In Democracy's Reconstruction, the latest addition to Cathy Cohen and Fredrick Harris's Transgressing Boundaries series, noted political theorist Lawrie Balfour challenges a longstanding tendency in political theory: the disciplinary division that separates political theory proper from the study of black politics. Political theory rarely engages with black political thinkers, despite the fact that the problem of racial inequality is central to the entire enterprise of American political theory. To address this lacuna, she focuses on the political thought of W.E.B. Du Bois,...

Black people in the British Empire have long challenged the notion that "there ain't no black in the Union Jack." For the post-World War II wave of Afro-Caribbean migrants, many of whom had long been subjects of the Empire, claims to a British identity and imperial citizenship were considered to be theirs by birthright. However, while Britain was internationally touted as a paragon of fair play and equal justice, they arrived in a nation that was frequently hostile and unwilling to incorporate Black people into its concept of what it meant to be British. Black Britons therefore confronted the...

Audre Lorde was not only a famous poet; she was also one of the most important radical black feminists of the past century. Her writings and speeches grappled with an impressive broad list of topics, including sexuality, race, gender, class, disease, the arts, parenting, and resistance, and they have served as a transformative and important foundation for theorists and activists in considering questions of power and social justice. Lorde embraced difference, and at each turn she emphasized the importance of using it to build shared strength among marginalized communities.

I Am Your...

In Democracy Remixed, award-winning scholar Cathy J. Cohen offers an authoritative and empirically powerful analysis of the state of black youth in America today. Utilizing the results from the Black Youth Project, a groundbreaking nationwide survey, Cohen focuses on what young Black Americans actually experience and think--and underscores the political repercussions. Featuring stories from cities across the country, she reveals that black youth want, in large part, what most Americans want--a good job, a fulfilling life, safety, respect, and equality. But while this generation has...

On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers?

Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, John Diamond and Amanda Lewis have created a rich and...

In The Power of Race in Cuba, Danielle Pilar Clealand analyzes racial ideologies that negate the existence of racism and their effect on racial progress and activism through the lens of Cuba. Since 1959, Fidel Castro and the Cuban government have married socialism and the ideal of racial harmony to create a formidable ideology that is an integral part of Cubans' sense of identity and their perceptions of race and racism in their country. While the combination of socialism and a colorblind racial ideology is particular to Cuba, strategies that paint a picture of equality of...

The historical significance of Barack Obama's triumph in the presidential election of 2008 scarcely requires comment. Yet it contains an irony: he won a victory as an African American only by denying that he should discuss issues that target the concerns of African Americans. Obama's very success, writes Fredrick Harris, exacted a heavy cost on black politics.

In The Price of the Ticket, Harris puts Obama's career in the context of decades of black activism, showing how his election undermined the very movement that made it possible. The path to his presidency began just before...

In 1964 Malcolm X was invited to debate at the Oxford Union Society at Oxford University. The topic of debate that evening was the infamous phrase from Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican Convention speech: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." At a time when Malcolm was traveling widely and advocating on behalf of blacks in America and other nations, his thirty minute speech at the Oxford Union stands out as one of the great addresses of the civil rights era.

Delivered just months before his assassination, the speech followed a...

"Why," asks Nick Bromell, "should the political thought of white Americans remain the only theory to which Americans of all ethnicities turn when constructing and reconstructing their understanding of democracy? Must Americans remain locked in an apartheid of experience and perception even after whites have become a minority population in this nation? Hasn't the 2012 presidential election made clear that the time has come to build not just on the votes of citizens of color, but on the varieties of democratic thought their experience has engendered?"

In his answers to these questions,...

Race and Real Estate brings together new work by architects, sociologists, legal scholars, and literary critics that qualifies and complicates traditional narratives of race, property, and citizenship in the United States. Rather than simply rehearsing the standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from homeownership, the authors of these essays explore how the raced history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship. While the narrative of race and real estate in America has usually been relayed in terms of institutional subjugation, dispossession, and...