More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, butThe Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward (...) racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy. Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action. Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy. (shrink)

Challenging the triumphal narrative of ‘political completion’ that surrounds intersectionality--as ‘the’ way to theorize the relationship among systems of oppression--and which helps to cement the impression of mainstream feminism’s arrival at a postracial moment, I argue we should instead approach intersectionality as a ‘provisional concept’ which disorients entrenched essentialist cognitive habits. Rather than assume that ‘intersectionality’ has a stable, positive definition, I suggest intersectionality anticipates rather than delivers the normative or theoretical goals often imputed to it.

THIS ESSAY CONSIDERS THE COLOR-BLIND MORALITY OF POSTRACIAL discourse, whether racial identity is to be considered suspect or simply "forgotten," or whether it can play a constructive role in public life. I pursue this question by turning to two accounts of racial identity, a liberal-multicultural conception and a social perspective conception of racial identity. The latter, I argue, better meets the primary objections to the former and offers an advantageous framework within which to evaluate postracial assumptions. Racial difference (...) does not need to be considered a threat to political community but can be envisioned in a way that supports the kind of political and moral deliberation necessary to support and advance a society committed to justice. (shrink)

There was a brief period when affirmative action (a small-tent remedy) was a way to create greater educational opportunities for blacks in America. But that ship has sailed. It now faces impassable judicial headwinds. Charting a course toward a realistic blacktopia begins with understanding why we must forget about race-based affirmative action to secure racial progress in America going forward. To understand why this small-tent remedy is no longer viable, and what the alternative is, we can attend to lessons from (...) _Grutter v. Bollinger_. In this 2003 ruling on a race-conscious law school admissions policy, a liberal majority of US Supreme Court justices accepts the demise of race-based affirmative action and pragmatically pursues a path forward on racial progress by lowering the race-first flag. This chapter analyzes the ruling and draws out its implications. (shrink)

The United States is dogged by racism and racial disparities in income, wealth, health, education, and criminal justice. Philosophers disagree on what kind of politics is needed to address this problem. Do we pursue race-specific remedies to undo racial inequality, or do we assume the permanence of racism and opt for non-race-specific remedies in pursuit of a more egalitarian society? Paradoxically, the way to make racial progress in racist America is to downplay race. In A Realistic Blacktopia political philosopher Derrick (...) Darby challenges the “small-tent” approach by examining US Supreme Court cases on education and voting rights, arguing that they hold general lessons about the limits of racial politics. He further argues that pursing non-race-specific remedies with maximal democratic inclusion is a necessary strategy for mitigating racial inequality and achieving racial justice. Securing racial justice in racist America—where the myth of postracialism prevails in law, politics, and society—calls for “big-tent” remedies. Antiracists must build coalitions among marginalized populations interested in issues that impact them collectively. A Realistic Blacktopia offers clarity on how racism persists contrary to claims that America is a postracial society, explains why the myth of postracialism cannot be ignored in crafting remedies for racial disparities, and supplies a principled pragmatic proposal for achieving racial justice. Drawing on the political thought of Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, and the black radical tradition, the book also explains why achieving racial justice requires inclusive democracy. (shrink)

This chapter argues for a forward-looking basis for grounding the shared political responsibility to address unjust racial inequality. This is attractive given what is known from empirical research in social psychology. This knowledge includes the limits of playing the blame game and how majority in-group members frame inequality as a problem of minority disadvantage rather than majority privilege to avoid blame and collective guilt. Also included is how placing blame on the majority can be an obstacle to majority members forging (...) the political solidarity with the minority that is necessary for collectively changing unjust social institutions. This argument is developed by drawing upon the role that basic societal institutions—on which everyone depends and has a stake in sustaining—play in shaping the distributive outcomes that stem from a unified system of social cooperation. (shrink)

