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Response

The Post-1965 Trajectory of Race, Class, and Urban Politics in the United States Reconsidered

Adolph Reed Jr.1

Abstract Comments by Larry Bennett, Cynthia Horan, Cedric Johnson, and Timothy Weaver prompted me to reflect on and connect my work on race ideology, the underclass idea, class dynamics in American politics, and the evolution of urban governance and the terms of black political incorporation since the 1990s. Race is best understood as a particular instance of a class of ideologies that work to justify existing hierarchies by reading them into nature. Understanding race in that way helps to see the notion of an urban underclass as also an ideology that seeks to naturalize hierarchy by attributing it to a population defined by durable cultural and behavioral defects, which make it impervious to social intervention. Proliferation of underclass ideology has rationalized retreat from social provision and underwritten a punitive turn in social policy. It has also articulated with the class dynamics driving black politics to generate a basis for an urban neoliberalism steered by an increasingly interracial or biracial governing class committed to diversity and market-driven social policy. New Orleans provides a useful case examination of these dynamics, both through reconsideration of the character of racial transition in local politics in the 1970s and 1980s and through analysis of the forces shaping the post-Katrina political regime. New Orleans’s political development, pre- and post-Katrina, exposes the inadequacy, indeed the class character, of a critical politics based on antiracism as a frame of reference for pursuit of egalitarian interests. More hopeful signs lie in emergence of a strong labor voice in the city.

Keywords race, class, political economy, underclass, black urban regime, post-Katrina New Orleans

1University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Corresponding Author: Adolph Reed Jr., Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, 3440 Market St., Suite 300, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. Email: alreed2@earthlink.net

655674LSJXXX10.1177/0160449X16655674Labor Studies JournalReed research-article2016

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First of all, I want to thank David Imbroscio for organizing the Urban Affairs Association panel that led to this symposium, Margaret Wilder and the Urban Affairs Association for supporting the panel so enthusiastically, and Bruce Nissen for having proposed the symposium for Labor Studies Journal. I am deeply gratified and honored by their interest and encouragement (Nissen and Imbroscio 2016). Most of all, I want to thank my longtime friends, colleagues, and collaborators Larry Bennett (2016), Cynthia Horan (2016), Cedric Johnson (2016b), and Tim Weaver (2016b) for having readily agreed to participate first on the panel and then in this symposium, and espe- cially for their empathetic and careful readings of my work and the challenges they identify in and for it. I trust they all recognize the extent to which their work has enriched mine over the years, and I hope my response will prove worthy of their efforts.

One thread uniting the several comments is the relation between race and class and its political significance. Weaver and Horan characterize my views about that relation clearly and accurately. In doing so, as well as in the provocations that follow from their considerations, they encourage me to probe more deeply into how those views inform my approach to other topics highlighted in these comments regarding the role of race in urban politics, and how we should understand the evolution of black urban gover- nance, especially the transformation or transcendence of the “black urban regime.”

A crucial first step is recognition that race is a historical phenomenon, which helps to situate it as a particular sort of ideology emerging from and legitimizing a specific pattern of social relations, as what historian Kathleen Brown (1996, 110) describes as a “technology of power.”. The idea that our species is made up of large, taxonomically distinct, natural groupings that occur between the level of local breeding populations and the species as a whole—that is, “races”—took shape gradually over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The notion of race that is now the dominant folk understand- ing in the West congealed only over the second half of the nineteenth century, in the context of an evolving social order characterized by slavery and plantation economy, imperialist expansion, emergence of a new petite bourgeoisie given to scientistic and managerialist (and thus taxonomic) fetishism, postbellum southern and other fin-de- siècle elites’ anxieties about encroachment or displacement by socially inferior Others, and upper classes’ common sense presumptions that they justifiably sit atop the natural order of things (Marks 1995, 2002; A. Reed 2005a). Seen as the product of that environ- ment, it is also easier to understand race, or racism, as not sui generis, as it is typically treated in the discourse of post–World War II racial liberalism that remains, if not hege- monic, at least the default frame of reference for discussing race.

Despite seeming to indicate moral urgency, standard liberal formulations that char- acterize racism as, for example, America’s “original sin” or “national disease” dehisto- ricize race/racism (racism as an ideological program is the sole condition of existence for race, a purely idealist construction, as a taxonomy of human difference) and thereby ontologize it as a phenomenon that exists apart from and logically prior to given pat- terns of social relations. Morally satisfying as such assessments apparently are to those making them, they do not help us comprehend the actual role race plays and has played in grounding and reproducing systemic inequalities. Nor do they suggest clear strategic

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directions for remedying those inequalities beyond antidiscrimination legislation, which is necessary but not sufficient, and what amount to not much more than calls for renunciation, public atonement, and expiation. In the name of denouncing racism, lib- eral antiracists thus reproduce a key premise of racialist thinking, that is, that racism is a transhistorical force that exerts an autonomous power over social relations.1

Once historicized, however, race can be seen more clearly as a species of a genus of ideologies of hierarchy based on ascription, that is, based on what one is alleged to be rather than what one does. Gender is another such ideology, and there are still oth- ers that have at one time or another underwritten hierarchies of wealth and power by providing a common sense view that they derive from and reflect different popula- tions’ “natural” talents, abilities, limitations, and standing in the society. Early in the twentieth century, for example, the feebleminded and habitual criminals were widely treated as race-like populations, and sexual predators arguably are approaching that status today (A. Reed 2010, 260). Such ideologies

emerge from self-interested common sense as folk knowledge: they are “known” to be true unreflectively because they seem to comport with the evidence of quotidian experience. They are likely to become generally assumed as self-evident truth, imposed by law and custom, when they converge with the interests of powerful strata in the society. (A. Reed 2013, 49)

Regarding race in particular, social theorist Harry Chang argued astutely in the 1970s that the notion emerged as a “social condition of production” and has been an active node in a dynamic of capitalist social reproduction in which “social types (instead of persons) figure as basic units of economic and political management.” To that extent, racial formation has always been an element of class formation, albeit one that expressly obscures that relation. In describing race as a “function- turned-into-an-object,” Chang analogized its role in capitalist reproduction to Marx’s argument regarding the fetish character of money. In Chang’s view, as money is the “reification of a relation called value,” race is a reification of a relation of hierarchy rooted in the capitalist division of labor (Liem and Montague 1985, 38-43; A. Reed 2013, 51).

Seeing race as a subset of a larger class of taxonomies of supposedly natural hier- archies also has implications for making sense of ideological categories like the “urban underclass.” Taxonomies of ascriptive hierarchy work most effectively to the extent that they are broadly accepted as true without reflection or argument, as an unproblem- atic common sense. In the United States, race and gender are the most publicly recog- nizable of such hierarchies, partly because of the success of the social and political movements that have challenged them. The victories of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have demystified race and gender as discourses of naturalized hier- archy by undermining their material and institutional foundations—for example, through adoption and enforcement of antidiscrimination law—and contesting their commonsensical character. Moreover, the historical circumstances within which the race notion emerged and took shape as hegemonic common sense no longer pertain.

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Effects, legacies, and residues of those regimes of hierarchy certainly persist. And more than enough people operate, as likely as not unreflectively, with the circular and self-reinforcing common sense folk notions that apprehend manifest racial and gen- dered inequalities as, if not “natural,” at least an unquestioned normal. Nevertheless, “practically no one—even among apologists for those patterned inequalities—openly admits to espousing racism or sexism.” As I have argued, it is noteworthy that Glenn Beck, no matter how disingenuously, claimed the mantle of Martin Luther King Jr. and denounced President Obama as a racist and that Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Ann Coulter have attacked Democrats as sexist. Their doing so underscores the extent to which racism and sexism—however thinly understood—are negatively sanctioned in con- temporary American public life and culture (A. Reed 2013, 49-50).2

By contrast, the imagery of an urban underclass emerged over the 1980s, coincident with the Reaganite attack on social provision for the indigent, as denoting a population whose persistent economic marginality is the result of its ascriptive characteristics that do not map identically or directly onto race or gender. The underclass is defined by putatively intractable behavior and values, not, or not yet at any rate, by biology. I have argued that the invention of the underclass and its normalization in quotidian as well as policy discourse as a supposedly real population provides a helpful window onto how race-like discourses of ascriptive differentiation take shape and their role in naturalizing patterns of inequality (A. Reed 1999, 179-96). The underclass works as a folk ideology in precisely the way that race and gender have worked: it is a just-so story that naturalizes existing patterns of inequality by attributing them to characteris- tics and limitations imputed to the population that the ascriptive narrative aggregates under the underclass label. Plainly put, journalists and commentators propagated the term as the marker of a supposedly new and distinctive population among the poor (never mind the narrative’s close similarity to the previous generation’s “culture of poverty”) that, because of the powerful inertia of its self-reproducing behavioral defects and self-defeating values, is beyond the reach of ameliorative social policy. Thus inspired, imaginative poverty and social policy researchers rummaged through their shared inventory of class prejudices and applied them to statistical categories carved out from aggregate census data and reified as “groups” to invent a population of utterly alien Others whose manifold, often entirely unrelated and mutually contra- dictory pathologies set them apart from and made them unknowable to the rest of American society, purely a problem population to be administered and incapable of respectable civic participation in and for themselves (A. Reed 1999, 182-87).3

The underclass notion has a matter-of-fact folk verisimilitude that racial justifica- tions of inequality no longer retain. Because it does not depend on the metaphor of gross phenotypic difference that grounds folk understandings of race, the underclass seems not to rest on racist arguments that are now stigmatized as atavistic. That fact marks both the progress of egalitarian interests and continuity in the deeper logic of which racialization is a historically discrete instance. I would in no way understate the significance of the victories of postwar antiracism. They have altered American politi- cal, social, intellectual, and cultural life radically for the better. At the same time, even the great egalitarian physical and cultural anthropologist Franz Boas and his allies

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challenged race only as a particular taxonomy of difference purported to have invidi- ous social entailments. Although many individuals did more or less consistently or incidentally extend the critique of racism to other ascriptive ideologies, neither the Boasians in general nor the forces that fought actively and courageously against racial segregation and discrimination advanced systematic challenges to the genus of ascrip- tively based hierarchies of which race is only a particular, though in the mid-twentieth- century United States a still particularly consequential, species. Indeed, in the main they either accepted or were ambivalent even about the status of “races” as given, somehow natural populations and objected emphatically only to claims to rank them hierarchically with respect to capacities and social worth.

