Cancel Culture (2): Adolph Reed Jr
Adolph Reed Jr has spent decades insisting that much of contemporary anti racism on the left has taken a wrong turning. The wrong turning is not that it rejects racism or that it wants a more equal society. The wrong turning is that it treats political life as a moral economy of identities, confessions, and administrative verdicts. Reed argues that this administrative moralism cannot deliver justice because it cannot even grasp what binds a we together. It confuses the mood of outrage for the work of politics. It replaces solidarity with a ledger of reputations and ritual proofs of virtue. It treats the remainder in every relation as a stain to be scrubbed away. In doing so it mirrors the new puritanism that has grown up in universities and online spaces, a puritanism that believes clean rooms and swift exiles will keep a community safe. Reed’s criticism of race reductionism, of the reparations frame, of movement marketing, and of the cottage industry around anti racism places him squarely with a philosophical view that sees community not as a work that can be owned, but as an exposure one holds without possession. On that ground Reed’s anti racism rejects the puritan impulse and instead seeks forms of life that can bear ambiguity, spend surplus without cruelty, and make room for politics that is not a theatre of proof.
Reed’s account of race reductionism describes a tendency that elevates racial identity to the master key of political explanation and strategy. In his view, this tendency functions within a restricted ledger in which every event is read as an index of racial hierarchy and every remedy is framed as recognition and punishment within that ledger. The political subject here is an identity that must forever avow itself in order to receive standing. Reed calls this a clientelist politics, a politics of brokered access and curated voices. It is moral theatre grafted onto a market of influence. The effect is to reify race as a permanent essence, even when the rhetoric disavows essentialism. Reed insists by contrast that the determinants of inequality in the United States are most effectively grasped through the dynamics of labour markets, public goods, and class formation, which do not map cleanly onto racial lines even as they contain the legacy of racial order. He does not deny racism. He denies the analytic and strategic priority of race as a standalone axis. That denial is not a softening of anti racism. It is an assertion that the politics capable of undermining racial hierarchy must attack the institutions and relations that generate inequality as such. He takes this to be the materialist charge, a charge that the new puritanism treats as heresy.
This is where Reed’s stance converges with a view of community as the unowned relation. Administrative moralism demands public avowals and full transparency in order to maintain the purity of the room. Race reductionism sustains that demand by coding avowal as fidelity to the racial people. Reed sees this as a managerial project, a project that produces an elite who can speak the language of injury while negotiating with power on behalf of a population treated as a brand. He calls attention to the constant appeal to big white men and women who validate which voices count as authentic. The ceremony of naming, the curation of who may represent, and the staging of contrition are not accidents. They are the way a restricted moral economy runs. Reed rejects this economy because it cannot reproduce solidarity. It can reproduce only clients and brokers.
Reed’s well known critique of reparations sits at the same hinge. He does not dismiss the history of dispossession or the claims of redress. He argues that the reparations frame shrinks politics to a distributive legalism bound to an identity ledger. In his reading, the reparations project consolidates racial peoplehood as the primary axis and invites a politics of symbolic win or loss that leaves the institutional structure of exploitation largely intact. He contends that the racial wealth gap, often treated as the clinching exhibit, is not a single structure but an artefact of stratification across classes, and that programmes which deliver universal goods to working people will do more to erode racialised inequality than projects that refine the moral economy of recognition. Reed’s point is not that justice should be colour blind in a sentimental sense. It is that justice must attack the relations that produce deprivation, or it will become a sacrament of purity in which spectacles of recognition substitute for transformation.
Nothing shows the clash more clearly than the episode in which a talk Reed was scheduled to give to a socialist organisation in New York was cancelled under pressure from a caucus committed to what they took to be an uncompromising anti racist line. Reed’s argument, which challenges race reductionism and calls for a class anchored strategy, was read as reactionary. The cancellation functioned as an administrative verdict within a puritan code. Purity was secured by removing the offending figure and by presenting the removal as an ethical necessity. The irony was that a Black Marxist thinker who had opposed Jim Crow and written a social history of that world was declared suspect for refusing to treat racial identity as the master code of politics. The episode distilled the conflict between a tribunal model of community and Reed’s insistence that argument and coalition are not forms of contamination.
