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“to look within the jug, examine its varied contents, and pour them
freely into the world.”
<h1>Stirrings in the Jug</h1>
<h2>Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era</h2>
<div class="details">
<div class="pub"><strong>1999</strong></div>
•
<div class="author"> <span>Author:</span>
<div class="Contributors">
<p>Adolph Reed Jr.<br>
Foreword by Julian Bond</p>
<p><img
src="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/stirrings-in-the-jug/image_cover_medium"
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Adolph Reed Jr. has been called “the smartest person of
any race, class, or gender writing on race, class, and
gender” (Katha Pollitt, <em>Mother Jones</em>) and
“refreshing and radical. Serious, even courageous” (Adam
Schatz, <em>The Nation</em>)—as well as many less polite
terms—for his bare-knuckled approach to political
analysis. In<em> Stirrings in the Jug,</em> Reed offers a
sweeping and incisive analysis of racial politics during
the post-civil rights era.</p>
<p>Skeptical of received wisdom, Reed casts a critical eye
on political trends in the black community over the last
thirty years. He examines the rise of a new black
political class in the aftermath of the civil rights era,
and bluntly denounces black leadership that is not
accountable to a black constituency; such leadership, he
says, functions as a proxy for white elites. Reed debunks
as myths the “endangered black male” and the “black
underclass,” and punctures what he views as the
exaggeration and self-deception surrounding the black
power movement and the Malcolm X revival. He chastises the
Left, too, for its failure to develop an alternative
politics, then lays out a practical leftist agenda and
reasserts the centrality of political action.</p>
<p>“In the early 1960s,” Reed writes, “Ralph Ellison
lamented the disposition ‘to see segregation as an opaque
steel jug with the Negroes inside waiting for some black
messiah to come along and blow the cork.’” In<em>
Stirrings in the Jug, </em>Reed challenges us to
advance emancipatory and egalitarian interests in black
political life and in society at large—“to look within the
jug, examine its varied contents, and pour them freely
into the world.”
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<p>
$24.50 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-2681-6
<br>
320 pages, 5 7/8 x 9, 1999 <br>
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<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/stirrings-in-the-jug">https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/stirrings-in-the-jug</a><br>
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