Within the world of racial politics, Adolph Reed is the great modern denouncer. His day job, for forty years, was as a political scientist. (He is now emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.) But by night he has maintained a long-term position, too, as a left-wing lambaster of figures he believes are selling some vision of race for political expediency or profit. In Harper’s, the Village Voice, Jacobin, and smaller factional outlets, not all of them still operating, Reed has called out Barack Obama as a “vacuous opportunist,” and the scholars bell hooks and Michael Eric Dyson as “little more than hustlers, blending bombast, cliches, psychobabble, and lame guilt tripping in service to the ‘pay me’ principle.” For Reed, class is what divides people, and far too many political actors treat race as an all-explaining category.