The egalitarian victory, that is, was not so complete as it has seemed. What has been delegitimized is the ambiguously phenotypic narrative of race/racism as one historically specific “technology of power.” That victory was consolidated in the postwar years on terms that displaced “race” for “culture” and racial supremacy for cultural pluralism. Walter Benn Michaels (1992, 1997) has shown that among American intellectuals, already in the 1920s and 1930s, culture and cultural pluralism had begun to supplant race as a discourse of essential human difference. Cultural pluralism, he argues, turns culture into race by reifying “cultures” as essences definitive of groups, and he notes that the shift from race to culture presented the latter as the functional equivalent of the former but shorn of “the embarrassments of blood” (Michaels 1997, 13).

I have argued elsewhere as well that proponents of inegalitarian political programs in the postwar years increasingly gravitated to culturalist justifications, as culture also absorbed and reconstituted class on terms that characterized systemic inequalities as reflecting natural populations’ essential differences in values, attitudes, and behavior that lay beyond the scope of remediation through redistributive policies (A. Reed 2005b). It is noteworthy in this context that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who for nearly three decades, beginning with his 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, had been raising with increasing shrillness the specter of the impend- ing irreversibility of inner-city poor people’s essential cultural difference from main- stream values and behavior—a trope reminiscent of late nineteenth-century rhetoric of “unassimilability”—declared in his 1994 Senate Committee on Finance hearings on welfare reform, “If you were a biologist you could find yourself talking about specia- tion here” (Work and Responsibility Act of 1994, 12).4

From this perspective, the underclass condenses an ascriptive ideology more perti- nent to and functional in our historical moment than race or gender. Consider that the underclass can be

(1) understood as a discretely marked, degraded, and self-reproducing population in the ways that are now associated with undesirable and stigmatized racial groups, defined by essentializing narratives that hover opportunistically between biology and biology dressed up as culture; (2) by our current folk norms, multiracial in composition, albeit most likely including in perceptibly greater frequencies than the general population people who would be classified as black and Latino “racially,” though as small enough pluralities to preclude assimilating the group ideologically as a simple proxy for nonwhite

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inferiors; and (3) separated in comparatively unambiguous ways rhetorically and perhaps even in quotidian recognition and the everyday public/private exercise of arbitrary police power from the larger populations that remain understood “racially” as black and Latino but have become normalized, perhaps on a model, mutatis mutandis, of the civic incorporation of those populations that became white “ethnics.” (A. Reed 2010, 261)

Seen in that way, the underclass as a discourse of naturalized hierarchy is an equiv- alent of race but avoids the negative sanctions that now attach to claims that explain inequality in racial terms and the contestation such claims automatically elicit. Thus, the tendency to center debate about underclass discourse on arguments as to whether or not it is racist or sexist misses the point. Its persuasive power derives from, in addi- tion to its embrace by the governing class and the latter’s propaganda apparatus in the newsfotainment industry and universities, the fact that it is not exactly reducible to race or gender but does the same work of naturalizing extant inequalities that those two taxonomies of naturalized hierarchy have done in the past. The tendency to chal- lenge underclass ideology on those grounds is ultimately an obsolete reflex, a vestige of an earlier moment of political struggle and debate. We might ask why responding to it in those terms continues to appeal. To some extent, it is a matter of habit. However, I will argue below that the tendency reveals something about the class commitments that ground contemporary black and antiracist politics.

This is a problem that has very concrete implications, as the failure of challenges to intensified inequality in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the terms of recovery in New Orleans throws into bold relief. As Horan observes, I have argued that underclass discourse has been a significant element in mobilizing and legitimizing a political alli- ance in post–Katrina New Orleans that simultaneously includes blacks as stakeholders and excludes poor people (A. Reed 2010, 262-67; 2005c, 2006a, 2006b, 2008; A. Reed and Steinberg 2006). Practically before the city was drained of floodwaters, policy makers and opinion leaders focused with increasing single-mindedness on razing low- income public housing projects and replacing them, under the aegis of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI program, with nominally “mixed-income” housing developments. It might have seemed odd, if not perverse, that destruction of public housing became such a priority at the moment when the city was in the throes of its worst affordable housing crisis. In fact, significant material and political interests converged around the dominant underclass ideology to make elimina- tion of public housing a central point of broad political agreement.

Development elites had been pressing for decades to raze some housing projects, in particular those like the St. Thomas project, adjacent to the trendy Coliseum Square and Lower Garden District areas, and the Iberville project abutting the Vieux Carré.5 The trope of “getting rid of public housing” resonated well with those whites in the city and elsewhere who fantasized about Katrina’s “silver lining.” Alphonso Jackson, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former character witness for Clarence Thomas, was anxious to make an ideological point in demolish- ing publicly provided housing for the poor, and he also reportedly was committed to awarding the demolition contract to a crony in Atlanta. The ecological narratives about

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poverty and social pathology resurrected in underclass ideology had long since implanted as common sense knowledge the conviction that public housing “breeds” criminality and other pathologies, as well as—incongruously, as being very poor already was an eligibility requirement for occupancy in public housing—poverty itself. To wit, on September 15, 2005, nine days after the Army Corps of Engineers finally patched the levees and began the weeks to months long process of draining the flooded city and restoring the power grid (e.g., my mother did not receive official clearance even to enter her neighborhood to survey conditions until October 18), a national group of prominent, by and large impeccably credentialed liberal social sci- entists and policy researchers issued a statement, under the Orwellian title “Moving to Opportunity in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina,” calling for the Bush administration to take advantage of the opportunity to “deconcentrate” poverty along the Gulf Coast.6

That initiative underscored how natural it had become to represent displacement as an antipoverty strategy, even in the wake of a horrible disaster. Locally, Pres Kabacoff, claiming to have been moved by reading William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, asserted in December, 2006, during the most intense period in the fight to preserve the remaining public housing projects slated for demolition, that his commitment to razing the St. Thomas project had been motivated by concern to attack “concentrated poverty” as well as by concern to pursue rent-intensifying redevelop- ment. Kabacoff’s claim, in conjunction with the “Moving to Opportunity in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina” statement, highlights the insidious ideological role of what David Imbroscio characterizes as the “dispersal consensus” among social policy scholars, as well as the disingenuousness of their complaints about criticisms of that role (Briggs 2008; Goering and Feins 2008; Imbroscio 2008a, 2008b; Kabacoff 2006).7

As activists who attempted to fight against closure and demolition learned, that combination of material interest and ideology militated powerfully against formation of a potentially effective alliance to preserve public housing, even among working- class black New Orleanians who were most likely to support calls for a general right to return and most likely to have had personal, often familial, connections to public housing residents. Activists’ inability even to slow down demolition reflects how thor- oughly hegemonic underclass ideology has become. The common sense “knowledge” that low-income public housing is a breeding ground for a pathological underclass sufficiently permeates everyday black middle and working-class understanding that it can override and reinterpret contrary personal experience.

