, and white's only bathrooms. My grandmother had a Black maid - Ophelia - who was the kindest woman I'd ever met and love her to this day. She sounds exactly like a few of Reed's elderly aunts.
Like Adolph Reed, Jr. I sensed injustice and separate and unequal, starting somewhere outside Goodman at a gas station outhouse for white's only. Of course, we were a white family and had nothing to worry about but I knew this was not the case for Ophelia and her family.
Like Reed, I am the last generation to have lived through (for me - one weekend) the Jim Crow time period. He remembers it because there were times when he was in real danger and lived with all of the subtle and not so subtle restrictions. I only saw them but even at age eight, I knew something was terribly wrong. I wrote about this experience in my memoir The Red Kitchen. Only later did I learn about the "lynching tree" that was on the sidewalk just beyond my grandmother's house.
Unlike Reed, I'm not in the least curious about my father's family or would have ever wanted to know more about that side of my heritage. And, my father chose to put on his blinders as to what Reed lived through and was weary of me and my "childish" outrage at what I witnessed over the course of our visit. And is why Reed's book means so much to me. Finally, someone my age who can talk to me about that time with authenticity on a personal, historical, and intellectual basis.
Reed combines memories, experiences, and the structure of Jim Crow, and as he writes "its afterlives." There are brilliant and poignant passages in this small volume - too many to cite here. As Reed wrote: "Separate was never intended to be equal" and "People who are oppressed know it-by definition."
Like Adolph Reed, Jr. I sensed injustice and separate and unequal, starting somewhere outside Goodman at a gas station outhouse for white's only. Of course, we were a white family and had nothing to worry about but I knew this was not the case for Ophelia and her family.
Like Reed, I am the last generation to have lived through (for me - one weekend) the Jim Crow time period. He remembers it because there were times when he was in real danger and lived with all of the subtle and not so subtle restrictions. I only saw them but even at age eight, I knew something was terribly wrong. I wrote about this experience in my memoir The Red Kitchen. Only later did I learn about the "lynching tree" that was on the sidewalk just beyond my grandmother's house.
Unlike Reed, I'm not in the least curious about my father's family or would have ever wanted to know more about that side of my heritage. And, my father chose to put on his blinders as to what Reed lived through and was weary of me and my "childish" outrage at what I witnessed over the course of our visit. And is why Reed's book means so much to me. Finally, someone my age who can talk to me about that time with authenticity on a personal, historical, and intellectual basis.
Reed combines memories, experiences, and the structure of Jim Crow, and as he writes "its afterlives." There are brilliant and poignant passages in this small volume - too many to cite here. As Reed wrote: "Separate was never intended to be equal" and "People who are oppressed know it-by definition."
September 4, 2022
History has meaning. Typically, a historian attaches meaning to events, personalities, trends, and policies by commenting on the effects those things had on the world, the nation, various groups, and individual people. Other historians might open debate as to the validity, relevance, and completeness of those interpretations. In The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives by Adolph L. Reed, Jr. the author attaches his own personal life. Well researched and intelligently expressed, Reed’s history is in the form of a memoir. Besides being a historical description, it is also a story of Reed’s family and his growing up. The book focuses on the genesis, development, and ultimate decline of Jim Crow, America’s apartheid.
Through decades as a political activist, journalist, scholar, and teacher, Adolph Reed has consistently advocated serious, historically grounded, progressive politics. He is well known for his views about anti-reductionism. Race reductionism is the presumption that race as a category can explain social phenomena and that every grievance, injustice, complaint that in any way affects a person of color, can be reduced to race or racism. A classical Marxist, Reed prefers that such blame be assigned to class.
He is often the target of criticism. However, Cornel West, a Harvard professor of philosophy and a Socialist, has stated, “God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation. He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century.”
I can’t resist the temptation for a bit of name-dropping. Adolph was a friend of mine when we were in Chapel Hill.
Through decades as a political activist, journalist, scholar, and teacher, Adolph Reed has consistently advocated serious, historically grounded, progressive politics. He is well known for his views about anti-reductionism. Race reductionism is the presumption that race as a category can explain social phenomena and that every grievance, injustice, complaint that in any way affects a person of color, can be reduced to race or racism. A classical Marxist, Reed prefers that such blame be assigned to class.
He is often the target of criticism. However, Cornel West, a Harvard professor of philosophy and a Socialist, has stated, “God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation. He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century.”
I can’t resist the temptation for a bit of name-dropping. Adolph was a friend of mine when we were in Chapel Hill.
