Tokens of the White left.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: Class Notes - Column

For more than twenty years I refused on principle to use the phrage "the white Left." I did not want to give any credence to the view, commonly expressed among black activists in the late 1960s and after, that the leftist critique of American society was somehow white people's property.

I maintained this resolve through SDS's 1969 proclamation of the Black Panther Party as the vanguard of the black revolution" - based only on the Panthers' willingness to align with whites - and subsequent gushes of Pantherphile exoticism. I kept it through the "separate black movement divides the working class" line, which was one crude "Marxist" alternative to examining black politics. And I held on through similarly evasive Procrustean analyses, for example, casting the civil-rights movement as a "bourgeois democratic revolution." My resolve was unshaken through endless reification of the "black community" as a collective subject.

Even when Frederic Jameson, editor of Social Text, told me early in the Reagan era that he had published an article that he knew was drivel and didn't even conform to the bibliographical format of the rest of the journal because he "wanted to publish something by a black author and that's what there was," I remained true.

I stayed patiently silent as the Democratic Socialists of America anointed one star Black Voice after another throughout the 1980s, with never a hint of concern about the anointed's institutional links to any sort of autonomous black political activity. And I endured the total lack of curiosity about Jesse Jackson's new political fame and what his antics since 1984 have to do with tensions and cleavages among blacks.

I'm ready to toss in the towel. When all is said and done, it really is all too much the white Left. In far too many quarters, identifying with progressive politics is perfectly compatible with reliance on racial shorthand and, therefore, with the disposition to view Afro-American life as simultaneously opaque to those outside it (thus the need for black interpreters and line-bearers) and smoothly organic (with exceptions made for the odd, inauthentic "sellout" leaders).

Perhaps I am finally giving in to this view because I'm old and tired. Perhaps it's the result of attrition. Mostly, though, it seems that the farther the memory - much less the actuality - of real political movements recedes on the horizon, the worse this problem has become. I confess that it is quite dispiriting. It also makes the issue of blacks' role in the Left a matter for real concern; more and more that role seems to be in a line stretching back at least to Melville's Queequeg, that is, to put whites in touch with their "deeper humanity."

This complaint has absolutely nothing to do with leadership, or even representation, in left institutions. It's about Jim Crow standards on the Left: the suspension, when making judgments about black people and...