The stigma that attaches to the underclass notion as denoting a disreputable popula- tion is bipartisan and spans the ideological spectrum. No one identifies as belonging to the underclass; it is purely a pejorative label and one applied only in the third person. So rank-and-file black citizens were primed, in line with the ecological view of low- income housing projects as sources of pathology, to accept, however ambivalently, the prevailing view of displacement as an antipoverty strategy because it has been articu- lated by opinion-shaping elites constantly and authoritatively as known truth. The ideo- logical environment also exerted more or less subtle pressure to distinguish oneself from that black underclass. The opposition’s rhetoric tended to denounce the demoli- tion plans as racial injustice, but the fluid and ambiguous character of the underclass’s

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racialization may have reinforced working- and middle-class blacks’ inclinations to differentiate themselves from the all but universally stigmatized population.8

That effect was compounded by the circumstance that at the same time Mayor Nagin and other elites addressed black New Orleanians’ concerns about being excluded from recovery by stressing homeownership as the key basis for exercising recognized civic voice in shaping the recovery process. The initial groundswell of protests about exclusion and denial of the right to return tended to refer interchangeably to black people and poor people as the targets of ruling elites’ intentions. Nagin offered public reassurances—more aggressively as he recognized that he would no longer be the favored candidate among white voters in his reelection bid and therefore needed to build black turnout—that all neighborhoods in the city would be rebuilt on an equal basis. Quickly, homeowners were established in official hearing and planning pro- cesses as the legitimate voices of neighborhoods. Black homeowners thus were defined as stakeholders, and renters of whatever sort were defined as not. To the extent that community equaled neighborhood and neighborhood equaled homeownership, it was not anomalous that anointed and aspirant custodians of neighborhood interests in largely black middle-class areas in Gentilly and New Orleans East mobilized like their white counterparts to protect their neighborhoods from being slated for location of more than what they contended was their “fair share” of rental complexes. Thus, black New Orleanians, no less than others, participated in generating a dynamic that institu- tionalized homeowner populism as the foundation of effective civic membership.

Two features in particular stand out about this development. First, in assigning quasi-official status to homeownership in planning and decision-making processes, it evoked a reassertion on neoliberal terms of eighteenth-century notions of property- based citizenship rights. Second, in incorporating blacks into the universe of home- owners on an officially equivalent basis9 with others, this new policy regime disrupts what has become a standard antiracist critique of homeowner populism that focuses on its origins in intensely racialized residential real estate markets and federal hous- ing policy’s role in sustaining them. Homeowner populism has been rightly under- stood as linked to programs of racial exclusion. More deeply, however, it has always been a class program as well, an ideology that dissolves the working class into an amorphous and idealized middle class and propagates a primary political identity aligning workers as homeowners with more affluent property owners against per- ceived threats to property values and prerogatives.10 From the 1940s through 1970s, it seemed pertinent and politically effective to characterize as racist the low-tax polit- ical regime championed by homeowner groups because of both its effects in under- cutting spending for public goods identified with nonwhites and the rhetoric and normative commitments that propelled it, including defenses of residential segrega- tion. While racist characterizations and rhetoric of mobilization remain visible enough in homeowner populism, the post–Katrina New Orleans instance makes clear that a more complex set of factors is at play.11

The overwhelming tendency in the scholarly and hortatory literature to focus on racial disparities has contributed to obscuring these complexities. As an interpretive frame of reference and a strategic political discourse, the point of the focus on

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disparity and the politics of antiracism of which it is an expression is to affirm race’s persistence as a fundamental metric of inequality. This default rhetorical stance is illustrated in its many iterations of “just like Jim Crow” or “as if nothing has changed” tropes. But that perspective brushes past, and diminishes or denies the continuing evo- lution of regimes of hierarchy in the United States and the implications of the victories that postwar struggles for racial justice have won.12 A politics grounded on antiracism simply cannot accommodate interest differentiation among black people as genuine and instead can conceptualize it only as the machinations of “sellouts” or “mislead- ers.” As I have argued, and as Johnson (2016b) notes, that discourse posits racial authenticity—who really speaks for the “black community”—as a standard for politi- cal judgment that is a vestige of black power radicalism. That standard was inadequate then. It is worse than useless now as an analytical or programmatic tool in a contem- porary period whose objective political fault lines—those illuminated by application of Marx’s famous heuristic, “Cui bono?” to whose benefit?—do not reduce empiri- cally to a black/white axis. The colossal failure of opposition articulated in antiracist terms to have any impact at all against intensified privatization and marketization in post–Katrina New Orleans is, or should be, a powerful lesson to that effect.

That it was not possible to generate significant black popular or working-class sup- port for demands to preserve and restore decommodified public housing for poor peo- ple in New Orleans at the moment when debate was at its sharpest over justice and equity in government support for the efforts of all those displaced to return to the city and participate in its recovery is a testament to the reality that what we understand as black politics is thoroughly embedded within the neoliberal regime and its ways of seeing. That is also the lesson to take from the failure of opponents of charterization to prevent, or contest effectively, the complete destruction of public K-12 education in the city. That story is somewhat more complex than the public housing case. Opposition to charterization, though weak, has been recurrent in local politics while opposition to destruction of public housing never gained any traction, largely because the campaign to destroy public education was a more protracted struggle while the attack on public housing was a Blitzkrieg; the nature of the debate about educational quality and its measurement is intrinsically more susceptible to technicistic obfuscation, and despera- tion among parents whose children are most likely to be victimized by marketization encourages willingness to endure the equivalent of calling in an air strike on one’s own position. But the outcome was the same.

And the point is not simply that charterization’s foes were defeated; the deck was always stacked against them, given the weight of the class, ideological, and organiza- tional forces aligned on the other side. The imbalance of power was exacerbated almost immediately after the city’s devastation by the swift, peremptory and unilateral firing of 7,500 school employees, including 4,000 teachers, in Orleans Parish schools and the consequent debilitation of the local teachers union, the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO)/American Federation of Teachers, the main institutional force capable of mobilizing and sustaining opposition to marketization. The telling point is that, especially with UTNO reeling, critics and opponents of the charter school machine were never able to establish a secure node in local politics, a popular

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constituent base dependable and potent enough to challenge marketization other than episodically and symbolically as, in Mark Dudzic’s wonderful phrase, the “pageantry of protest.” Even those who perform the Kabuki role of black militants/radicals/popu- lists/community activists have been incapable of generating any political capacity or practical response to the juggernaut of marketization for what it is and have been capable only of rehearsing generic charges of racism, shopworn rituals of protest against exclusion, and demands for representation—which often amounts to seats on the gravy train—in the processes of social reorganization impelled by the logic of upward redistribution.

This has been the case with respect to contestation over the terms of recovery across the board, beginning from Nagin’s boast that the city’s recovery plan would be “mar- ket-driven.” The inclusion/exclusion axis has established debate on the relative distri- bution of costs and benefits within a logic of recovery taken largely as given, and assertion of racial group equity as the crucial normative standard accepts the larger dynamics of dispossession that have the greatest impact on poor and working-class black people. Even the terms of debate over “gentrification” characterize displacement for rent-intensifying redevelopment as a cultural issue folded into overarching narra- tives of aboriginality and (racial) authenticity. This orientation leads to demands for inclusion, often cast in pluralist terms as recognition, not redistribution, and distances the issue of displacement from the machinations of the publicly supported real estate market. It also reflects how the discourse of cultural authenticity and exceptionalism, which is a core component of the fetish system that drives and sustains the local politi- cal economy and culture of tourism, also grounds and circumscribes neoliberal moral economy in contemporary New Orleans. So, for example, the black actor Wendell Pierce and black business operative and former mayoral candidate Troy Henry have defined their fight with another development interest over disposition of a property on the cusp of trendy neighborhoods in terms pitting themselves as avatars of the aborigi- nal, authentic, and local (black) against (white) inauthentic hipsters and outsiders (Sayre 2015).13 Post–Katrina New Orleans thus illustrates strikingly how what we think of as black politics is embedded in a political common sense that is not merely compatible with urban neoliberalism but is a dynamic element in its institutional and organizational, as well as ideological, reproduction (Adams 2015b; Jay Arena 2015; French-Marcelin 2015a).

This reality makes Bennett’s and Johnson’s challenge to extrapolate from my argu- ment about the black urban regime to reflect on the current situation in black urban politics especially timely and important. As they point out, I articulated that account of the pattern of black urban governance that emerged over the 1970s and early 1980s as it was near its apogee. Revisiting that moment from the standpoint of nearly three decades of subsequent political development can be useful for making sense of both past and present.

I have thought for a while now that, if I were to alter my account of the black urban regime in any way, it would be to stress yet more the significance of the links between the emergent black political class during the mid-1960s to early 1980s and the avatars of newly ascendant Democratic progrowth liberalism—Democratic liberal political

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entrepreneurs and the corporate and development interests they served, as well as a reform-oriented nonprofit sector that mediated the relation among the elements of the germinal political alliance. Although I do discuss that relation in the original account, engagement with John Arena’s and Timothy Weaver’s work in particular, along with observation of the last two decades of black political development, has brought home to me more forcefully how fundamental that relation was in many cities, and in national politics, in defining the normative horizons and ideological orientations of the “new black politics,” including its common sense premises regarding racial representation and social justice (John Arena 2012; Weaver 2016a).14 The mutuality of that relation is especially significant because the black political class not only constituted itself within the governing framework of growth liberalism, as I argued; the emerging black func- tionary stratum’s pragmatic engagement with allies in the modernizing progrowth elite and its political operatives shaped the evolving articulation of the ensemble as well as its constituent elements, and the dynamic of their mutual constitution defines the nature of the regime and its reproduction. One might even say that dynamic is the regime.

