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

Black Is a Country by Nikhil Pal Singh is a no-nonsense history of black social thought in the twentieth century. Singh writes with both passion and rigor. "Struggles to claim universality for black people," Singh argues, "have challenged not only particularism masquerading as a universalism, but a universalism distorted by its long monopolization against blacks" (45).Among the topics this book revisits with fresh insight are: the hard-hitting work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the various paths of black activism between the World Wars, the ambivalent project of Gunnar Myrdal at mid-century, and the connection as well as the divergence between the civil rights movement in the United States and decolonization struggles elsewhere.Seeking to undo "the mystifying imprecision of the word" (132), this book meditates on freedom. It offers a sobering reminder that today (and not just in developing countries) the access to the means for making oneself truly human continue to be narrow, or selective at best. The problems of inequity in African America are linked to the fate of other peoples for whom freedom continues to be scarce, due to race and class lines. Echoing Du Bois, Singh suggests that democracy remains in need of "wholesale reconstruction" (96).Here is another sentence to underline in Singh's book: "The specific danger is that many of the valuable insights derived from the ethics and politics of living and overcoming Jim Crow are now being squandered. More worrisome, the steady denial of the deep legacies of historical racism now contributes to the idea of an America restored to an identity with itself and with the destiny of all humanity" (57).In a certain way then, this book is also an affirmation. It is a record of the culture and practices that African Americans have cultivated, exercising the freedom to act ethically and to build a world. As Singh guides us through black social thought, we realize that the struggle against racism is relevant to anyone concerned with distributing not just the human image but also the material forms of access to the universal, among as many persons as possible (in their own terms) in as many time zones across our planet.Buy this book and read it more than once---along with Seeing Through Race by W.J.T. Mitchell.

This is a really great book to learn an extensive amount on black history. A majority of the stuff in the book was completely new to me and dealt with black history at a very high level. Definitely worth buying and keeping in your collection!!!