Read
December 8, 2022“Reed, a political scientist now emeritus at Penn, was born in 1947, and grew up in New Orleans during the final years of the Jim Crow era. One of his aims is to record for posterity the lived experience of that time for one black person, but another is to demonstrate both the class politics of Jim Crow and how class differences among African-Americans affected their experience of the racism of the era. Another aim is to show the extent to which forms of economic oppression outlived the Jim Crow era, even as the racial composition of the oppressor and oppressed classes changed. The book is full of memorable stories, illustrating both the petty humiliations that were the daily fare of Jim Crow and the transformation of social relations wrought by its defeat. One example from near the end of the book: “[T]he changing conditions generating and attendant to the defeat of the Jim Crow order provided incentives for changed behavior. (Illustratively, and comically, the day after Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the white barber in tiny Eudora walked down the street to my Great-Uncle Clarence's funeral home to announce ‘Mr. Bethune, now that the law has changed, I'd certainly appreciate your business.’).””
— Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence, Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values
— Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence, Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values
August 12, 2023
The South is a short book by Adolph Reed, Jr., detailing his life events in relation to Jim Crow and an analysis of that period. It is pretty good, but not as insightful as other works by the same author--something, however, which one cannot fault the work for, considering, however much the word is inapplicable to his analysis, this work is largely autobiographical.
This is not to say it is not insightful, however. As quite a bit of the book is narrative, Reed often combines his analysis with a story of some sort--mainly, of course, stories about himself and his faimly--which illustrate his point or show in some way the Jim Crow order.
His discussion on "passing" makes this clear. In this part of the book, "passing" is organized into an essential characteristic of experience under Jim Crow. In real terms, many black people passed white in order to retain their jobs, or to circumvent racialized legal restrictions. With Reed, we see that he and friends would talk about passing, ask if people they saw on the bus or wherever were passing--joking, in short, if someone were passing white. These ideas are weaved into his life experience. He tells a story, for example, of attaining beignet's from a white-only shop by having his grandma go in and pass white.
This is not to say it is not insightful, however. As quite a bit of the book is narrative, Reed often combines his analysis with a story of some sort--mainly, of course, stories about himself and his faimly--which illustrate his point or show in some way the Jim Crow order.
His discussion on "passing" makes this clear. In this part of the book, "passing" is organized into an essential characteristic of experience under Jim Crow. In real terms, many black people passed white in order to retain their jobs, or to circumvent racialized legal restrictions. With Reed, we see that he and friends would talk about passing, ask if people they saw on the bus or wherever were passing--joking, in short, if someone were passing white. These ideas are weaved into his life experience. He tells a story, for example, of attaining beignet's from a white-only shop by having his grandma go in and pass white.
June 10, 2022
must read to understand the distortions of history from both the liberal and illiberal wings of the us polity
Understanding Jim Crow, it’s transition from a black socialist perspective is very refreshing. He warns us that the teleologies of the emerging anti-racist cohort and of the ruling class are remarkably overlapping.
His first hand experience unfolding white and black experience from his perspective growing up in Jim Crow was also eye-opening. I am old enough to remember the civil rights era but not the Jim Crow era. I can recall the reaction from people I grew up with and working class neighborhoods it’s not being too friendly to the changes. I would say this was a racist reaction at the time and I think that’s right. And the truth is I barely interacted with African-Americans in my youth although we attended the same primary schools and middle schools.
Professor Reed’s experience fills in the gap’s and shows something I intuited when I was a young working class kid that there was something I had in common with black working class kids but I just couldn’t put it to words.
Understanding Jim Crow, it’s transition from a black socialist perspective is very refreshing. He warns us that the teleologies of the emerging anti-racist cohort and of the ruling class are remarkably overlapping.
His first hand experience unfolding white and black experience from his perspective growing up in Jim Crow was also eye-opening. I am old enough to remember the civil rights era but not the Jim Crow era. I can recall the reaction from people I grew up with and working class neighborhoods it’s not being too friendly to the changes. I would say this was a racist reaction at the time and I think that’s right. And the truth is I barely interacted with African-Americans in my youth although we attended the same primary schools and middle schools.
Professor Reed’s experience fills in the gap’s and shows something I intuited when I was a young working class kid that there was something I had in common with black working class kids but I just couldn’t put it to words.
July 18, 2023
Took me longer to read than I anticipated, but was rewarded with a thoughtful, quietly provocative memoir about the quotidian and mundane facets of the Jim Crow order and its slow crumbling. Reed’s blend of autobiography and social scientific analysis was refreshing. Though he had an argument in mind as he wrote, he didn’t let that get in the way of telling a good story.