In analyzing the black urban regime, I sought to examine black politics as a dynamic element within the context of broader American political development. I discussed the structural, demographic, and ideological conditions around which it took shape and the tensions and contradictions that threatened to undermine it, most of all the contra- diction between the upwardly redistributive imperatives of the governing coalition and the downwardly redistributive imperatives of the black popular electoral constituency. The black regime’s consolidation was predicated on navigating those contradictions, and it succeeded through an improvised combination of class-skewed electoral demo- bilization, presumption and assertion of the priority of support for market-driven rede- velopment and, eventually, the corollary of retrenchment in the public sector as the cornerstone of public policy, increasingly thorough and seamless incorporation of the black professional-managerial stratum—which became, given broader demobiliza- tion, the effective black constituency—into the governing coalition and its public/pri- vate distributive system, and formulation of practical versions of black racial interest that harmonized with the larger progrowth imperatives of upward redistribution. I dis- cussed, for example, how Mayor Maynard Jackson mediated potentially contradictory imperatives of the governing and electoral coalitions in the early years of racial transi- tion in mid-1970s Atlanta by positing a notion of black racial interest that fit with redevelopment imperatives and by aggressively pursuing increased black representa- tion in the public contractor class, which was also framed as a generic racial interest (A. Reed 1999, 163-77).15 Continuing popular demobilization in black politics and generalization of neoliberal retrenchment steadily reduced pressure on the black polit- ical class to align the interests of electoral and governing coalitions by narrowing common sense understandings of the politically possible, the scope of imaginable political intervention, and the stakes of political action.

From the standpoint of sorting out the subsequent trajectory of black urban political development, the most important feature of the black political class’s emergence may indeed be how fundamentally formative and mutually constitutive its relation with the simultaneously emergent redevelopment elite has been from the beginnings of racial

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transition in local politics.16 Often it was alliance with an emerging black political class that enabled modernizing, redevelopment-oriented Democratic elites to displace entrenched regimes that had resisted both intensified downtown growth strategies and interest-group incorporation of blacks on equal terms as coalition participants. As the alliance and regime consolidated and evolved, what initially may have been more of an uneasy biracial governing arrangement whose internal tensions were likely to sur- face around issues related to racial redistribution has come to approximate a more coherent interracial governing class.

In part, that is the outcome of a straightforward sociological dynamic enabled and accelerated by the defeat of racial segregation. As the dominant metaphor of class hier- archy has shifted away from race and as black and white elites increasingly live in the same neighborhoods, interact socially as individuals and families, attend the same schools and functions, consume the same class-defining commodities and pastimes, and participate in the same civic and voluntary associations, they increasingly share a common sense not only about frameworks of public policy but also about the proper order of things in general. They share a sensibility and worldview and a reservoir of their class’s cultural experiences, aspirations, quotidian habits and values, as well as the material interests that unite them as a stratum.17 Despite the fact that grievances or competition within the consensual framework of governance still may be expressed in more or less muted racial terms, perception that deep racial cleavage remains the key fault line around which elites align is a badly out of date vestige of the tense politics and structural conflict that were especially salient during the period of racial transition.

Certainly, the intense struggles over racial redistribution at the moment of transition in urban politics were genuine, as were the commitments of participants on all sides. Racial hierarchy and exclusion heavily influenced, and especially in the South often explicitly defined, the allocation of goods and bads, costs and benefits, in local poli- ties. White elites, and nonelite whites, commonly received any black assertiveness or demand for racial redistribution unequivocally as an unacceptable breach of the proper order of things and a threat to established individual and/or racial prerogatives, and individual prerogatives projected and even understood as racial prerogatives. At a level of historical abstraction at which ethnic group and other ascriptive discourses are recognizable—in line with Chang’s analogy to the fetish character of money—as expressions of class struggle that mystify it through displacement onto ostensibly nat- ural groups, contestation over the terms of minority-group political incorporation can be seen as a moment in a dynamic of recomposition of the terms of class rule to accommodate the victories of the civil rights movement.

Participants in that dynamic did not generally characterize or experience it as a proxy for class struggle, just as those engaged in transactions with money take it at face value and do not actively see it as the “reification of a relation called value.” For many, if not most, race no doubt feels real in quite the same way as money. Thus, more than four decades later, some conservative whites in New Orleans still harbored such abiding animosity toward “Moon” Landrieu for in their view having opened the door to black governance that they voted to reelect the black Ray Nagin in 2006 over Moon’s son, Mitch. However, continuing evolution of the governing alliance that

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emerged from the transition, while still to some extent reproduced through racial meta- phor, does not depend fundamentally on imposed racial subordination to sustain class hierarchy. And in 2010 Mitch Landrieu became the first New Orleans mayor at least since the Voting Rights Act to win with majorities of both black and white voters.

All politics is pragmatic and generative. What I described under the rubric “black urban regime” was a relatively stable set of arrangements that reflected and defined a particular moment in an evolving pattern of urban governance. That moment con- densed around the dynamics of metropolitan demographic, social, and political-eco- nomic reorganization in the postwar United States and the ways that those dynamics informed, converged, and collided with black political assertiveness. The regime emerged from, consolidated, and was constrained by institutional responses to the vic- tories that assertiveness produced, and it contributed to articulating the substantive terms on which those victories would be institutionalized as an evolving normal poli- tics. Several years after the “Black Urban Regime” article, I attempted to take stock of what the regime’s normalization entailed. Normalization and popular demobilization, I argued, are two sides of the same coin and the organic outgrowth of the black urban regime as I described it (A. Reed 1999, 117-59). In reducing pressure to harmonize contradictory imperatives of governing and electoral coalitions, normalization/demo- bilization thus eased the regime’s legitimation requirements.

That development is in one sense an instance of a familiar trajectory of successful insurgencies. However, whether or not it reflects the workings of some iron law, the important point is that normalization/demobilization was not exactly the black urban regime’s Thermidor. The militant racial populism associated with insurgent activism surrounding racial transition in governance never amounted to more than a rhetoric of mobilization. The radical Black Powerites who propounded that populist rhetoric never had more than marginal and symbolic impact on shaping what would be seen as the “black agenda.” The substantive program around which the emergent black politi- cal class cohered always centered on racial redistribution, and racial redistribution was always fundamentally a class program. The successful regime’s normalization there- fore did not indicate retreat from a more radical agenda; it enabled jettisoning the rhetorical and mobilizational equivalent of a booster rocket that had facilitated acces- sion to power but no longer performed useful functions, except in the limited arsenal of those seeking leverage through Kabuki-like performances of protest. As I argued in the “Black Urban Regime,” black political incorporation was predicated on the prior- ity of progrowth interests, and the new black political class took shape entirely on those terms.

The terms on which the new regime in urban governance was consolidated were neither inevitable nor even necessarily the result of conscious strategy. The new arrangements did not unfold; they emerged through pragmatic improvisation within the constraining framework of a simultaneously evolving ideological common sense.18 For example, underclass ideology’s enshrinement as hegemonic common sense con- tributed to and reflected the regime’s stabilization by disconnecting poverty and eco- nomic inequality from public policy and political economy and substantively divesting poor people of civic standing and agency. The post–Katrina New Orleans public

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housing case illustrates one of underclass ideology’s demobilizing effects. Along with a resurgent rhetoric of self-help and moral rehabilitation as racial uplift within black political discourse, it has underwritten privatization and outsourcing of social services to religious and other nongovernmental entities, general cuts in social provision, and a punitive moralism in approaches to social policy. In depicting residential areas in which poor people are clustered as alien, dangerous hearts of darkness, underclass ideology is also directly implicated in the proliferation of approaches to policing that routinely flout civil rights and liberties and approximate the terroristic style of an occupying army. All of this is consistent with and reinforces the neoliberal program of public support for upward redistribution, most insidiously by construing that program as its opposite, often enough through characterizing black private contractors as ben- eficiaries for the “community.”

In this context, a black politics that centers on pursuit of racial parity is more than compatible with neoliberalization. The black political class’s freedom from the need to nod toward the gestural racial populism associated with the period of political transi- tion also facilitates gradual reconstitution of the governing class on genuinely inter- racial terms. Underclass ideology and the neoliberal ideal of diversity have combined to smooth that transition. The way the underclass notion hovers ambiguously between race, class, and culture provides a discursive frame of reference that, as I indicate above, can reinforce class and related social solidarities across race around stigmatiza- tion of a population that is a substantively racialized Other purported to be culturally distinct and not reducible to familiar racial categories, yet at the same time—perhaps not unlike shtetl Jews in early-twentieth-century Berlin or New York—understood as a special racial burden and responsibility for respectable blacks. Underclass discourse makes a shared narrative available for black and white elites that in effect racializes inequality by displacing it from political economy to culture, which, essentialized as pluralism and diversity, has become the ideologically acceptable discourse of de facto racialization. As commitment to diversity has become rooted in the society as the neo- liberal alternative to equality and as the material circumstances and interests of black and white elites converge and overlap, it is only natural that the governing class, both locally and nationally, would become more racially integrated.

