First, Jim Crow should not be taken as a less formative experience than slavery. He is speaking directly to the errors of today, which threaten to calcify the reality of the past into doctrinaire historical misunderstandings.

Drawing on his lived experiences growing up in the segregated South, Reed seeks to delineate exactly what Jim Crow was and wasn’t. This isn’t so much a memoir as it is a historical mediation. He has seen how the evaluations of this era are beginning to play out, and he felt that a precise intervention was necessary. The book is motivated, in part, by his perception that his “age cohort, those born in the first decade or so of the postwar baby boom, very soon will be the last living Americans with direct knowledge and recollections of the Jim Crow era.” Reed is dealing with the fate of anyone blessed/cursed to live long enough: to see their own lives become the subject of historiographical debates, political appropriations, and excessive analogizing. In The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives he takes on a much more urgent role: an elder. has had a distinguished career as an academic, political scientist, and activist. The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives by Adolph L. The dominant elites can happily satisfy such pleas token egalitarianism is no threat at all.We need to realize how important class is in order to understand how inequality can rise as Confederate monuments fall. That's the Clinton trick: to accept pleas for group representation or 'access' while repudiating demands for an issue-based program. The simplistic belief that any credible member of a group can automatically represent that group's interest feeds a tendency to reduce political objectives to a plea for group representation on decision-making bodies or in other councils of power. Embarrassingly, people like Maya Angelou and Catherine MacKinnon initially cut Thomas slack based on the silly belief that because he's black and once was poor, putting him on the supreme court would turn out OK. This leads to two related beliefs that are wrong-headed and politically counterproductive: that only a group member can know or articulate the interests of the group, and that any group member can do so automatically by virtue of his or her identity.Ĭlarence Thomas should have been evidence enough to invalidate the premise linking group membership and perspective.

These derive from the faulty premise that membership in a group gives access to shared perspective and an intuitive understanding of the group's collective interests. “At bottom, identity politics rests on problematic ideas of political authenticity and representation.

The South by Adolph L. Reed Jr.