Within the world of racial politics, Adolph Reed is the great modern denouncer. His day job, for forty years, was as a political scientist. (He is now emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.) But by night he has maintained a long-term position, too, as a left-wing lambaster of figures he believes are selling some vision of race for political expediency or profit. In Harper’s, the Village Voice, Jacobin, and smaller factional outlets, not all of them still operating, Reed has called out Barack Obama as a “vacuous opportunist,” and the scholars bell hooks and Michael Eric Dyson as “little more than hustlers, blending bombast, cliches, psychobabble, and lame guilt tripping in service to the ‘pay me’ principle.” For Reed, class is what divides people, and far too many political actors treat race as an all-explaining category.

Like his friend and ally Barbara Fields, a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of “Racecraft,” Reed tends to look skeptically on diversity programs or campaigns for reparations, which he believes redirect political energies for change into symbolic efforts that help just a few powerful Black people; these stances have put him in opposition to activist anti-racist thinkers, like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and to mainstream liberal figures, such as Isabel Wilkerson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “I taught Obama’s cohort—the Yale version,” Reed told me. “And I was struck by how many of them were so convinced that the whole purpose of the civil-rights movement was that people like them could go to Ivy League colleges and go to Wall Street afterward, how many of them were dispositively convinced that rich people are smarter than the rest of us.” It was the same perspective, Reed went on, that suggested that “more Oscars for Ava DuVernay is like a victory for the civil-rights movement, and not just for Ava DuVernay and her agent.”