Once again, post–Katrina New Orleans offers a dramatic illustration of that shift, including how underclass ideology can reformulate even superficial racial populism as an instrument of displacement of poor people for rent-intensifying redevelopment. In early 2006, black City Council President Oliver Thomas infamously dismissed com- plaints that poor people were not being helped to return to the city by saying,

We don’t need soap opera watchers now. We’re going to target the people who are going to work. It’s not that I’m fed up, but that at some point there has to be a whole new level of motivation, and people have got to stop blaming the government for something they ought to do. (Varney 2006)19

Another black councilmember, Renee Gill Pratt, Thomas’s successor in the racially competitive Council District B, enthusiastically seconded Thomas’s remark. The black

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Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) administrator also supported and echoed Thomas’s characterization. (Thomas and Gill Pratt each subsequently went to federal prison, respectively, for accepting bribes and kickbacks and racketeering. So they did follow through after all on their expressed concern with reducing the city’s criminal element.)

That was a moment in which it was not unusual for public functionaries to speak with brusque candor, and Thomas had cultivated a persona distinguished for colorful straight talk. Nevertheless, it is instructive that in a predominantly black city, the heavy favorite, prior to his indictment at any rate, to succeed Nagin as mayor felt no com- punction about disparaging poor black New Orleanians in such a nasty and stereotypi- cal way.20 Indeed, Thomas was touted as a plain-speaking “populist” and folksy man of the people for his willingness to retail condemnatory stereotypes about black poor people in colorful language as much as for his association with “grassroots” black voluntary associations. It is telling as well that Thomas cultivated that reputation dur- ing his years as City Councilman from District B, where he continued and arguably intensified the campaign of his black mentor and predecessor James Singleton to demolish the St. Thomas project.21

It would be easy to suggest that Thomas’s populist image was a creation of the development elite and its opinion-shaping apparatus, but that view would overlook the extent to which Thomas was popular with black voters as well. Rather, the Thomas persona exemplifies how underclass ideology and growth politics have meshed, along with new, class-skewed opportunity structures opened by each and both in tandem, to define the stakes of politics.

The typical governing regime in black-led cities has evolved from a sometimes— though always less so than imagined by scholars, participants, or constituents—unsta- ble coalition held together by fundamental commitment to a downtown-centered, progrowth agenda and disrupted occasionally by conflicts that often were couched at least partially in a superficially populist language of demands for racial redistribution. As white elites have accommodated to, accepted, and actively supported the principle of racial redistribution and as they increasingly share with their black counterparts a fundamental class perspective, the governing alliance on which the regime rests becomes more seamless and deeply entrenched and less susceptible to sporadic disrup- tions by demands for popular redistribution.

From that perspective, the histrionics that captivated so much of the black com- mentariat when Mitch Landrieu was elected mayor of New Orleans in 2010 or when other whites have been elected, or nearly elected, to the mayoralties of cities that had been governed by black executives for decades were naïve; those who fretted about loss of “black political power” misunderstood the extent to which the governing classes in those cities that have had black-led governments are by now integrated racially. While talk of rebuilding New Orleans on a “smaller footprint” understandably stoked black anxieties about surreptitious plans to alter the city’s racial demography radically, it became clear—or should have become to those willing to read the signs— that the local ruling class had no particular interest in upsetting the settled governing arrangements. Landrieu’s successor is likely as not to be black, and blacks currently

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hold five of the seven City Council seats. A 2012 charter amendment that mandates that the two at-large Council posts be elected independently of each other also increases the likelihood that one of the two will be black to the extent that the new procedure facilitates informally negotiated elite agreements about candidates. Of course, for many whites as well as blacks, mundane struggles for advantage are often enough likely to be at least tinged with more or less diffuse racial metaphor—for example, in disparagements of one’s foes on lines of competence or the like or a more or less ambiguous deployment of we/they narratives. Nevertheless, the notion that a deep racial divide separates black and white governing elites rests on a presumption that explicitly racial subordination remains the dominant ideological framework for the maintenance of class power. It does not.

A generative view of black political development and the evolving urban regime suggests that the approaches to governing sometimes held to distinguish the more recent cohort of open and unambiguously neoliberal black and Latino mayors like Cory Booker in Newark, Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C., Ray Nagin in New Orleans, Julian Castro in San Antonio, Dennis Archer in Detroit, Michael Nutter in Philadelphia, Kasim Reed in Atlanta, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in Baltimore, and likely eventual aspirant Kurt Summers in Chicago are in important ways more con- tinuous with their predecessors than it may seem. The mayors who led the initial black regimes—Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, Ernest N. “Dutch” Morial in New Orleans, Kenneth Gibson in Newark, even former militant leftist and trade union activist Coleman Young in Detroit—were hardly less committed to the primacy of progrowth development interests than Booker and the others. They were more militant in their racial politics, but that militancy was primarily in service to an agenda of racial redis- tribution that was more politically controversial during the era of racial transition. In that sense, the “post-racial” mayors are simply lineal descendants of the heroic cohort whose elections consolidated the transition.22 They also reflect entailments of the nor- malization of black urban governance, which presumes, among other things, at least a modus vivendi according to which white elites accept and support racial redistribution within the framework of neoliberal hegemony.

In a generally insipid essay in the New York Times Magazine three months before the 2008 presidential election, Matt Bai attempted to distinguish what he described as a “newly emerging class of black politicians,” which he characterized in generational terms. “Comfortable inside the establishment, bred at universities rather than seminar- ies, they are just as likely to see themselves as ambassadors to the black community as they are to see themselves as spokesmen for it” (Bai 2008).23 Bai’s generational dis- tinction is simplistic, if not banal, and it is telling that he does not indicate whom or what these new politicians supposedly see themselves as ambassadors from. Nevertheless, his observation throws into relief an important point about the trajectory of black political incorporation since the 1960s. At the municipal level, the politicians and political style he describes represent not the transcendence or defeat of the urban regime crafted through racial transition but its fulfillment. It is now so solid and iner- tially self-reproducing that nominal black control of the mayoralty or even a stable black council majority is no longer as central, certainly not necessary, for maintenance

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of the regime and the black political class’s social and political power, although that may seem paradoxical from a perspective shaped by the contentious period of racial transition. This does not mean that the governing regime is “post-racial”; racial redis- tribution remains an important element of its interest-group calculus, and commitment to diversity is a source of its cohesion. The point is that black urban regimes consoli- dated over the 1970s and 1980s around evolving patterns of alliance and everyday practice that established and then presumed an interracial governing class.

The first generation of black mayors were no doubt sincere in their commitments to advancing the interests of the black community as they saw them. But the Black Powerite racial communitarianism that propelled the insurgency obscured the class character of the political and social vision articulated as a pragmatic politics by the emergent stratum of electoral and administrative functionaries. The contentiousness around racial redistribution that commonly confronted those transitional administra- tions often led them to project the rhetoric of racial populism. That gave mayors like Maynard Jackson and “Dutch” Morial a militant cachet that both further obscured the class character of their substantive programs and fueled an impression that they were more likely to stand up against redevelopment and other white elite agendas than their successors have been. In New Orleans, for example, Morial’s successor, Sidney Barthelemy, is generally considered by progressives to have been more acquiescent to corporate and development interests than Morial even though their actual conduct with regard to catering to large capitalist class interests was nearly indistinguishable.24

As I argued in the “Black Urban Regime,” the notion of black political incorpora- tion, although within limits accurate descriptively, fails to take into account the ques- tion of which interests benefit (and lose) from any set of political arrangements. That is, scholars who have examined minority incorporation into local governing coalitions have tended not to consider the differential impact that policies and initiatives taken to indicate incorporation may have among discrete segments of black and Latino con- stituencies. That tendency reflects the extent to which ethnic succession as a model of politics obscures class inequalities in programs of redistribution along nominal group lines. It is more clear today than in the late 1980s that what Browning, Marshall, and Tabb appropriately characterized as “strong incorporation”—a condition in which minority elites operate as full members of a governing coalition—was not simply a victory for a political interest–group version of equality of opportunity (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984, 1997; A. Reed 1999, 112-14). It also was instrumental in establishing a normative standard, as well as a practical framework—more of an alchemy—for realization of social justice as racial redistribution that would become a cornerstone of neoliberalism’s legitimation.25

Failure to recognize the role of class forces in black urban politics is partly a result of the focus of the study of black politics as an academic field. The problem is as old as the field itself, which originated in a context shaped first by the premises of race relations ideology, then Cold War racial liberalism, and black professional-managerial class imperatives to assert what English Professor Kenneth Warren describes as “man- agerial authority over the Nation’s Negro problem” (A. Reed 2004; Warren 2011; West 2006). The effect of those imperatives has been to homogenize black American

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politics with the consequence of rendering invisible political dynamics among black people. In the urban politics field, in particular, this tendency has produced a mass of scholarship that juxtaposes “black leaders” or a singular “black community” to white elites. The fact that this approach remains hegemonic despite its manifest inadequacies with respect to providing accounts of either urban or black political development since the mid-1960s is a testament to the field’s fundamentally ideological class commitments.

