Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy

by Singh

Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to the history of black struggle.

It is through the words and thought of key black intellectuals, like Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and others, as well as movement activists like Malcolm X and Black Panthers, that vital new ideas emerged and circulated. Their most important achievement was to create and sustain a vibrant, black public sphere broadly critical of U.S. social, political, and civic inequality.

Finding racism hidden within the universalizing tones of reform-minded liberalism at home and global democratic imperatives abroad, race radicals alienated many who saw them as dangerous and separatist. Few wanted to hear their message then, or even now, and yet, as Singh argues, their passionate skepticism about the limits of U.S. democracy remains as indispensable to a meaningful reconstruction of racial equality and universal political ideals today as it ever was.

Genres: Race, Nonfiction, Politics, History, Academic, Philosophy, Theory

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 2004

Reviews

[Scott Neigh]

History. A reexamination of the Black civil rights movement in the US. The conventional narrative frames it as a struggle that took place from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and that involved pushing the US nation and state to more completely live up to the supposed high principles of its founding by admitting Black people to the rights of liberal-democratic citizenship. This isn’t wrong, exactly, though decades later it is often used as a cudgel by those committed to romanticizing America’s supposed greatness and exceptionalism and to denying the persistence of racism. This book argues that, first of all, it is more useful to examine Black struggles from the 1930s to the end of the 1960s – the “long civil rights movement.” And it points out that all throughout this period (and implicitly stretching to the present), there has been a tension between that struggle as nation-bound and organized around liberal-democratic rights and notions of freedom, and as internationalist and committed to reframing things like “freedom” and “justice” through Black experience in a way that would necessitate transformative change far beyond any individual nation-state and beyond any comfortable liberal categories. It traces this complex dynamic mostly through the work of prominent Black American intellectuals, writers, and activists – including their explorations of different ways of thinking the interrelatedness of class, race, and nation – as well as through important documents and government policy initiatives. Definitely interesting, and I think perhaps even more immediately politically relevant today than it was when it was published in 2004.

[Ferentz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reads well alongside Joseph's Waiting til the Midnight Hour.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The analysis of the interaction between ideals of a universalist American liberal nationalism and black liberation is an extremely interesting topic and and well addressed from several perspectives, but lacks a clearly defined standard of analysis by which to judge the many different movements, thinkers, and ideologies which this book addresses, which ultimately leads to a chain of well developed individual analyses without a strong overarching narrative in which to place those pieces

[Stella Metcalf]

honestly a headache to read - i think we agree on a fundamental level but he writes imprecisely

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not a historian and this was a history book in the ways I find history often limiting.

[Hollis]

This book provides a remarkable study of post-WWII through Civil Rights era U.S. race management within the frame of global Cold War politics. I love Singh's suggestion that "we might think of race, racism, and fictive ethnicity as mysteries lodged within the ‘hyphen’ joining the nation and the state, society and the market, liberalism and democracy” (37). I found productive readings of race compared to ethnicity, state-sanctioned 'antiracist' campaigns that limited material change, as well as the place that race held to position America in the global sphere as a 'universal' nation-state. In particular, Singh privileges the voices of W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, as well as Harold Cruse and James Baldwin getting peripheral looks. This gives the text an admittedly masculinist lens, leaving one to wonder why the lack of, to lean on the most obvious exclusion, Claudia Jones? Though, that is a small drawback for what is a generally phenomenal study. Away from individual figures, I was also swayed by Singh's reading of the Black Panther Party in Chapter Five, where he frames them as “practitioners of an insurgent form of visibility… in which militant sloganeering, bodily display, and spectacular actions simultaneous signified their possession and yet real lack of power” (203). All told, this is one of the more satisfyingly history books I've gotten through.

[Ben]

Uses the history of Black Americans as a case study to interrogate the universalist American ideal. Every time there is a truly radical critique of American consensus, that critique is, through a process of negative dialectic, absorbed by the universalist ideal until it not only ceases to be a challenge, but helps support its hegemonic power (for example, Lincoln in memory, and the way that MLK was transformed after his death from a radical spokesman against all forms of inequality to a sort of banal figure who wanted everyone to hold hands)

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

unselfconscious left hegelianism meets the color line, with mixed results