Pradnya Garud
Touré F. Reed, professor of 20th-century US and African American History at Illinois State University, talks to Round Table India on a wide range of topics about US history and politics. In Part 1, he delves into US electoral politics, focusing on white nationalism and its roots.
Pradnya: How would you describe the current situation in the U.S. to an international audience?
Touré F. Reed: Not good. The Democrats and the Republicans are BOTH committed to Identity Politics (IDPOL). The allegation of a bipartisan commitment to IDPOL will likely sound weird to some, since identity politics has become synonymous with liberal or progressive politics.
Identity politics is unquestionably pluralist; however, I think the presumptions driving this particular brand of pluralism are fairly conservative.
But when you get down to it, white nationalism is a form of identity politics. Liberals and progressives alike, correctly, understand white nationalism to be a conservative ideology. For contemporary liberals and progressives, white nationalism’s conservativism comes down to a couple of things: the presumption of white superiority over POCs and, of course, the desired outcome of white domination of non-whites. While these are important elements of the white nationalism’s conservatism, I would suggest the white nationalism is conservative not only for the above reasons but because it presumes that racial groups are intrinsically different—distinguished by discrete interests, temperaments, and dispositions.
Antiracist or intersectionality informed progressive and liberal visions of IDPOL, obviously reject the rightness of white superiority and, by extension, white domination of non-whites. But these liberal frames generally insist that blacks are bound together across time and place. Constructs like “the black community” or “black culture”—both of which a lot of us use without ever reflecting on the implications—presume that blacks share a unitary and distinct experience that translates into a shared vision of the world and even a common interest. Constructs like Afrocentric Consciousness or the Black Radical tradition build on this presumption of “sameness” to advance the view that blacks’ distinct, historic positionality as an oppressed “community” has imbued blacks (perhaps especially black women) with a vision, foresight, and progressivism that insulates us from contemporaneous political and ideological influences—apart from racism— which affirmatively distinguishes us from other populations.
It always feels good to be one of the “elect” or the “chosen.” But that feeling of affirmation isn’t the stuff of addressing the declining middle class. It’s also not the stuff of addressing racial disparities in housing, employment, education, the criminal justice system, and so on. In fact, I think it does the Devil’s work, insofar as IDPOL framings, be they in the hands of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, are appealing to both parties because they shift our focus on the sources of misery in life away from material power, or class, toward so-called cultural issues or even abstract concepts—like immigration, abortion rights, DEI or affirmative action, gun rights, the decline of family values, etc.
I know some will read this and say that I’m dismissing the value of cultural or social issues by suggesting that they are distractions from the so-called real economic issues. I promise you that this is not what I’m doing, if only because I appreciate the significance of the things I sketched above and more—some of which are very important to me, personally.
But the point is if you pluck these issues out from the material world that we live in by framing them as “identity” issues—and this is the work that “identity” does— then you balkanize them. In other words, you narrow the terms of debate in a way that obscures the full implications of the issues and, by extension, limits the ability to address real, serious issues. I’ll give you a couple of examples.
Let’s take abortion rights as one example. Basically, from the Clinton era forward, abortion rights rhetoric has pivoted off of an individual woman’s right to choose what to do with her body. This is, of course, an important aspect of abortion rights, but as women’s “identity” issue, it functions politically as an alternative to an abortion rights politics that might be wed to women’s reproductive health issues broadly, access to birth control, access to prenatal care, access to daycare, and even family planning. In other words, if we didn’t frame abortion rights as an “identity” issue, we could deepen the base of support for it as part of a larger narrative about public health and, of course, the huge obstacles to stability or family formation (if that’s something one wants to do) created by our anemic system of public goods— private healthcare system, our underfunded public education system, etc. Some of those on the other side who currently see abortion as immoral could relate to the immorality of this system that makes it very difficult for even well-educated Americans to just lead healthy lives let alone to form families. That might help win more of them over—men among them—by wedding the issue of abortion to public goods and investments.
I know some would hear that as putting women on the back burner. I don’t see it that way at all. I see that as emphasizing the humanity of women—particularly women in the margins—since abortion rights have many implications. And frankly, if it were as simple as a “women’s issue,” then one-third of women wouldn’t be “pro-life” (anti-abortion), 40% of men wouldn’t identify as “pro-choice” (according to a recent Gallup poll).
Affirmative action/DEI is the second example I’ll point to. To make sure the reader doesn’t lose sight of this, I need to stress from the outset that, in origin, antidiscrimination policies like affirmative action were fundamentally about redressing poverty—blacks’ overrepresentation among the poor and unemployed. They were not about promoting “diversity.” That’s hard to imagine, since at this point most of us use diversity and affirmative action interchangeably—shaped by both the place of diversity in higher education following SCOTUS’s Bakke verdict and the corporate embrace of affirmative action by the 1990s.