In a 2013 interview, Johnson proposed an important distinction between

black political life—a broad category stretching back across multiple decades, even centuries, in reference to black people engaging in various forms of politics, whether slave rebellions or the push for desegregation of the South—[and] black ethnic politics as a peculiar phenomenon that develops during the 20th century, particularly after the 1960s. (Johnson and Rothenberg 2013)

That distinction helps to situate the black urban politics that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s as the product of a specific moment in postwar American political develop- ment. It also shows up the inadequacy of interpretive tendencies that posit a unitary, transhistorical “black liberation movement” or “black freedom movement,” or “long civil rights movement,” all of which presume a teleological coherence as the transcen- dent “Truth” of black Americans’ political activity. Those tendencies, as Johnson sug- gests, have roots in black power ideology and reproduce its presumption of a “black community” as a singular political agent.26 That perspective blocks recognition of the significance of material tensions and contradictions in black politics and in particular obscures the historically specific foundations of the black urban politics that devel- oped in the 1960s by representing it either as an organic continuation of the civil rights struggles, the expression of a transhistorical black movement, or the product of co- optation of an authentic black telos by ruling class forces. Unsurprisingly, interpreta- tions so framed generally cannot provide persuasively thick accounts of black political development in the postsegregation era; the approach leads examination of contempo- rary politics to a conceptual dead end. The black power nationalist presumption of a fully self-contained black politics is not at all adequate for interpreting a pragmatic reality in which dynamics among black political actors take shape in relation to, and can influence as well, broader structural forces and patterns of alliance and conflict.

In his early 1970s memoir, Carl B. Stokes (1973, 53), pioneer of the new black political class and former Cleveland Mayor, credited his decision to pursue the mayor- alty in 1965 to having read Robert A. Dahl’s classic manifesto of postwar urban plural- ism, Who Governs?,27 and Carmichael and Hamilton’s (1967) Black Power explicitly defined its program in ethnic pluralist terms. Yet Dean E. Robinson (2001, 2010) is, along with Johnson (2006; Johnson and Rothenberg 2013), among the few who have seriously considered the implications of that provenance. One of Robinson’s important insights is that the model of ethnic group incorporation and succession from which black ethnic politics derives is itself an invention of postwar social science, an element of the larger disappearance of class and political economy into growth politics.28 That

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insight and its implications are lost in the simplistic and ideologically blinkered pur- view of the field’s ahistorical and ultimately essentializing premises.

An encouraging development in the study of black American politics, perhaps the only one, in the years since I initially published the “Black Urban Regime” article, which expanded on and refined a previous rumination published in Telos (A. Reed 1985), has been the work of a cohort of younger scholars whose research goes against the grain of the field to problematize the category “black politics” and historicize political activity among black Americans by situating it in the context of broader polit- ical-economic dynamics. Scholars of black urban politics like Cedric Johnson, Preston Smith, and Michelle Boyd have examined the tensions and class contradictions that are the empirical reality of black politics in cities; their work has helped us all to understand how material forces influence the political dynamics that play out among black Americans and shape political discourse and patterns of political alliance. That work also helps to clarify the object of the field of study—what it is and what it is not.

Michelle R. Boyd’s (2008) Jim Crow Nostalgia, a study of contestation over notions of neighborhood, community, racial identity, and political interest in Chicago’s black- on-black Bronzeville redevelopment and neighborhood upgrading project in the 1990s, was an early and important case-based challenge to the dominant interpretive tendency. Preston H. Smith’s (2012) richly contextualized Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis is a signal contribution to correcting the teleology tacit in even revi- sionist accounts of postwar black political history (see also P. H. Smith 2000). Through examining black political debate and action around housing issues in postwar Chicago, he lays out a grounded account of the ambivalent relation—confluence, overlap, inter- play, and sometimes irreducible tensions—between normative commitments to prin- ciples of “social democracy” and “racial democracy” that he argues lay at the foundation of and drove black political activity and debate in the period between the late 1930s and 1960s.

Revisiting the black urban regime notion today throws into relief the problem that the mind-set that centers on antiracism as the center of gravity of black political dis- course and practice undermines taking stock of how black politics has evolved since the 1980s, or for that matter the 1960s. Both in national and urban politics, its trajec- tory has steadily narrowed the scope of political expectation among black Americans to fit what an ever more self-interestedly agenda-setting black political class decrees to be feasible or thinkable. Popular demobilization and a political agenda ever more tightly circumscribed by the combination of generic racial symbolism and material benefits for professional-managerial strata reinforce each other. And the triumph of the Democratic party’s Wall Street and neoliberal wing under Bill Clinton’s presidency and its further consolidation under Obama’s have inscribed the Thatcherite TINA— There Is No Alternative to the primacy of investor-class imperatives, including steady retrenchment of the public sector, collective bargaining, and social wage protections— as defining the leftward limit of political aspiration. Underclass ideology rationalizes that shift as common sense by justifying punitive moralism as social policy, disquali- fying poor and economically marginal people from effective civic voice, creating material incentives for professional-managerial strata through an increasingly

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privatized and marketized social service sector, and camouflaging the punitive class program as racial uplift. That is why gratuitous attacks on caricatures of poor black people helped to establish candidate Obama’s racial bona fides in 2008. The “racial” agenda is more purely than perhaps at any time since the emergence of a black mass politics in the 1930s a petit-bourgeois, professional-managerial class agenda. As of my writing this in June 2016, no clearer demonstration has been made to that effect than the spectacle of former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee icon and fifteen- term U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and fellow long-term black U.S. Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), who openly and emphatically denounced the idea of free public higher education as irresponsible. Clyburn explicitly elevated the interest of a small, historically black university on whose board he sits above the ability of students, in this instance black students nearly by definition, to pursue higher education without constraint by ability to pay. Lewis went further still, all but sneering:

I think it’s the wrong message to send to any group. There’s not anything free in America. We all have to pay for something. Education is not free. Health care is not free. Food is not free. Water is not free. I think it’s very misleading to say to the American people, we’re going to give you something free. (Johnson 2016a; Sheinen 2016)

From the standpoint of left political interests and values, this account does not pres- ent an especially sanguine view of the terms on which racial transition in urban gover- nance has been consolidated, and in arguing that antiracism is most meaningfully the political program of the left wing of neoliberalism, it does not seem to offer clear pathways to pursuit of a more egalitarian society. Therefore, it is particularly gratify- ing that Tim Weaver (2016b) sees the thrust of my arguments as optimistic; he and I may be nearly alone in doing so, and I appreciate the challenges he poses concerning political strategy. The questions regarding the relative merits of national versus local foci for political action bring to mind the Maoist slogan stressing the need for “walk- ing on two legs.” David Imbroscio’s (2010, esp. 161-78) argument that there are opportunities for—and I apologize if I put words into his mouth here—sharpening the political contradictions of urban neoliberalism through conscientious pursuit of local economic alternative development strategies (LEADS) is persuasive. Such initiatives can have practical benefits for discrete communities and can help to reanimate discus- sions of the public good, but I believe that ultimately what is needed is a national, popularly based political movement, rooted—for reasons I have articulated often enough—in the labor movement and that can generate the political capacity (one of the reasons the labor movement is central) to fight effectively for an agenda that reflects how the society would look if it were governed by and in the interests of the great majority of the country who work, or are expected to work, for a living.

That is the vision that animated the effort to build a Labor Party between the early 1990s and mid-2000s of which I was a part. I still think that its program or one like it provides a clear and thorough illustration of such an agenda (Labor Party 1998). What seems to me the necessary approach to building such a movement is to organize locally around a national agenda, and that can incorporate pursuit of LEADS into a national

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campaign to restore and advance a sense of the public good as a basis for policy mak- ing, in much the same way that the Full Employment Act of 1945—defeated in the House by an alliance of Republicans and conservative southern Democrats—and A. Philip Randolph’s “Freedom Budget” of 1966 would have established actual full employment as a cornerstone of national economic policy.

A concern about LEADS, of course, is that on its own such an approach, as Arena has shown vis-à-vis New Orleans, can devolve to a dead-end localism, consistent with neoliberal outsourcing and privatization. That is one reason it is important to tie such efforts to a larger political critique and agenda. I think Alinskyite and similar notions that fetishize localism by positing a theory of movement-building according to which local actions somehow organically accrete to bigger critiques and actions are empiri- cally and historically wrong and ideologically compromised.29 Notwithstanding their tendencies to romanticize the local and “grassroots,” they can share with managerialist liberalism an elevation of process over outcomes.

I will conclude by addressing Weaver’s final questions regarding the appropriate- ness of the state as the domain for realizing an egalitarian political agenda and of the labor movement as the vehicle for attaining it. Especially because neoliberal hegemony hinges so much both programmatically and ideologically on marketization of the world and vilifying public goods as a justification for their privatization, a crucial objective of a counternarrative of mobilization must be revalorization and affirmation of the public sector and the idea of the public itself. The state is the domain that embodies the ideal of the public; it is where public goods are produced, disseminated, and protected. I have grown increasingly disturbed by the proliferation of a knee-jerk antistatism in much of what understands itself to be left or antiracist politics (see, for example, A. Reed 2015). Whether flying under the flag of anarchism or some other precious theory, when it is anything more than naïve reproduction of dystopian fantasies, that tendency is, to recur to another old leftist characterization, left in form, right in essence. It reproduces the ideological perspective of neoliberalism. We need to reassert what the state can do as an agent for protecting and advancing the interests of working people. The promise to do so and insistence on affirming that role for the state are what made Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination the most hopeful and potentially exciting development in American politics in some time.

