"Adolph Reed and his ilk believe that if we talk about race too much we will alienate too many, and that will keep us from building a movement."

"We don’t want that — we want to win white people to an understanding of how their racism has fundamentally distorted the lives of Black people," said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton professor of African-American studies and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, quoted in "A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury/The cancellation of a speech reflects an intense debate on the left: Is racism the primary problem in America today, or the outgrowth of a system that oppresses all poor people?" (NYT).

Also quoted, Cornel West, the Harvard professor of philosophy, who is a Socialist: “God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation. He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century. If you give up discussion, your movement moves toward narrowness."

From Reed himself: "An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types. There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence."

Buried in the article is Reed's opinion of Joe Biden: his “tender mercies have been reserved for the banking and credit card industries.” I'd like to hear more of that — skepticism about Biden's racial politics.