Reed’s alignment with a philosophy of the unavowable community appears in his treatment of how speech works at its limit. Administrative moralism expects complete legibility, instant confession, and speech that proves innocence. Reed distrusts these demands because he understands political speech as a practice that must make room for hesitations, misfires, and revisions. He treats the insistence on a perfect narrative of self as a professional function of the anti racism industry, not as a condition of truth. He is sceptical of pedagogies that convert classrooms into sanctuaries of confession. He favours instead a culture of enquiry where the claim is tested by reasons and where identity is not a veto. This is not coldness. It is an ethic that refuses to turn speech into a trial of being and that insists on the distinction between persons and positions. It resists the conversion of the other into property, which is the deepest temptation of the puritan moral economy.Reed’s constant theme is that politicised identity talk becomes a substitute for politics. By substituting an intimate theatre of virtue for collective action directed at the institutions that structure life chances, it guarantees that outcomes will be symbolic. In Reed’s writing, the proper object of left politics is the provision and defence of universal goods that desegregate life in practice. He has done more than write about this. He has organised for Medicare for All in the South, a site where universal provision would alter the lived texture of racialised inequality. In this practical project one can see the concern with forms that bind without extraction. Universal provision is a modest analogue of an unowned bond. It binds by sharing exposure to illness and cost and the fear that attends both, not by creating a hierarchy of moral proofs.
Reed’s claim that anti racism as a freestanding politics is limited connects with a different register, that of surplus and expenditure. The moral economy of contemporary anti racism hoards injury and outrage as assets to be deployed. It treats surplus affect as fuel for a permanent mobilisation within the ledger. Reed’s annoyance with this style is not that people feel too much. It is that feeling is captured for marketable movement culture rather than released in building durable organisations around concrete goods. He is fond of pointing out that the performance of radicalism often advances the interests of a Black professional class whose fortunes rise with the expansion of diversity administration and corporate branding. In that sense, the restricted economy of recognition allows surplus to be banked as careers and consultancies. The heat is not spent. It is circulated as content. Reed would have us spend the heat on institutions that change pay, housing, care, and time.
His longer view of Black political history deepens the critique. Reed argues that much of what passes for a radical Black politics since the nineteen eighties has been a language of uplift recoded for the nonprofit and donor landscape. It locates the source of inequality in defective identity and proposes programmes of consciousness as the response. He reads this as a recycling of nineteenth century moralism and of uplift elites who imagined that their representation of the race was identical with the good of the race. In one well known essay he traces how race reductionism speaks past the lives of ordinary Black workers and appeals instead to the big white men and women who can validate a voice that fits the brand. This description is not satire. It is a sociology of a new class of brokers whose currency is the management of feeling about race, and whose exchange partners are foundations, corporations, and universities.
Reed does not write in ignorance of the historic ferocity of American racism. He grew up under petty apartheid in the South and has reconstructed the texture of that regime with sobriety. He is not interested in consolations about national healing or in bromides about colour blindness. His point is that a politics that chases moral proof in the present will not undo the institutional structure that outlived Jim Crow. The struggle against segregation, in his memory, was not won by perfect speech or identity rites. It turned on fights over schools, transport, jobs, and law. It was a politics of institutions, not a theatre of innocence. That is the inheritance he wants to preserve, which is why he is so hard on a new puritanism that prefers show trials to budget battles.
Consider the place of names and innocence in Reed’s argument. The new puritanism enthrones the name. It asks who speaks and from which identity and accords standing accordingly. It also enthrones a dream of innocence. It holds that a person who has mastered the codes can be pure. Reed insists that in a capitalist society structured by markets and mediated by institutions, no one is pure. Everyone is entangled in relations of domination that cannot be cleansed by performative denials. The route to cleaner life is not purification by speech. It is the curbing of markets in housing, labour, and care by public provision and regulation. Innocence is not an option. Responsibility is. Puritanism seeks to purchase a fantasy of purity by exiling those who threaten the brand. Reed calls that a politics of clients and bailiffs. It is not emancipation.
Reed’s exchanges with figures like Ta Nehisi Coates and his scepticism toward the bestseller versions of anti racism make the fault lines visible. He disputes the reparations frame that Coates brought to national prominence because he believes it elevates a moral narrative over an institutional programme. He pushes against the idea that a national drama of recognition and transfer can substitute for political fights over wages, pensions, schools, and health care. He has also criticised the training industry that instructs workplaces to search their souls while leaving ownership and bargaining power untouched. For Reed these are instances of the restricted economy at work. They make a spectacle of virtue while diverting energy from the slow, often dull, fights that change life.
His most explicit statements about the limits of anti racism draw the larger conclusion. Anti racism in the abstract, he argues, has become a favourite because it allows people to feel that they are on the side of good without committing to a programme that might threaten property or reallocate power. It is a politics suited to a neoliberal order because it allows the market to continue while promising moral improvement through awareness and representation. Reed names this contradiction again and again. He does not believe it can be squared. A left that becomes a ministry of morals will become the junior partner of capital. It will fight over signs while the owners divide returns. This is the grim lesson of a generation of campus politics. It is also, for Reed, the explanation for the ease with which corporate America adopted the language of anti racism during the last decade while resisting unionisation and public provision. The language that speaks in the idiom of innocence can be fused with a brand. The language that speaks in the idiom of provision cannot.
