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Reviewed by:
  • Black Natural Law by Vincent W. Lloyd
  • Ronald B. Neal
Vincent W. Lloyd. Black Natural Law. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. 180 pp. $55.00.

Vincent W. Lloyd's Black Natural Law is concerned with the state of black politics in contemporary America. In Black Natural Law, Lloyd argues that contemporary black politics suffers from a loss of purpose and direction in relation to the condition of the black majority in the United States. He contends that the black political class has gotten lost in the machinations of current electoral politics and the race-neutral ideological agendas of liberals and leftists, multiculturalism, and secularism. In a word, present-day black politics has no depth or foundation, and worse, no future to propose to many black Americans in the United States. In Lloyd's account, so dire is the state of black politics, that even the two-term electoral achievement of the first black President of the United States, Barack Obama (a risk-averse president along the line of race), was reflective of the impoverished state of black political life in America. If there is a single social phenomenon that points to this crisis, it is mass incarceration. Unlike the institutions of slavery and de jure and de facto Jim Crow, legal segregation, the problem of mass incarceration has not yielded a robust movement of dissent on the part of the black political class. In Lloyd's account, where the black political class is concerned, there is no consensus on the gravity of mass incarceration as an urgent political interest. More profoundly, beyond mass incarceration, there is no agreement on what counts as the shared condition among black Americans. What Lloyd calls "black natural law" attempts to overcome this dilemma.

According to Lloyd, black natural law is a tradition of natural law with a unique outlook on human nature, which was employed by black political elites from the antebellum period to the civil rights era. Through a close reading of the lives and legacies of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Lloyd identifies a tradition of natural law, represented by these figures, in addressing the condition of the black majority during their lifetimes. In each chapter, Lloyd outlines the distinct manner in which each figure employed black natural law. Lloyd delineates black natural law in terms of three distinct themes: reason, imagination, and emotion. These themes, which are also universal human faculties, were integral to a metaphysical, legal, and existential attack on the culture and institutions of segregation. Being denied legal recognition as citizens of the United States and recognition as human beings, Jim Crow-era elites had to appeal to a higher law—the law of God—to champion the cause of black freedom. The appeal to the law of God was inseparable from the creative use of reason, imagination, and emotion. Lloyd contends that black natural law is an unacknowledged tradition that is related to yet distinct from the mainstream traditions of Catholic natural law. Although related to Catholic natural law writ large, black natural law, in its engagement with race, goes beyond the Catholic theological mainstream. As Lloyd argues, "black natural law offers the best way to approach politics, not just for blacks but for everyone. It is the approach that ought to be taken. The black natural law tradition addresses the same problems addressed by other natural law traditions, but it offers [End Page 307] more coherent and compelling responses" (ix). For Lloyd, this tradition warrants serious consideration in the resuscitation of black politics in the United States.

Black Natural Law offers an incisive critique of the current political mood of the United States and more significantly, that of the black political class. Its invocation of higher law (God's law) and the primacy of reason, emotion, and imagination in political discernment, is a direct challenge to a political class that is fragmented in terms of identity and ideology. It is a rebuke of political relativism in light of the persistence of antiblackness and racism in the United States, mass incarceration being one of its most visible outcomes. Overall, Lloyd attributes the weakness of black politics...

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