Favorite passage:
“The segregationist order was never stable. It was only the
white southern myth of timeless tradition, a myth installed partly at gunpoint as an element of consolidation of ruling class power, that gave it the appearance of solidity. Retracing that history, which contained and shaped but generally lies beyond the insight that can be drawn from personal experience, is necessary to fill in the picture of what the Jim Crow South was. However, because of the ways the past lives imagistically so near the surface of the present in the South, moments occasionally erupt that encourage, perhaps demand, critical reflection on the region’s actual history, and that history’s relation to social and political life today.”
Favorite passage:
“The segregationist order was never stable. It was only the
white southern myth of timeless tradition, a myth installed partly at gunpoint as an element of consolidation of ruling class power, that gave it the appearance of solidity. Retracing that history, which contained and shaped but generally lies beyond the insight that can be drawn from personal experience, is necessary to fill in the picture of what the Jim Crow South was. However, because of the ways the past lives imagistically so near the surface of the present in the South, moments occasionally erupt that encourage, perhaps demand, critical reflection on the region’s actual history, and that history’s relation to social and political life today.”
May 14, 2024
This book was assigned by Dr. Roger Lancaster as part of the Social Institutions class I took with him in the fall of 2023. The book is one part memoir and one part social/historical analysis about race in the American South of Adolph Reed's childhood as well as changes and continuities in regards to how race is dealt with in the American South today. Because of his own biography and experiences, Reed focuses in particular on Louisiana and seeks to acknowledge the realities of racial oppression, subordination, and apartheid in the Jim Crow South while simultaneously complicating simplistic notions about total segregation between blacks and whites in that milieu. The book struck me as having many of the weaknesses common in books that rely too heavily on the particularities of individual biographies, but it also had flashes of real brilliance and insight. I generally find Reed's thinking on racial and economic issues to be insightful. His materialist perspective as a committed socialist flavors all of his thinking and points the way forward for Americans of all races to unite against the economic and social forces which ultimately degrade and oppress us all.
December 22, 2022
Emerging from among the many detailed personal anecdotes which form its (brief) bulk, Reed manages to embed many important lessons. I took away the following:
* In “separate but equal,” with which the Jim Crow era began, “equal” was never the intention. Instead, Jim Crow was a system by which all Black Americans were forced into a single, flattened class, at the very bottom of the social order.
* There were considerable variations in the way that Jim Crow was enacted, depending on local circumstances. In general, it was more relaxed in a city like New Orleans. But even within a city, there would be different rules from one establishment to another.
* However, these very variations and exceptions could be extremely dangerous, if you made false assumptions about a town or neighborhood with which you were not familiar.
* Neither the Jim Crow system nor its variations depended on individual racism (or not). Its power and purpose were social and political.
* As Jim Crow ended, class difference was reasserted, and Whites judged Black people more by class than race – whether individual racist beliefs were eradicated or not.
* The victory against the white supremacy of Jim Crow thus hardly touched the rigidity of class in America: in fact, white supremacy can be considered a “cover story” for the deep inequality which persists. That is, neoliberals may believe either that we live in post-racial times, or that the Civil Rights era changed nothing – both are false, and both beliefs lead to symbolic actions which leave inequality entrenched.
Highly recommended, especially to my teacher colleagues, who generally mistake class issues for race issues! And as short as it is, you can save yourself even more time by skipping the Foreword, in which Barbara Fields does little more than repeat, at some length, many of Reed's best anecdotes, all the way through to the punchline.
* In “separate but equal,” with which the Jim Crow era began, “equal” was never the intention. Instead, Jim Crow was a system by which all Black Americans were forced into a single, flattened class, at the very bottom of the social order.
* There were considerable variations in the way that Jim Crow was enacted, depending on local circumstances. In general, it was more relaxed in a city like New Orleans. But even within a city, there would be different rules from one establishment to another.
* However, these very variations and exceptions could be extremely dangerous, if you made false assumptions about a town or neighborhood with which you were not familiar.
* Neither the Jim Crow system nor its variations depended on individual racism (or not). Its power and purpose were social and political.
* As Jim Crow ended, class difference was reasserted, and Whites judged Black people more by class than race – whether individual racist beliefs were eradicated or not.
* The victory against the white supremacy of Jim Crow thus hardly touched the rigidity of class in America: in fact, white supremacy can be considered a “cover story” for the deep inequality which persists. That is, neoliberals may believe either that we live in post-racial times, or that the Civil Rights era changed nothing – both are false, and both beliefs lead to symbolic actions which leave inequality entrenched.
