"Black politics in New Orleans as elsewhere is a petit-bourgeois class politics that projects demands for group recognition as equivalent to demands for popular redistribution; as retrenchment has become the political norm, recognition has increasingly displaced redistribution
as the foundation of the political agenda. Even nominally insurgent or populist political expressions are articulated entirely within this framework, which is not without material stakes. The stakes, however, involve descriptive racial representation
— i.e., black beneficiaries as contractors, officials, or grantees who stand in for the black population as a whole — rather than more general social wage policies. Even “militants” or those who understand themselves as insurgent activists abjure the latter in favor of a...
...rhetorical anti-racism and demands for recognition of diversity. Recognition of diversity confers primarily symbolic benefits to the black population in general and material benefits to specific individuals who organize, administer, and enact the recognition.
A politics anchored to this asymmetrical structure of benefits depends on a rhetoric of authenticity no less than touristic ideology does; it can work only to the extent that individuals or small groups can successfully present themselves as linked organically to a larger...
...but amorphous constituency – e.g., a “black community” – on whose behalf they speak."--Adolph Reed, Jr.
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