This brings me to the issue of the centrality of the labor movement. It is true that organized labor has been in decline for several decades. However, it remains the one institutional location in which working people are organized politically as a class, the only institution with the capacity to contest the neoliberal juggernaut. That is the rea- son that public-sector unions are now the principal targets of the concerted bipartisan neoliberal offensive; they are all that protects us from realization of capitalists’ utopia of a world utterly marketized and stripped of social protections, economic security, and rights on the job, a world defined by innovative forms of indenture (e.g., “at-will” employment, “zero-hour” contracts, contingent employment redefined as independent contracting and entrepreneurship), in which workers will have no alternative but to accept employment on whatever terms employers wish to offer it because wage-slav- ery will be the least undesirable option for survival.

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Antistatist and romantically localist approaches by contrast do not merely play into the hands of those reactionary forces. Intensifying identitarian attacks on the class- based political strategies that are the only avenue to building the deep and broadly based movement essential for challenging the assault make clear that that politics is not just an alternative form of egalitarian politics, it is an alternative to egalitarian poli- tics, neoliberalism’s loyal opposition and a variant of contemporary red-baiting sani- tized by the Holy Water of diversity ideology.

This perspective converges with the critique I have laid out of the trajectory of black urban politics since the Voting Rights Act as well as my argument concerning how we should think about race and its political significance. Because what is gener- ally understood as black politics is all but exclusively a class-driven affair, pursuit of egalitarian initiatives requires breaking beyond the strictures of that politics to appeal to black working people in concrete terms that connect with the concerns that most pressingly constrain their everyday lives. These are material concerns with employ- ment, health care, housing, education, and others shared widely within the general population and that can be the basis for building that broad movement. That is another reason the labor movement is the necessary cornerstone for that project; it is where working people of all sorts come together around that crucially shared identity. It is important to recognize as well that antiracist politics will not help us build it. As I believe I have shown here, it is another class’s tool, which for pragmatic reasons we must find ways to work around.

Finally, in the spirit of Weaver’s emphasis on my optimism, New Orleans offers a potential illustration of what an effective labor-based strategy could look like and how it might be built. UNITE HERE Local 2262, which recently won recognition as the representative of workers in Harrah’s casino and is organizing elsewhere in the hospi- tality sector, could become a significant force in local politics as well as in signifi- cantly improving the lives and economic security of New Orleanians who work in the city’s dominant industry. The union’s success so far is a clear story of the importance of the connections between national and local action because the international union negotiated a neutrality agreement for the New Orleans site as part of its national agree- ment with Harrah’s. That key intervention enabled UNITE HERE to succeed where the highly touted Hospitality, Hotels and Restaurants Organizing Council (HOTROC) campaign failed in the mid- and late 1990s. As important as their toehold in that key industry is, Local 2262’s leadership understands that the success of ongoing work- place organizing efforts will require broad support of the larger working-class com- munity and that understanding also reinforces the union’s concern to become an active voice and force in the struggle to advance working-class interests on other issues not directly linked to the workplace. It can become a central player in local politics and not merely in the familiar mode of trading support for elected officials in exchange for short-term interests linked to employment conditions. It also suggests an exciting pos- sibility that the union can be an important node in revitalizing something on the order of the old Congress of Industial Organizations (CIO) coalition—appropriate to con- temporary conditions—around a broad array of social justice issues and that it can thereby help to articulate a practical political vision grounded on the lived interests

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and concerns of the city’s working people, currently rendered invisible and denied under dominant neoliberalism. In New Orleans specifically, that means a firm and independent voice that will fight openly and unambiguously for working people’s access to affordable housing, high-quality public education and public transportation, and that will press for a more egalitarian pattern of distribution of costs and benefits in local and state as well politics. And that could be a very exciting step toward creation of the movement, a new, openly class-conscious political alliance, capable of chal- lenging the naked capitalist class power of which neoliberalism is the contemporary expression.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. That view, expressed in such formulations as “natural aversion,” “natural affinities,” or “consciousness of kind,” was a pivotal premise of Victorian race theory and informed Justice Henry Billings Brown’s majority opinion in Plessy, which asserted “a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color” (Thomas 1997, 43). Lofgren (1987, 93-115) provides a very useful general examination of the broader intellectual con- text of race theory in which Justice Brown’s opinion was embedded.

2. Antiracists’ inclinations to attack undesirable inequalities or apparent racial outrages in the present through analogizing them to slavery or southern Jim Crow segregation and to advance the trope that contemporary transgressions seem as if “nothing has changed” actually underscore the fact that our social context is in important ways quite different. The rhetorical charge is an assertion that the behavior condemned is, or appears like, an atavism.

3. Distinguished poverty researchers Richard P. Nathan, then of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, and the Urban Institute’s Isabel Sawhill independently of each other declared an end to debate about the existence of the underclass—each adducing the authority of jour- nalists’ and mass media accounts of its existence as evidence that the issue was settled. Then each proceeded to generate scientific-sounding narratives assigning statistical cat- egories reified as populations to the underclass taxon (A. Reed 1999, 182). On the impor- tant, but consistently overlooked, distinction between categories and groups, see Brubaker (2004, 11-13) and Rothbart and Taylor (1992, esp. 18-21).

4. For examination of Moynihan’s ongoing legacy, including in shaping political develop- ment in New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina, T. F. Reed (2015), Adams (2015a), John Arena (2015), French-Marcelin (2015b), and Johnson (2015) use the coincidence of the fif- tieth anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: A Report and the tenth anniversary of the disaster ensuing from Hurricane Katrina to examine the links between

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culturalization of economic inequality and the outrage of neoliberal New Orleans in a sym- posium (The Moynihan Report and the Crescent City).

5. The St. Thomas project, after a nearly thirty-year campaign, instructively spearheaded by successive black City Councilmembers from the district, was razed in the early 2000s, a few years before Katrina, as a component of a rent-intensifying redevelopment effort. The Iberville project was demolished in 2013 and early 2014 as an element of a massive, pub- licly subsidized redevelopment project led by Pres Kabacoff, the same developer who had been responsible for St. Thomas’s demolition. On the long-term effort to demolish the St. Thomas project, see John David Arena (2012); Arena provides an important account of the deep links between the emergent black political class that took shape in the 1970s and the redevelopment elite and the role of the nonprofit sector in legitimizing the redevelopment alliance’s imperatives by authenticating a layer of “grassroots” community organizations. Bagert (2002, especially Appendices D1-7) also provides a close critical account of the bait and switch Kabacoff and the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) perpetrated in selling the claim that St. Thomas would be replaced by a significantly “mixed income” development. I discuss the contours of Kabacoff’s new Iberville-Tremé development proj- ect and its scope (A. Reed 2011).

6. For critical discussion of the statement and its ideological content and likely impact, see A. Reed and Steinberg (2006) along with an interview with Adel (2006), originator of the “Moving to Opportunity” statement, and more broadly critical articles by John David (Jay) Arena (2006) and Quigley (2006). Despite Briggs’s vigorous defenses of his initiative, by means of asserting that critics egregiously misrepresent his and the others’ intentions, the original statement has not been accessible on the Internet since shortly after its release, and the “think tank”—the New Vision Institute for Policy and Progress—under whose auspices it was issued seems no longer to exist.

7. Kabacoff is hardly the first redevelopment advocate to adduce tender concern for poor people as a motivation for displacing them. Nearly two decades ago, when Larry Bennett and I worked on the expert witness team for the tenant plaintiffs in their suit challenging displacement from the Cabrini-Green project in Chicago, we were bemused to find that the Chicago Housing Authority in a brief for its Near North Redevelopment Initiative advanced the “concentrated poverty” argument in support of demolition, inventively arguing that Cabrini-Green’s residents were even more “isolated” than their counterparts on the South Side because the project was “a pocket of isolated and concentrated poverty surrounded by wealth” in the middle of a largely white and affluent area near the Gold Coast, even though that location meant that they lived in just the opposite of concentrated poverty. See Chicago Housing Authority (1997, 1.2). We cite and discuss this claim and the broader initiative in our expert witness report, subsequently published as Bennett and Reed (1999, 182-85).

8. Disparaging underclass imagery also overlapped an older strain of conservative and moral- izing folk understanding in black political discourse. As early as the 1970s, Jesse Jackson, as an element of his “I Am Somebody” patter, included in his litany of bromides of racial uplift, “I may be in the projects, but the projects aren’t in me.” That strain was at least as old as Booker T. Washington’s advocacy of forsaking civil rights and focusing on self- improvement and moral rehabilitation. As the contradictions at the core of the black urban regime sharpened over the 1980s, calls for moral rearmament and “personal responsibility” came increasingly to predominate in responses among the black political class to persis- tent and intensifying poverty in inner cities. Accelerated outsourcing of the social service sector to church and other nonprofit groups in the 1990s reinforced both the self-help line

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and the related exhortation to moral rehabilitation as a response to poverty and economic insecurity, and that tendency has become more deeply entrenched since. It is noteworthy in this regard that presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 buttressed his bona fides among black political elites by hurling Dutch uncle style denunciations at mainstream stereotypes of the underclass—for example, his evocations of apocryphal “Cousin Pookie” and the rebuke about feeding one’s children Popeyes chicken for breakfast—before audi- ences at black churches and to a standing ovation at the national National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) convention.

