In Chicago, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of the foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and a vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over paradigm [to] the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics.

--Excerpted from "The Curse of 'Community'", a chapter in Class Notes, Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene, by Adolph Reed, Jr. The New Press, New York. Distributed by W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright 2000.