Touré F. Reed to Deliver History's Donovan Lecture on 'Woke Neoliberalism'

Touré F. Reed, associate professor of history at Illinois State University, will present "Woke Neoliberalism: The Conservative Implications of Liberal Race Reductionism" as the Department of History's 2020 Timothy Donovan Lecturer at 7 p.m. Monday, March 2, in Giffels Auditorium in Old Main.

The lecture comes from Reed's just published book, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism. Reed contends that the road to a more just society for African Americans and everyone else is obstructed, in part, by a discourse that equates entrepreneurialism with freedom and independence. This, ultimately, insists on divorcing race and class.

In the age of runaway inequality and Black Lives Matter, there is an emerging consensus that our society has failed to redress racial disparities. The culprit, however, is not the sway of a metaphysical racism or the modern survival of a primordial tribalism. Instead, it can be traced to far more comprehensible forces, such as the contradictions in access to New Deal era welfare programs, the blinders imposed by the Cold War, and Ronald Reagan's neoliberal assault on the half-century long Keynesian consensus.

Reed earned his B.A. in American studies from Hampshire College and his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. He is a fourth generation African American educator and third generation professor. Reed's research focuses on the impact of race and class ideologies on African American civil rights politics and U.S. public policy from the Progressive Era through the present.

Reed is the author of Not Alms But Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950 and is co-author of Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of Black American Thought. His shorter pieces have appeared in LABOR, Catalyst, Jacobin, the New Republic, the Nation, and elsewhere.

Reed is engaged in research for a third monograph, titled New Deal Civil Rights: Class Consciousness and the Quest for Racial Equality, 1933-1948. He has received numerous grants and fellowships including the prestigious Kluge Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Library of Congress in support of New Deal Civil Rights.

The Donovan Lecture Series is named in honor of Timothy Donovan, former professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Arkansas, and has brought leading historians to campus. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.