The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics

by Adolph L. Reed Jr.

Controversial analysis of the Jackson campaign by a black scholar who argues that his candidacy hurt the development of a viable black political movement.

Genres: Politics, History

Hardcover

First published January 28, 1986

About the author

Adolph Leonard Reed Jr. is an American professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in studies of issues of racism and U.S. politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School for Social Research and he has written on racial and economic inequality.

Reviews

[Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most important book one can read to get a clear understanding of the persistent factors that cause the troubled nature of black politics, and how those faults lead to the damaging reality of the Obama presidency relative to its effects on the black community.

[David Selsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems a little crass, a little tin-eared, to call a Marxist political scientist “the Boss,” “the shit,” or “the GOAT.” But that’s what I feel when I read Adolph Reed Jr. He’s the baddest dude around, and it has nothing to do with his being imperious, condescending, sarcastic, glib, or snarky to his interlocutors--all of the tones and approaches people these days take on social media when trying to score points and win arguments; in other words, he doesn’t own anybody, or even try to. Reed is cool because he sees things clearly and his observations are so astute. Reed is almost always on point. You can slow roll your talent as a writer and thinker when you’re committed (through brilliant analysis, observation, self-reflection, and courage [that last noun maybe being more important than anything else]) to a righteous political project.

There are many things striking about “The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon,” the most striking is that even though it was published 35 years ago it feels remarkably fresh. I can’t overstate this. I circled around this book for months on Amazon, here, contemplated buying it but never did because I didn’t like the cover and wondered if as much as I respected and had been inspired by Reed’s project in his other writing I would get much out of a detailed (does Reed do anything any other way? No) examination of a failed presidential campaign 37 years ago. How wrong I was. Like many of the essays in Reed’s fantastic “Stirrings in the Jug,” “The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon” presents an intricate, nuanced, insightful map and explanation of the vicissitudes, historical contingencies, opportunities, and shortcomings of Afro-American politics in the United States. Reed uses the presidential run of Jesse Jackon in 1984 as a jumping off point to explore how discrete cohorts within Black politics variously jockeyed, clashed, and/or legitimized themselves vis-a-vis the Jackson candidacy. Just writing that sentence in an attempt to encapsulate the project of the book highlights (to me) how hard it is to capture what makes Reed so good. With Reed’s writing it’s much more than the thematic concerns of the article or book, it’s always, in addition to the poignant insights and sparkling sentences, the overall ethos of Reed’s engagement that makes the material edifying. Let me try to explain. Whenever I hear someone telling me he or she, or someone he or she is speaking on behalf of, “speaks truth to power” I cringe. I cringe because it’s a hackneyed phrase and because it’s so hackneyed has no explanatory power and usually the “power” in the phrase is a scary, pernicious entity like the . . . GOP. For obvious reasons, Reed wouldn’t be caught dead bloviating that he’s doing such (speaking truth to power), but I’ll say it on his behalf because that’s exactly what he does. He tells, and from what I can gather he’s been telling it this way for 45 years, political opponents, friends, and “allies” alike in what ways and to what extent he disagrees with them and how their analysis is lacking. Reed is what in today’s parlance one of ye little good faith would call a contrarian. Before debate and critical engagement become debased and impoverished to a degree that continues to amaze daily, Reed’s form of stiff-spined truth-telling and dirty-laundry exposing seriousness was just called being a smart dude who called it like he saw it. You know, it was also kind of what we called being an adult. Anway, that’s the ethos I’m talking about--a little Gore Vidal, a little Glenn Greenwald, but delivered in a truly unique register and cadence.

What else? “The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon” is so fresh because the same class dynamics, intra-elite jostling and positioning he chronicles in the Black political polity of the early eighties still exist today (and of course not just in the Black polity but within the political composition of whatever ascriptive identity you examine). Interest group politicking; fealty to petty bourgeois and bourgeois political concerns; mystifying a particular political class project (petty bourg and bourgeois) by claiming it is being waged on behalf of all Black people or all POC . . . this is the part of the review where I try to feebly reconstruct, or at least give a thumbnail version of, the flowing, precise argument set forth by Reed in the book. There is no need to. Reed did it; he wrote it across 140 pages and did so wonderfully. Suffice it to say the lessons, insights, examinations, and classifications Reed intricately traces and unpacks are chock-full of explanatory power for the political world which we inhabit presently. Neoliberalism in 1985 ain’t that much different from neoliberalism in 2021. The same stakes, the same mystifications of class projects, the same toothless counterbalance to capital (disorganized labor), and the same tortured dance steps by white Leftists trying to build working-class solidarity across ascriptive identities all the while while tipping of themselves with self-congratulatory, performative gestures to Black exceptionalism (whose exceptionalism bolstered under the banner of race reification further preludes class solidarity).

It appears Reed has a book coming out in February, “The South,” with a foreword by Barbara Fields. I cannot wait.

[Delanie Dooms · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's not much one can say about Adolph Reed, Jr., that is not praise.

This book details, more-or-less, the causes behind the Jesse Jackson campaign of 1984, and gives us insight into what must be done in the future to build proper black democracy.

This book is spread across eight chapters, the first few of which go over the Jesse Jackson campaign's claims and their dubiousness. This section of the book is very enticing, but the overall point which is made is one of entire simplicity: that we live in a world of causes and effect, where things like a single political campaign cannot be positioned as a thundering shaker and mover of the political world. Reed provides a materialist analysis that works in the Reaganite regime (and its consequences), local politics, and much else, to show the ambiguity of the supposed totalistic reign of Jackson.

The next few chapters take on a more complex tone, showing us the interrelationship between black people and other minorities, the Left & news media, and political elites.

Perhaps the main function of this text is to attempt to make the rather simple but equally important point that black people in America are not "exceptional" in their relation to the political climate. The same sense of nuance that comes with any other group comes with them, and, insofar as this is the case, we must repudiate the notion that there is a single, authentic vision of black politics, and that the various interests within this community work in opposition and frequent contradiction with one another.

Reed's insistence on a democratic and conversational approach to politics is heartening, but such a thing has not come to pass despite his claim of mundanity and simplicity of recommendation.