Interview With Professor Adolph Reed

Katie Halper: How do you define racism?

Reed: Well, that’s a question!

One of the interesting things I think that we’ve experienced over the last half century or so, and our reasons for this too and get into maybe, or maybe not maybe later, that racism as a category has expanded. The currency of what counts as racism has inflated like the Deutschmark in the late 1920s. So anything can be racist, and racism becomes the sole explanation, or sole explanatory category, for making sense of any inequality or seemingly inappropriate or unjustifiable inequality that involves black people or other non whites in any way. So, for instance, there was an advisee of mine, who in her first year, in the PhD program, was in my grad seminar on Black American political thought.

She was leading discussions around readings between the mid thirties and end of the forties. And it was all new stuff to her, but her first comment was that she was surprised genuinely to see that nobody that she read talked about struggling against racism. Everybody talked about much more concrete stuff, programs that they were for programs that were against policies, they were for positive they were against. And I said, “Yeah, well that didn’t happen until after the victories of the social movements of the sixties.”

Lord knows, this is what post-war racial liberalism in the U.S. was all about. So you struggle against racism, which is part of the struggle against prejudice, part of the struggle against intolerance, bigotry and so forth and so on. What recedes from view is essential problems of economic inequality like employment inequality, housing inequality, et cetera.