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.”

Cornel West, at times one of Reed’s targets (Reed once denounced him as “a freelance race relations consultant and Moral Voice for whites”) and lately an ally, told me, “Brother Adolph has three deep hatreds. He hates the ugly consequences of predatory capitalist processes. And he hates the neoliberal rationalization for those predatory capitalist processes. And he hates the use of race as a construct that promotes the neoliberal rationalization of predatory capitalist processes. A trinity of hatreds—you could almost put that as the epitaph on his grave.” Among the left-of-center, this puts Reed at odds with just about everyone, which means that there are few more interesting developments in intellectual politics than the news that Adolph Reed is on the warpath.