I say this, though, because somehow Democratic post-election analysis in both 2016 and 2024 insists that fear of “diversity” rather than economic anxieties catapulted Trump to the White House. Let’s just ignore the fact that support for Trump among non-whites grew between 2016 and 2024. I don’t know how one can distill racial resentments from economic anxieties. By the 1970s, the Right had successfully equated affirmative action with quotas that displaced deserving/qualified white guys in favor of undeserving, unqualified black and brown people (whatever their sex) and women (whatever their race). As I said from the start, by the 1990s, diversity and affirmative action were essentially synonymous. So, among conservatives, diversity meant quotas that disadvantaged whites in employment and avenues to employment like college and graduate schools by promoting undeserving blacks and Hispanics. Over the past several years, DEI has replaced diversity, which means DEI is now synonymous with economically disadvantaging qualified whites in favor of unqualified blacks and Hispanics.
This is all to say that fear of diversity is inextricably linked to fears of economic precarity. This association would be further amplified by a privilege discourse that equates whiteness with privilege (often consisting of a formal checklist announcing what might be better understood as class privilege) and blackness with underprivilege (often consisting of a checklist of items that might better be understood as class privilege).
Anyway, do anti-discrimination policies have to be synonymous with white displacement? NO! As I said from the start, in origin, affirmative action was about redressing disparities rather than representing identities. Disparities have persisted, despite more than half a century of affirmative action, not simply because the racists have gone underground—which is far from a new concept. The big problem is antidiscrimination laws, as well as Kennedy’s and Johnson’s executive orders establishing affirmative action, came to be about a decade into the structural transformation of the US economy from a blue-collar, unionized economy to a white-collar, high-tech, service economy, and just about a decade before the genesis of Neoliberalism.
The relevance of this to my larger point is that opting to discuss racial disparities simply in terms of identity undermines the cause in much the same way pro-choice IDPOL does. Liberals might champion or even prioritize—as they did during the Racial Reckoning— diversity initiatives and hiring as a very narrow, IDPOL-informed case for creating some job openings for a pool of well-qualified minorities in an increasingly competitive labor market. In this context, diversity purportedly adds to the competitiveness of a firm by capitalizing on the plurality of talents and crucially, perspectives that comprise heterogeneous markets.
As we already know, conservatives responded, predictably, by casting “diversity hiring” as reverse discrimination. This characterization stings especially harshly in hyper-competitive job markets.
Though I’m a big fan of “diversity” and appreciate its utility, one big problem with the IDPOL case for racial justice is that it is now distinct from economic justice. For us today, back poverty or incarceration rates aren’t part larger economic or political trends— deindustrialization, declining union participation, public sector retrenchment, trade policy, Federal Reserve Policy, etc. Since this class context off the table, today liberals insist that racial disparities are expressions of primordial white racism. The class context was also off the table from Reagan through Obama, with a very different set of bad actors. But back then, conservatives as well as Democrats/liberals insisted the problem was black people themselves—black cultural dysfunction.
In the 1960s, by contrast, the case of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph made for what would become affirmative action was wed to a case for economic justice for all working Americans. Identity politics takes this off the table.
Pradnya: Why do you think Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election?
Touré F. Reed: Harris lost for a lot of reasons. I will volunteer that I don’t think that Harris lost either solely or principally because of racism, sexism, or misogynoir. Just compare Harris’s share of the so-called white vote with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. It seems that 42% of whites cast ballots for Harris. This means she performed slightly worse with whites than Biden, who got 44% of the white vote. Though in 1996 and 2008, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama performed better with whites than Harris did, Harris actually got a larger share of the white vote than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama had in 1992 and 2012, respectively. Harris also performed much better with white voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, despite the fact that HRC won the popular vote by a pretty convincing margin.
The bottom line is that Harris underperformed with non-white voters. Harris did especially poorly with Hispanic men, but she underperformed with non-white women. In fact, she performed no better with black women than Biden had in 2020.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that racism and sexism played no role in some voters’ decision to reject Harris. It is a given that some white voters and maybe some non-white voters were turned off by Harris’s race, sex, or both. But this is a reality the DNC would have been considered from the start, just as they had with Obama. And the fact that Harris performed as well with whites as one would expect of any Democrat since Bill Clinton should make it hard to settle on the view that racism, sexism, or misogynoir comprised the engine that drove Harris into downtown “Loserville.”