9. Of course, formal equivalence of standing does not necessarily translate into effective parity of civic voice. A property-based system of effective decision-making rights can be expected to give large property priority over small property, and, for reasons that unques- tionably have to do with the history of racial exclusion and discrimination, black neigh- borhoods are on average farther down in the hierarchy of real estate valuation than white neighborhoods, and both are farther down on average than large developers’ holdings. Contention over specific issues concerning the allocation of goods and bads in the recovery process has often enough taken the form of objection to arguable violations of the principle of racial equity. Yet that principle bumps up against the priority of property rights, which is the normative cornerstone of the “market-driven” recovery regime. Property rights are therefore likely to trump racial equity, and that has been the case so far except to the extent that it has been possible and desirable to negotiate satisficing compromises. The overarch- ing point, however, is that the political regime that has consolidated in New Orleans post- Katrina, much as in national politics, is built on commitment to negotiated racial and other interest-group parity premised on the nonnegotiable primacy of property rights—and thus investor-class priorities. This regime’s commitment to maintaining parity is contradicted by the great asymmetries of power in a system that privileges property over democratic participation. Moreover, what is understood to constitute the universe of expressible black political interests is circumscribed by the regime’s imperatives.

10. Self (2005) provides a distinctively lucid and concrete account of the genesis and contours of homeowner populism through examining the case of Oakland and the East Bay in the postwar decades. I believe that the very apt “homeowner populism” is his coinage as well.

11. New Orleans is hardly unique with respect to the appearance of homeowner populism among blacks. See, for example, Lacy (2007).

12. Merlin Chowkwanyun and Reed (2012) have examined the inadequacies of the focus on racial disparity on both intellectual and political grounds.

13. As if to punctuate the larger shift in black politics, Henry is grandson of the legendary local labor leader, Clarence “Chink” Henry, president of the prominent International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1419.

14. Like Arena (2012), Ferguson (2013) also stresses the significance of the nonprofit sector in shaping the contours of the new black politics. Of course, as I indicate and draw upon in the “Black Urban Regime,” an important early scholarship also examined facets of these connections and their likely significance (M. K. Brown and Erie 1981; Cloward and Piven 1974; Judd 1986; Kerstein and Judd 1980; Nelson 1987; R. Smith 1981).

15. That chapter was reprinted from Stone and Sanders (1987). It was published in both vol- umes as “A Critique of Neoprogressivism in Theorizing about Local Development Policy: A Case from Atlanta.”

16. Some earlier scholarship has stressed the primacy of the alliance in shaping the racial tran- sition. See Keiser (1997) and Eisinger (1980). Raphael J. Sonenshein (1994) is a similar

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account but focused on the coalition led by Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, in which blacks were a decided minority.

17. There is a vast literature on the sociology of class formation. Regarding the specific dynam- ics of formation and reproduction of governing class dominance in postwar American urban politics, Clarence N. Stone’s (1980, 1982) early 1980s accounts remain especially clear and useful.

18. R. M. Smith (2014) provides a particularly lucid and astute account of the dynamic and transformative interaction of ideas and ideologies, institutions, and coalitional alliances in shaping American political development in general. A chronic problem within the study of black politics as an academic field has been failure to consider black American political development as constituted within the general patterns and logic—Smith’s “spiral”—of American politics (A. Reed 2004).

19. In a subsequent interview, Thomas softened his statement as the election approached and adduced the authority of Malcolm X to establish the racial legitimacy of his attack on black poor people (Neworleanspodcasting.com, interview March 14, 2006).

20. Gill Pratt was a Thomas protégé and moreover may have been attempting to curry favors with the new, albeit small, white electoral majority in her district. If so, it was a ploy that failed; she lost the seat to a white political novice that spring.

21. See John David Arena (2012, 29-116) for discussion of Singleton’s and Thomas’s resolute campaign against St. Thomas.

22. Whether or not there is a “post-racial” black politics and, if so, what it might mean is a question that has prompted considerable chatter among scholars. Political scientist Andra Gillespie (2009, 2012) has published two books on the topic that attempt to examine it with some rigor. The Obama presidency has generated voluminous academic rumination on the postracialism thesis. In assessments of particular politicians, the postracialism notion focuses on style of self-presentation and is to that extent another iteration of debate over whether an earlier cohort of black office-seekers and officials practiced a “deracialized” politics. See, for example, Perry (1997); that volume contains and expands upon a sympo- sium Perry (1991) edited on the topic. Charles V. Hamilton (1977) may have first articu- lated the notion.

23. In Bai’s view, this ambassadorship “often means extolling middle-class values in urban neighborhoods.”

24. Barthelemy’s image as more conciliatory racially than Morial stemmed partly from the fact that his Seventh Ward political organization, Community Organization for Urban Politics, known by its acronym, COUP, had an antagonistic rivalry with Morial and from the fact that he won the mayoralty because of heavy majority white support (he received 86% of the white vote) in a runoff against William Jefferson, who received 70 percent of the black vote and who was later elected to Congress. That initiated a pattern, an early practical expression of white accommodation to black governance, in which white voters deter- mined which of two black contenders would be elected mayor. It is more reasonable, how- ever, to see the Barthelemy administration as having taken further steps but under different conditions in a direction established by his predecessor.

1. Morial suppressed strikes by police and, like Maynard Jackson, sanitation workers, aggressively pursued Urban Development Action Grants to intensify downtown-cen- tered economic development, and actively supported extravagant public subsidies for the debacle of the city’s 1984-1985 World’s Fair. Typical among transitional black

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mayors, Morial fought resolutely for affirmative action to increase black percentages in municipal employment and the police department specifically. Barthelemy did not attempt to undo those efforts, which Morial had continued and expanded from the Landrieu administration. (By 1974, under Landrieu, the city’s governing elite already identified “Inadequate Minority Opportunities” as a major problem to be overcome and committed to addressing it as a major policy objective; see Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd et al. 1975.) Barthelemy, like Morial, was committed to an eco- nomic development strategy driven by support for upwardly redistributive, rent-inten- sifying growth. It was under his administration that demolition of low-income public housing was formulated as an official objective of local government planning (Rochon & Associates 1988). The greater than actual differences perceived between the two mayors partly resulted from differences in personal style, as Morial was more aggres- sive or combative in self-presentation. However, as the first black mayor, Morial faced more hostile and intransigent opposition—ironically, including from Barthelemy and the COUP faction on the City Council—than his successor.

2. Perception that Barthelemy was less committed to advancing black interests derived as well from his reaction to the effects of the mid-1980s Oil Bust and the city’s declining economic condition, which exacerbated fiscal stress. His acquiescence to pressure for retrenchment, the effects of which would fall disproportionately on blacks as both pub- lic employees and service recipients, reinforced persistent criticisms that he was insuf- ficiently committed to protecting black interests. (In the 1986 race against Jefferson, the latter’s camp circulated rumors that Barthelemy had commonly passed for white in the French Quarter in the 1960s.) It is by no means clear, though, that Morial’s response would have differed substantially from Barthelemy’s. Affirmative action and other pro- grams of racial redistribution would not address the problem of declining revenues.

25. “Neoliberalism,” as Weaver and others show, is a secondary logical reconstruction, a name given after the fact to an evolving ensemble of social relations and an accompanying ideo- logical penumbra—in David Harvey’s pithy formulation, a free-market utopian ideology and a pragmatic program for revanchist upward redistribution—once they have congealed as a relatively coherent social, political, and economic order (Dudzic and Reed 2015; Harvey 2005, 2-3; Krinsky 2011; Krinsky and Simonet 2011; Weaver 2016a). Dudzic and I suggest that, in practical terms, “neoliberalism is best summarized as capitalism that has effectively eliminated working-class opposition” (Dudzic and Reed 2015, 373).

26. Johnson makes clear that he does not intend “black political life” to denote a singular black politics that was a normal state from which “black ethnic politics” is a deviation; instead “black political life” is more a heuristic, the larger conceptual category of political action and engagement among black people that encompasses various discrete, temporally and contextually situated forms and expressions.

27. Stokes also discusses the Ford Foundation’s role in preparing his mayoral candidacy. Ferguson’s Top Down is a very useful study of Ford’s role in shaping black power politics; its one limitation is a tendency to assume that Ford and other elites hijacked and preempted a more popular black power politics, which hinders her from following the critique of black power through to its core as a class program.

28. To be sure, as I discuss in the “Black Urban Regime,” scholars of black urban politics examining the early phases of racial transition in local government at the time often inter- preted it through the lens of ethnic politics and succession. Unlike Robinson, however, they

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were inclined to see ethnic succession as a natural process, not the ideological product of a specific post–World War II moment.

29. See, for example, Jane McAlevey’s (2015) critique of Alinskyite organizing models, including as they have been introduced into the trade union movement.

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Author Biography

Adolph Reed Jr. is professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and is cur- rently completing a book examining the decline and transformation of the left in US politics since 1944.

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