Take the quarrel over speech in universities. The new puritanism wants rooms in which the wrong names and the wrong sentences are excluded by rule. The threshold condition for membership is fluency in a code that refuses ambiguity. Reed sees this as the end of enquiry. He also sees it as a transfer of power to administrators who can adjudicate the code, and to consultants who can monetise it. The old dream of a university as a place where thinking can carry the discomfort of truth is dissolved into a managed space for reputations. Reed does not romanticise seminar rooms. He says plainly that academic due process and union protection are the real achievements that make thought possible. He has little patience for the idea that a climate of continuous confession will produce knowledge. It produces fatigue and theatre. That judgement aligns with a view of language at the limit in which stammers and pauses mark seriousness rather than sin.
The new puritanism imagines that it can manage danger away by procedure. Reed argues that danger belongs to social life and that the attempt to purge it by verdict creates ersatz sacreds that can be deployed against anyone who does not serve the brand. He has watched how corporate boards adopt the rhetoric of risk and safety to override faculty governance and to shift control from organised labour to consulting firms. He has watched how student politics echo the same moves in miniature, replacing organisation with tribunals, and solidarity with watchfulness. The convergence is not a metaphor for him. It is the political economy of an educated class whose careers are entwined with the management of affect and reputation rather than with the transformation of production and provision.
The implication is that anti racism worth the name must be willing to refuse the pleasures of the ledger. It must be willing to speak of problems in terms of institutional design, budgets, and law, not only in terms of sincere speech and cleansing rites. It must treat racial inequality as a pattern reproduced by policy and markets rather than as a cosmic stain to be performed away. Reed’s insistence on universal goods is not a trick to erase race. It is a recognition that the forms of life that bind without ownership resemble universal provision rather than boutique recognition. When a hospital is free at point of use, the relation among patients does not depend on avowal or proof. When schools are funded on a common basis, the we of a district is less available to be carved into client lists. That is Reed’s analogy to a community that does not make itself by excluding a stain but by bearing a common exposure.
Critics often accuse Reed of class reductionism. Reed answers that the accusation misstates the object. The point is not that race is illusory. The point is that a politics that halts with race will be captured by elites for whom race management is a career. He points to the long history of Black politicians who rose by fusing uplift moralism with deals that left working people behind, and to the present habit of substituting diversity in elite spaces for decommodification in ordinary life. He calls this a politics of position and performance. He ridicules the fantasy of a non essentialist racial essentialism, a phrase he uses to mark the contradiction at the core of a certain liberal and left anti racism that claims to refuse essence while treating a name as destiny. In his view the contradiction is not an accident. It is the bloated self-contradictory metaphysics required by an administrative moralism that must anchor itself somewhere once it has given up on institutions.
One can trace the same divide in his writing on fascism and scapegoating. Reed has argued that fascist politics deploy race as a way to organise ressentiment while promising to protect a threatened people. He has also argued that certain anti racist formations accept the terms of this deployment by treating race as the immovable axis of political identity. They fight over the sign while leaving the relation intact. He would have an anti fascism that refuses both terms and that rebuilds solidarity where production and life meet. In that sense his anti racism is also an anti scapegoating politics. It refuses to treat a person as the bearer of a stain that can be removed to save the group. It directs attention to the structure that needs changing.
Reed’s theoretical commitments carry practical names. He admires labour politics that deliver material security. He works with institutions like the Debs Jones Douglass Institute that organise for public health care. He writes in venues like Nonsite that give space to sustained argument rather than to timed outrage. He debates in Dissent and journals of labour studies where the question of how to win is not subordinate to the pleasure of moral rightness. He is an unembarrassed social democrat in a time when the word has been either forgotten or turned into lifestyle branding. His preferred allies are organisers, nurses, teachers, and municipal workers. His typical enemy in print is the broker of virtue who meets with donors, issues statements, and turns every fight into a contest of reputations.
A striking feature of Reed’s tone is that he does not flatter audiences with tales of innocence lost and found. He speaks as if we are all implicated and all responsible. That tone is scandalous to a new puritanism that seeks to stand above the muck by proving it has no contact with it. For Reed, the refusal of innocence is the condition of politics. It is only because we are entangled that we can act together. The dream of separation from stain is the road to cruelty. He would say that both the far right and the puritan left are tempted by that dream. Both promise to make the room safe by driving out the impure. Both are at once millenarian and managerial. Both thrive in settings where surplus is hoarded as content and where the work of building institutions is treated as a secondary matter.To name specific figures is to see the contrast in colour. Ta Nehisi Coates represents for Reed the high point of a moral narrative of identity that won prestige in elite spaces at the very moment when the institutions of egalitarian provision were in retreat. Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo represent the training industry that instructs people to account for themselves in affective registers while leaving ownership and bargaining power untouched. Reed’s counter current has found allies in Walter Benn Michaels and in the work of Touré F Reed who pursues similar arguments about class, labour markets, and the making of racial inequality. It also resonates with projects like Medicare for All that draw together diverse constituencies around goods that relieve ordinary fear. The point of listing these names is not to settle scores. It is to trace two incompatible theories of the world. One treats identity as the hinge and procedure as salvation. The other treats institutions and shared exposure as the ground of a common life.
