Talkin' 'Bout Back in the Day

Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era By Adolph Reed Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999

STIRRINGS IN THE JUG: BLACK POLITICS IN THE POST-SEGREGATION ERA recapitulates the development of black "structural" politics over the course of the last fifty years in order to mark the failures and successes of black leadership in sustaining demands for equal citizenship and civil rights. To be sure, it is a study that offers so very much: a restructuring of the political history and debates from the southern protest movements of the 1950s to the "black revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s to the steady deterioration of radical black politics throughout the 1980s; a critical engagement with social policy discourse concerning the "underclass" in order to expose the mythologizing science of policy "underdevelopment" in urban America; an honest rereading of the uncritical evaluation and embrace of Malcolm X as commercial icon during the 1980s and early 1990s; and finally, a reconceptualization of black political activity that will realize the "gains of the 60s" whereby "black people, as individuals and as groups, organize, form alliances, and enter coalitions freely on the basis of mutually constituted interests, crisscrossing racial boundaries as they find it pragmatically appropriate" (50).

Adolph Reed is a political scientist with great critical precision. That he is a DuBoisian-inspired integrationist with the praiseworthy objective of "rejuvenating a popularly based left activism" (2) tempts me to cut Stirrings in the Jug some slack. But the issue of structural politics in the black community over the last fifty years and, more importantly, the reconceptualization of black political activity in the present historical moment is too important a concern, too vital a project for any of us to take lightly.

The trouble begins with Reed's explicit assumptions about cultural politics. Invoking the emergence of hip-hop culture of the 1980s, Reed dismisses its political agency arguing that it "has once again blurred the lines between ideology and style, political action and consumer preference" (206). Reed asserts:

The influence of a "cultural politics" discourse—an outgrowth of the structuralist and poststructuralist trends in radical social theorizing—denies the possibility of a problem in this regard by defining identification with a "taste community" as intrinsically political behavior, of equal status with purposive contests over state action. (206)

Following Reed's logic, black cultural politics have functioned as an increasingly "depoliticized" and consumer-driven surrogate in the absence of more "purposive contests over state action" [i.e., structural politics]. Yet here and throughout, Reed cannot offer any substantive blueprint for political mobilization today (however, he undoubtedly arms us to understand the political shortcomings of previous generations). Still, for all his critique about the importance of sustained political mobilization, his analysis devalues, and misses at times, the active political character in black popular culture and black cultural practices. My sense is that this has something to do with Reed's professional training (political science) and the apparent privileging of structural determinants over the messy and oftentimes contradictory messages voiced in both identity and cultural politics in the black community.

Consider Reed's concluding chapter, "The Allure of Malcolm X and the Changing Character of Black Politics." In many ways, this final section is brilliant in its pointing to the uncritical "rediscovery" of Malcolm X through, namely, Spike Lee's marketing campaign in a number of his popular films (School Daze,Do the Right Thing and, of course, X, come immediately to mind). According to Reed, this emergence of Malcolm as heroic icon has become emblematic of the ways in which an entire generation of young people is disconnected from the historical realities surrounding not only his life, but the entire breadth of political struggle and activist engagement throughout the 1960s. All of this, he says, took place at the same time that black political elites were stripped of their conventional access to insider negotiation during the Reagan administration of...