Adolph Reed’s 1996 assessment of Obama
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Sid Shniad
May 13, 2016, 3:07:38 PM5/13/16
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Adolph Reed’s 1996 assessment of Obama, shortly after the latter won his
first Illinois state senate race:
“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.”
“The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996—reprinted in
Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
(New Press, 2000)
Adolph Reed’s 1996 assessment of Obama, shortly after the latter won his
first Illinois state senate race:
“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.”
“The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996—reprinted in
Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
(New Press, 2000)
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