"In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices, one of them a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous to repressive neo-liberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and developmental worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community talking about meetings in kitchens, small scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program, the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform. In favoring form over substance, I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the IMF has sway. So far the black activist response hasn't been up to the challenge. We have to do better."
----- Adolph Reed, December 1995
Source: Useful Idiots, July 3, 2020
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