| The renowned Black scholar Adolph Reed opposes the politics of anti-racism, describing it as a cover for capitalism.  Photograph by Eric Sucar / Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Adolph Reed is a leftist “at odds with just about everyone” on the left, owing to his longstanding argument that “class is what divides people, and far too many political actors treat race as an all-explaining category,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes. Reed, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has called Barack Obama a “vacuous opportunist,” and bell hooks and Michael Eric Dyson “little more than hustlers”—and there are few signs that he has blunted his skewers. Of some of his critics within the Democratic Socialists of America, who opposed his appearance before chapters of the group and accused him of “class reductionism,” he says, “This is a handful of jerkoffs who had their Cheerios that fucking morning.” Yet Wallace-Wells also finds Reed contemplating the apparent futility of leftism, while feeling the threat of Trumpism acutely—his Zoom background is of a tsunami, which he describes as representing his concerns about the rise of authoritarianism and the fall of American democracy. How does an iconoclast of the left respond during a time of alarming democratic erosion caused by the right? —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor Read the story. | 
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