Adolph L. Reed Jr. facts for kids

Adolph Leonard Reed Jr. (born January 14, 1947) 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. He is a contributing editor to The New Republic and has been a frequent contributor to The Progressive, The Nation, and other left-wing publications. He is a founding member of the U.S. Labor Party.

Biography

Born in the Bronx, New York, Reed was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. In the late 1960s, he organized protests involving poor black people and antiwar soldiers.

He received his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971 and his PhD from Atlanta University in 1981. During his doctoral studies, he worked as an advisor to Maynard Jackson, Atlanta's first black mayor.

Views

Reed's work on U.S. politics is notable for its critique of identity politics and anti-racism, particularly of their role in black politics. Reed has been a vocal critic of the policies and ideology of black Democratic politicians. For instance, he often criticized the politics of Barack Obama, both before and during his presidency.

In an article in The Village Voice published on January 16, 1996, Reed said of Obama:

In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn't been up to the challenge. We have to do better.

After South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley announced that African American Republican Tim Scott would be named to the soon-to-be-open U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina, held by Jim DeMint on December 17, 2012, Reed, in an op-ed published in the December 18, 2012 edition of The New York Times, stated: "It obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress." Reed's editorial has been criticized by conservatives who argue that Reed applies the term "token" to any African American who holds conservative views and posited a correlation between Reed's conviction that GOP policies do not reflect mainstream black politics to a belief that the tokenism charge does not apply when the African-American politician is a member of the Democratic Party.

Reed supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.