The Retrograde Quest for Symbolic Prophets of Black Liberation
Moving beyond the Moses Complex
Reed, Adolph Jr.
http://newrepublic.com/article/161124/retrograde-quest-symbolic-prophets-black-liberation
Date Written: 2021-02-17
Publisher: New Republic
Year Published: 2021
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX24347
One little-examined legacy of the broader intellectual embrace of race-reductive thinking is something we might call the Quest for Moses(es)—the shorthand branding exercise of privileging the content of individual characters in our debates on racial injustice. We see this tendency in much of today’s wokeness-inflected discourse, which leans heavily on appealing to the authority individuals considered to be exemplary, from differing times or historical contexts, in lieu of empirical arguments to support assertions concerning how we should understand racial injustice.
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