Adolph Reed Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. He is also an organizer with the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute’s Medicare for All – South Carolina initiative.

Reed is widely known for his writings on race, class, and American politics; his two most recent books are “The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives” and, with Walter Benn Michaels, “No Politics But Class Politics”, both from 2022. He is currently completing a book titled “When Compromises Come Home to Roost: The Decline and Transformation of the U.S. Left” From Verso, and a good part of our discussion focusses on an article drawn from one of its chapters (link below). In addition, he is the co-author, with Kenneth Warren, of “Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality: The Farce this Time”(https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003569947/black-studies-cultural-politics-evasion-inequality-adolph-reed-jr-kenneth-warren?refId=222811c552-74b8-4258-8fa4-3ebd2edae170context=ubx_, about to be published by Routledge. Reed is also a regular contributor to the “Class Matters podcast”(https://classmatterspodcast.org/podcast_category/episodes/) produced by the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute.

The articles that framed our discussion:
“Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair”(https://nonsite.org/looking-backward-to-counter-mysticism-and-despair/) (June 16th, 2025)
“Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss”(https://nonsite.org/going-forward-from-the-edge-of-the-abyss/) (November 11th, 2024)

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