WOLFF: So, tell me. Let me jump a little bit because I know it's in the minds of my audience.
How do you see the resurgence of white supremacy into the headlines of our society,
into the consciousness? Why is this happening when so many believed, rightly or wrongly, that somehow
that was behind us? Can you help us? How do you understand that?
REED JR.: Well, I try right? I was going to say I can help. Yeah, I can help you at the same time I
try to help myself. So, I taught for a long time a grad seminar in 20th century race theory, and
after the first four or five weeks the graduate students found themselves getting really depressed
because they came to realize that sort of wiggish narrative of progress didn't quite quite work.
And they came to recognize that the commitments to inegalitarian ideologies aren't based on evidence.
They're ontological. So, what happens is when one narrative of naturalized inequality gets defeated,
then it doesn't go away. But what happens is those people who are committed to
to a belief that there are essential, meaningful differences among subsections of
homo sapiens will just say to themselves, "Well, I know it's true, but we just don't
have the evidence yet to demonstrate it." So then, when somebody discovers
genes then they all get happy and say "Aha, so now I can get the evidence." So, white supremacy
is an ideology. When we were both living in southern Connecticut in the early 80s, the clan
marched in Meriden. My colleagues were going nuts about this and asked me what this meant. I said,
"Well look. In the first place, the Klan in Meriden is a bunch of alienated, disaffected,
washed-out-of-the-working-class people." They were mainly youngsters, but with the first wave of what
deindustrialization was going to look like. From 1868 to 1970, the operative question was-
it was in the South at least, and of course in the 20s, the claim was something different anyway-
but was in the South at least whether it was more significant that the Klan was the above
or the underground wing of the Democratic Party or that the democratic party was the
above ground wing of the Klan. So, there's a powerful political and social institution.
White supremacy as an ideology has been around since race was invented basically or
at least since the 19th century. And it's there as a set of scapegoating discourses. Frankly, I blame
the rise of white supremacy, or resurgence if you want to call it that, of white supremacy as
much on the neo-liberalized Democratic party as I do on the right. My good friend Anthony Mazzocchi
often said that neo-liberalism can't satisfy people's needs and concerns and anxieties.
The farther along it goes, the more and more people who who are going to be
tossed onto the ash heap. And if we aren't there to provide them with
plausible explanations of what's messing their lives up and at least the outline of
a plausible scenic seeming road map about how to make things better, than these right-wing
forces that have always been there doing the same same thing, offering the same set of bromides,
and snake oil, and of scapegoating, are going to be there to take advantage of it.
I've argued this too. I think you have as well, that we may have gotten to a point at which
the equivalent of a T intersection, at which neoliberalism has exhausted its capacities for
delivering enough to to enough of the population to maintain its legitimacy as a political system.
And if that's happened, then there are only two ways to go, like at the T intersection.
One is to the right, and that's authoritarianism of fascism, and yeah, I don't like the...
I also understand that academics like to quibble about when authoritarianism becomes
fascism or whatever. And my view is that when the question arises, it's beyond time
to think about taxonomizing it. All you need to do is figure out how to fight it. But the other
direction is in our direction basically. And the big punch line is like with everything else
that what we need is to figure out how to start generating a movement anchored in a working class
that can restore popular faith in public action, public life, public goods.