That said, I think Harris’s loss is fairly easy to explain. Biden was very unpopular. Harris refused to distance herself from him. Inflation and Gaza hurt Biden with some Democratic constituencies. Harris’s unexpected candidacy marked the third successive presidential race in which the process for choosing the Democratic candidate was dispiritingly bureaucratic. Harris had only about three months to campaign, but worse yet, for whatever reason, her four years as VP were undistinguished. And Harris is also not the greatest communicator on that stage. For what it’s worth, I have a lot of sympathy for Harris with respect to the difficulties she would have had securing a comfortable public footing because I think Biden disadvantaged her by first, guaranteeing that his then-to-be determined running mate would be a woman—which made her the rightwing caricature of an affirmative action or DEI hire that the Right predictably characterized as. And second, he didn’t really seem to give her much to do as VP. Finally, I don’t imagine the Democrats’ attachments to IDPOL helped much. As I alluded to previously, the GOP had long ago succeeded in equating the Democrats’ commitment to “diversity” or even more equitable taxation with the liberals’ alleged commitment to propping up profligate minorities at the expense of deserving and hard-working Americans. I should stress that this predates Trump by decades, even if the expressions of this view that characterize Trumpism are uniquely chilling.
I should also stress that although I used “deserving and hard-working Americans” to refer to this moment, up until fairly recently “deserving” and the “hard-working” had long been code for “white.”
Having said that, I think the parameters of the deserving and undeserving are more complicated today (less rigidly racial), but that, in itself, is not a good thing. In fact, I think the ranks of the self-identified deserving Americans have gotten deeper or, dare I say, more diverse, as the checklist of undeserving people has grown.
One expression of what I’m getting at here is the number of Hispanic voters, birthright and naturalized alike, who voted for President Trump, partly because of his anti-immigrant stance. A lot of individuals who “immigrated legally” are antagonistic toward those who took the so-called easy, “illegal” route to live in America. In other words, we have deserving “legal” non-white Hispanic immigrants who dislike undeserving “illegal” equally non-white Hispanic immigrants.
I think one would find a version of these kinds of sentiments among black male Trump voters, some of whom, I’m sure, were turned off by the Democrats’ (Obama among them) commitment to attributing low-enthusiasm for Harris among black men to their presumed sexism. Here too, a narrative of “displacement” would have resonated with some black men. Since Hillary Clinton’s loss, the Democrats’ embrace of intersectionality, combined with black women’s exceptionally strong support for Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Harris, has fueled admonitions of black men (straight black men, in particular) as a drag if not reactionary force in black life. You’re not going to win the votes of people you opt to insult before election day.
It seems, as well, that the place of Trans identity in Democratic and liberal discourse, if not policy, may likewise have resonated with some voters as a form of “displacement”—from a variety of quarters.
Once again, though, identity politics is part of the problem. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be invested in LGBTQ rights, or the rights of blacks and other racial minorities, or immigrant rights, and so on. These are all important and worthy projects. The problem I’m pointing to, though, is how liberals and progressives have come to conceptualize these issues, which I think is counterproductive both politically but even interpersonally.
Most people have lost sight of this but antidiscrimination policies (as opposed to antiracism) distinguished between the public and private spheres. Antidiscrimination policies made it illegal to discriminate against protected classes (race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, religion, creed) in the public sphere. Those laws, however, did not and do not challenge one’s right to harbor racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. beliefs or feelings. Your views and the people you chose to associate with in your personal life were your own. Put another way, just as the state has the power to outlaw bank robbery (an act in the public sphere that has societal consequences) but no power to outlaw fantasizing about robbing a bank, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 outlawed racial, sex, ethnic, etc. discrimination (acts or behaviors in the public sphere that have societal consequences) but not racist, sexist, xenophobic, ethnocentric attitudes.
The relevance here is that the public sphere threshold those laws expected us all to meet was tolerance. Acceptance, by contrast, was not the benchmark.
There are many reasons, I think it makes far more sense to think of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and so on as categories that announce social relation or position rather than identities. One of the big problems with thinking about the above as “identities” is that doing so has translated to a fight for social justice that is about acknowledgement of the “rightness” of “what you are” (which, for what it’s worth, is always in some degree of flux and transition) rather than your right to fair treatment in the public sphere—in the workplace, in the classroom, at the shopping mall, in the housing market, etc.
In other words, the “identity” framework (just like antiracism) takes off the table tolerance. Since identity frameworks equate “tolerance” with capitulation, then missionary-style proselytizing and admonitions of sinners who refuse to celebrate the identity of “the other” would seem appropriate and reasonable.
To be clear, if you’re a missionary with the backing of capital ships and marines, then asserting your moral superiority via righteous fire and brimstone style proselytizing and condemnations of the heathens before you is not unreasonable. As long as the capital ships are offshore and your marines’ base is within convenient screaming distance, you’re not likely to lose. By contrast, if your end game is to win progressive policies in a pluralistic democracy, then tolerance is the better threshold.
Once more, one reason tolerance is the better play is that few of us want our boss or our government directly telling us how to think and feel about things—our attitudes are our own (even as they too change with time and often rarely acknowledged ways). Our forefathers and foremothers long ago accepted the power of government to regulate behaviors in the public sphere, even if the parameters of that expression of government power are not a constant. But telling us who we have to accept or celebrate in the public sphere is a bridge too far, especially since many times the win for one group is bound up with a condemnation of another—that displacement thing I mentioned previously.