The tension between online anti racism and Reed’s current of thought is sharpened by the way platforms reward denunciation. The new puritanism is a perfect match for the feed because both require constant content. Reed’s writing is impatient with content. He wants outcomes. He wants a public sphere where the slow sediment of decision replaces the quick burn of outrage. He is a partisan of boredom where boredom means the patient ordering of life by rules that deliver goods. This taste marks him as an enemy to a style of politics that must always be dramatic in order to survive. Reed would not sanitise the world. He would give people a chance to live within it with less fear and less domination.
A final contrast rests on how each side understands the sacred. The new puritanism treats certain words and positions as untouchable and reacts to laughter as betrayal. It makes a shrine of injury and guards it with administrators. Reed treats the sacred, if the term is to mean anything, as the dignity of ordinary life secured by material means. He refuses to turn sorrow into a shrine because he knows that shrines can be used to extract obedience. He is suspicious of rituals without redistribution. He is suspicious of catharsis masquerading as policy. He is for public things over private theologies. It is a harsh standard. It is also freeing. It returns politics to earth.
When Reed denies the anti racist new puritans their claim to define anti racism, he is not asking that race be forgotten or that history be rewritten. He is demanding that our account of racism match the reality of capitalist society and that our remedies be equal to the job. He is demanding that we stop policing one another’s souls and start changing the terms of life. He is demanding a discipline of thought that can bear ambiguity, a discipline that knows language fails at the edge and that still insists on clarity about programmes and power. He is demanding that we abandon the comfort of innocence and choose responsibility. These demands align him with a philosophy that rejects administrative moralism for a community that is kept by practices of attention and by the choice to spend the surplus of life on forms that do not require sacrifice.
Reed’s anti racism is hard because it refuses the brilliance of the theatre. It asks people to align with strangers around public goods. It asks people to accept that there will be no final absolution. It asks that we stop counting moral credits and start counting hospitals, schools, transit, wages, and hours. It asks that we read the history of Black politics as a history of work and institutions rather than as a passion play. It asks that we stop rewarding those who turn injury into a product and that we start listening to those whose lives are changed by a clinic that does not ask for money at the door. It is the opposite of cynicism. It is also the opposite of purity. It is a wager that a we can exist without property claims to the soul.
One can reject this wager. Many do. They say that without puritan vigilance the old harms will return. They say that without perpetual confession we will drift into denial. Reed answers that puritan vigilance is already a denial. It denies how power works. It denies how people live. It denies the possibility of solidarity beyond ritual. He would rather lose a news cycle and win a contract. He would rather endure a clumsy sentence in a room that can think than enjoy a pure silence in a room that cannot. He would rather honour the vigil that keeps company with what cannot be owned than preside over a clean house that has no air.
Seen from this angle Reed is not a contrarian with a taste for provocation. He is a political thinker of a familiar old left kind who asks that we turn feeling into organisation and that we see identity as a real thing that cannot carry the whole weight of political judgement. He stands in a line that runs through labour republicanism, municipal socialism, and the socialist wing of the civil rights movement. He has little patience for adornments that pretend to be power. He has even less patience for the new puritan priests who perform innocence while securing their place as brokers. He is a friend to those who still believe that public goods can knit a common life. He is a critic of those who turn anti racism into a currency. He is an ally of anyone who will trade theatre for wages.
If the choice in our moment is between an administrative moralism that patrols speech and curates identity, and a politics that binds by provision and by shared exposure to the limits of life, Reed’s answer is given. He denies the puritan claim to define anti racism because he knows it leads to management, not emancipation. He makes the harder claim that an anti racism worthy of its name must refuse the ledger and the shrine and must build a world in which fewer people are forced to live with dread. The refusal is not sentimental. It is a discipline. It is a refusal to turn the other into property. It is a refusal to hoard surplus outrage as content. It is a refusal to name purity as the goal. It is, finally, a commitment to a kind of community that will not appear under a spotlight. It appears in rooms where people work together without extracting promises of the soul, in clinics where the bill is zero, in schools where the budget is a promise kept, in unions where a member is a neighbour. To that community Reed gives a name that is older than the industry and newer than the feed. He calls it politics.