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

Nikhil Pal Singh's excellently written new book aims to recognize the "persistence and reclaim . . . the relevance" of "black freedom dreams" (4). This lofty goal is one shared by many black activists, scholars, and everyday people who have been striving for equality with increasing frustration since the end of de jure segregation. Singh's contribution to this ongoing task is commendable. Through a careful exploration of key intellectuals, movements, and texts of what he terms the "long civil rights movement," beginning between the world wars, the author proposes that we see black freedom dreams emerging from a consistent strain of black nationalism (writ large and small) and the creation of a black public sphere. He synthesizes contributions from African American history, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and whiteness studies to present a comprehensive picture of how and why these freedom dreams have not become a reality. Furthermore, and of great interest to scholars of rhetoric, media, and public affairs, he provides frameworks for how to dissect current discourses of race and equality.

The title refers to the idea that African American freedom dreaming has not been confined to operating only within the borders or the political ideals of the United States. Resonating with Houston Baker Jr.'s (1995) and Michael Warner's (1992/2000) critiques of Habermas's bourgeois public sphere, Singh makes a convincing case that we should not see slavery or racism as a mere blemish on the progressive narrative of universal human liberty provided by the Enlightenment and codified in the Constitution. Rather, Singh argues, thinkers from Frederick Douglass to Huey Newton realized that, despite the American myth that race and nation are mutually exclusive concepts, the very basis of U.S. democracy is tied up in racial exclusions. He urges us to question those who argue that because many "black activists and intellectuals have grounded their arguments within the prevailing discourses of American politics" there is little doubt that the nation contains all the necessary tools to achieve racial harmony and justice (19).

But what if this story is symptomatic of an equally longstanding failure in U.S. political culture, a failure to apprehend and interpret the enduring, invidious power of racial domination . . . in which individuals are considered equal with respect to nationality, and a persistent regression, in which the actual individuals and communities who benefit from national belonging are implicitly or explicitly constituted in white supremacist terms? If this is the case, then the idea that American universalism, and the moral primacy it attributes to individual freedom and civic egalitarianism, have worked to overcome racial division and racism is faulty—not merely an apology for racist practice, but implicated in creating and sustaining racial division.

(19–20)

Because property rights formed the basis of citizenship and the "universal" right to political participation, "the ideal national subject has actually been a highly specific person whose universality has been fashioned from a succession of those who have designated his antithesis, those irreducible non-national subjects who appeared in the different guises of the slave, Indian, and, at times, immigrant" (21). The exclusion of these groups has been central to the consolidation of national power; thus, black existence is repeatedly formulated as a problem, from the antebellum dreams of sending blacks back to Africa to Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma, to neoconservative calls for an end to all race-based public policies.

The persistent belief that race is not entangled with nationality or citizenship renders many black claims for justice unintelligible to those who cling to the myth of the universal citizen and American liberalism. For example, Singh's analysis of Myrdal's work (chapter 4) reveals it as a project that "expressly cast racial equality as the telos of American nationhood," again framing race and nation as mutually exclusive concepts (135). The social scientific approach to race, even as it called for more formal equality, still stated the problem as "a problem in...