This is to say, Harris may not have overreached herself. But I suspect a lot of voters were turned off by Democrats’ and liberals’ rhetorical overreach. This did not help Harris, nor does it do anything good for the rest of us.
Pradnya: The shift of working-class men away from the Democratic Party has become one of the central themes of post-election analysis. Why do you think many men are becoming disenchanted with the Democratic Party?
Touré F. Reed: I alluded to this in my previous answer. As you say, many men do vote Democrat. So, I wouldn’t suggest that men have become disenchanted with the Democratic Party. But many men don’t think the Democratic Party has much to offer them.
That said, one of my former dissertation advisors and mentors, Judith Stein, had observed that blue-collar voters didn’t so much leave the Democratic Party as the Democratic Party left them, with the election of Jimmy Carter. Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were not friends to organized labor. Joe Biden, of course, was a pro-union Democrat— the first in my lifetime. And yet Biden’s support for unions did not translate into major successes for Harris.
I think there are many things happening. One— and I say this living in the Midwest in proximity to blue-collar Trump supporters— a lot of Americans are one or two issue voters. So, the candidate who is the champion of the one or two issues they care about is going to get their vote. The other particulars don’t matter.
Two, most people don’t think about the details of policies; they vote on impressions. This is a bipartisan problem. In fact, this why white liberal acquaintances of mine in the 1990s could say that while they shared my discomfort with the 1994 and 1996 crime and welfare reform acts, I should still vote for Bill Clinton, rather than sit out, because Bill didn’t really want to sign those bills into law; he just had to in order to get elected. No one who thought that politics was first and foremost about getting the policies one wants would utter that statement aloud. But a lot of us, across partisan lines, attach ourselves to a party or a politician who resonates with how we see ourselves—like being a Cubs fan because you identify with people from north Chicago suburbs or being a White Sox fan because you identify with working-class, ethnics on Chicago’s South Side.
Three, Trump’s loutish persona is bound up with a righteousness of its own. To his supporters, Trump is speaking truth as power to power in the name of “the pissed upon” at the very same time he’s giving away our future to Peter Thiel.
This is yet another expression of why I would argue that identity politics is doing the Devil’s work. If tolerance and coalition building are off the table, then how do you win the 80,000 votes across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election or the 300,000 votes (or whatever the number) by which Harris lost the swing states? I suppose, a Democrat could luck up and find himself running for POTUS at the very same moment the electorate has lost confidence in the GOP, both because the outgoing Republican administration was stuck with a housing and stock market crash and the Republican presidential candidate has decided to pick an unseasoned, gaffe-prone, word salad spinner for his running mate. I guess another possibility is a Democrat could run for POTUS at the very same moment the Republican incumbent is mishandling a global pandemic. On this trajectory, though, I’m fearful that the next Democratic presidential victory will only happen after Trump tries to outlaw looking up at that lithium-rich asteroid on a collision course with Earth. And, of course, even if the Democrats made their way into the White House under such circumstances, they’d still likely try to find a market-based solution to our asteroid problem, because it would feel too much like socialism to raise taxes on rich people to finance the asteroid killing laser that might save us all.
Anyway, some will say that I’m ignoring or minimizing the role of racial resentments here. But I would obviously disagree with this charge. The Republicans have been race-baiting since Reagan, if not Nixon. This is what they do. What I’m saying, though, is at the same time Republicans are scapegoating (race-baiting and trans-baiting) to pull into their orbit voters who derive few tangible rewards from the GOP’s tax-cutting, deregulatory agenda, the Democrats are pushing those same people into the GOP’s arms via identity politics frameworks that insist on casting working-class white men as a privileged group of toxic deplorables who are finally getting their comeuppance. Frankly, I think a version of the same thing is at play vis-à-vis black men, though it’s far less advanced.
You may win a place in Heaven by telling heathens they’re damned to Hell. But you won’t win votes by telling people you don’t know that they are irredeemable jerks who deserve to be punished for the sins of their fathers as well as their own.
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Touré F. Reed is Professor of 20th-century US and African American History at Illinois State University. He is the author of Not Alms But Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950 (UNC Press) and Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (Verso Books). Professor Reed is currently working on his third book-length monograph, Menace II Equality: How the Entertainment Industry Sold Reaganism to Black Americans.
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Acronyms:
GOP: Republican Party known as the ‘Grand Old Party’
DNC: Democratic National Committee
SCOTUS: Supreme Court of the United States
POTUS: President of the United States
HRC: Hillary Rodham Clinton
DEI: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
POC: People of Color
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This interview was conducted via email in the summer of 2025. Please read part 2 here.