Highly recommended, especially to my teacher colleagues, who generally mistake class issues for race issues! And as short as it is, you can save yourself even more time by skipping the Foreword, in which Barbara Fields does little more than repeat, at some length, many of Reed's best anecdotes, all the way through to the punchline.
May 27, 2024
There are a few books I’d recommend to people who grew up in areas with long haunting histories of racism, and this is one of them (By Hands Now Known by Margaret Burnham is another). I think there is hardly a more audacious remark than to say something like “I’m from the south, I understand what racism is like”, if you are a modern white person. Works like this help readers begin to understand the comprehensive totality of the Jim Crow order and its apparent immutability. It’s truly terrifying how many stories of the Jim Crow order Reed has from growing up from a boy to a scholarly man in Louisiana. No one should have to live their life under the unwavering threat that their life could be taken from them if they so much as look at a white person the wrong way. Reed provides elucidating anecdotes of the terror that was this social, political, economic, and symbolic order. There was never a day in the Jim Crow South where folks thought the world would be different in 15 years. But change is possible through dissent, hope, organized activism.
April 5, 2022
A short themed memoir with vignettes of his life during Jim Crow, its waning, and aftermath. He grew up in New Orleans, was educated in NC and Atlanta, and had family in the Delta region where he visited after he left and lived in New York.
(One of my favorite stories - during the years of the OPEC oil crisis he was driving in SC with his family at night and was pulled over because a trooper was perplexed by his “Boycott Gulf” bumper sticker. He ended up giving him “an impromptu account of the persistence of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and Gulf’s complicity in sustaining it. The trooper was attentive and clearly wanted to make sense of it all.” )
Throughout, but mainly at the end, he weaves in analysis on contemporary conversations about race and history. The last chapter revolves around New Orleans in 2017 when 4 Confederate monuments were taken down and he happened to be there for family reasons during the furor over it.
My spouse got this book after reading a recent profile of Reed in the New Yorker. I picked it up out of curiosity and was captivated.
(One of my favorite stories - during the years of the OPEC oil crisis he was driving in SC with his family at night and was pulled over because a trooper was perplexed by his “Boycott Gulf” bumper sticker. He ended up giving him “an impromptu account of the persistence of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and Gulf’s complicity in sustaining it. The trooper was attentive and clearly wanted to make sense of it all.” )
Throughout, but mainly at the end, he weaves in analysis on contemporary conversations about race and history. The last chapter revolves around New Orleans in 2017 when 4 Confederate monuments were taken down and he happened to be there for family reasons during the furor over it.
My spouse got this book after reading a recent profile of Reed in the New Yorker. I picked it up out of curiosity and was captivated.
November 14, 2023
As with most everything Reed writes, there is a lot to love about this book. Reed is quite intelligent and an astute observer of socio-political realities. I was less interested at the outset, since the book spends a lot of time on Reed's personal reminiscing, and I am more theory-minded, not nearly as interested in personal anecdotes (what happened and what we remember happening are often rather divergent, if not altogether disparate). The book picked up for me in the latter third or so when Reed gets into his analysis of race, Jim Crow, slavery, and current realities surrounding short-sighted approaches and reactions to the racist-antiracist positions. All the things I love about Reed's approach to analyzing class and race relations are here (albeit in truncated form), and I learned a few things about his personal life too. Not a bad way to spend an evening.
July 31, 2024
A good overview, based on Reed's own experience, of how varied the Jim Crow system was. Rather than a fixed and immovable system of segregation, the experience depended largely on location, and on who you happened to have to interact with as a black person. Some people were super racist, others not so, others friendly. Reed also describes how the Jim Crow system was imposed not just on black people, but also on whites and was largely based on reinforcing and perpetuating a ruling class. He also has a lot of discussion about how a history of this time period and system based solely on race falls down as race was constantly being negotiated and renegotiated both by whites and minorities. It was always in flux. A good overview, if a bit brief and superficial.
September 5, 2024
In which Reed soberly discusses his experiences growing up in the Jim Crow South, emphasizes the pragmatic roots of the two-faced racist treatment from neighbors, and reminds the world that underneath the racism is a class struggle which still persists today. Not quite an academic screed and not entirely a memoir, this short book is a welcome and intelligent reminder that some of today's conversation around racial essentialism is overblown and ultimately distracts from the larger disparities that have never changed, that the poor is poor and the rich are parasites.
I wish this had received the same lauded treatment as the Xendi book. But if that were to have happened, nuance would have been forced to enter the chat and we all know how Americans feel about nuance.
Recommended.
I wish this had received the same lauded treatment as the Xendi book. But if that were to have happened, nuance would have been forced to enter the chat and we all know how Americans feel about nuance.
Recommended.
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