This book has argued for lowering the race-first flag and for fostering a united front of marginalized groups to advance the cause of racial progress in postracial America. Some scholars who accept the standard story of racial progress appeal to thinkers within the black radical tradition to support the case for flying the race-first flag. There is ongoing debate concerning how to understand this tradition, over which black thinkers count as radical. However, there is a danger of ignoring lessons (...) from this tradition that support the case for pursuing progress via a more united front among a broader cross section of marginalized groups. Thinking about the contributions of black thinkers to America’s understanding of its democratic experiment, the nation’s failure to realize its democratic values, and how to struggle productively in making it do better comprise a place to extract these valuable lessons. (shrink)

The Introduction frames the book’s argument with a distinction between two ways to approach racial justice in America. The standard progressive approach recommends “small-tent” remedies that target problems faced by black Americans. The novel approach defended here recommends “big-tent” remedies that target a broader group of marginalized populations who experience disadvantages that impact them collectively. Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, women, working-class whites, persons with disabilities, persons identifying as LBGTQ+, DREAMers, and other groups are concerned about jobs, housing, healthcare, education, discrimination, (...) mental health, drugs, criminal justice, environmental pollution, the climate crisis, voting rights, and other pressing matters. The argument is that they must find ways to work together on solving these problems to make lasting progress, racial and otherwise. Even after America’s post–George Floyd racial reckoning, the irony is that downplaying race may be the best way to achieve racial progress. (shrink)

Although it is certainly premature to celebrate the passing of racism in America, the postracial narrative is both prominent in our political discourse and deeply entrenched in US Supreme Court doctrine. Taking this fact seriously, along with the reality of stark polarization about racial matters, to pursue politically feasible and constitutionally sound remedies for racial inequality this chapter defends “postracial remedies.” They represent big-tent remedies. America’s real-world circumstances require such remedies for issues faced by marginalized populations and around (...) which they can build broad coalitions to address them. The specific coalitions are not set in stone and will vary depending upon the issues. However, forming them is the way forward because antiracists must unite to fight. (shrink)

The chapter presents W. E. B. Du Bois’s argument for affording all people, especially black and other marginalized populations, a hand in democratic rule. This is vital for achieving a realistic blacktopia. Du Bois maintains that the masses should use the weapon of voting to select representatives committed to seeking justice for all. He supports postracial remedies and anticipates the pragmatic importance of seeking such remedies to address the profound inequalities that stem from imperfect democracy. To achieve a more (...) perfect democracy, where differences have been used to divide and distract from all the ways in which plutocrats have fleeced the masses, he argues, we must use political power to undo the circumstances that affect everyone excluded. To do this, we must give power to the people. (shrink)

Questions commonly raised by the reparations debate include: Who is owed reparations? Who owes reparations? And what form should reparations take? Recent philosophical treatments of the topic also invite us to consider the following question: What is the relationship between the historical injustices of slavery and Jim Crow and current racial inequalities in wealth, health, housing, crime, and education in the normative argument for black reparations? Some ways of answering this question seek to undermine the prevailing normative argument for black (...) reparations, namely, the argument from corrective justice. Influential versions of this argument turn on a particular explanation of the “root” cause of racial inequalities. This is a serious source of concern, however, given the depth of disagreement in the social science literature about why black–white inequalities persist in the postracial era. This chapter develops the concern to vindicate skepticism regarding a race-first approach to securing reparations for racial wrongs. (shrink)

This chapter reconstructs the US Supreme Court’s racial progress argument in _Shelby County_. It also raises concerns about ways of answering it that merely replace a conservative narrative about racial progress with a liberal one. Although the latter narrative is compelling, and the Court’s overall argument for striking down the coverage formula is deeply flawed, it is unwise to rest the entire case for saving the Voting Rights Act and defending the right to vote—moving forward—on winning the racial progress argument. (...) This is especially true in a nation so smitten by the view that we have reached the “postracial” promised land, and where this fanciful outlook is arguably now entrenched in Supreme Court equal protection doctrine. This chapter proves further evidence of the limits of race-first reasoning—this time to stave off a retreat from racial progress—when faced with a conservative judiciary. (shrink)

Achieving Our Humanity explores a postracial future through a philosophical analysis of the social, cultural, economic and political experiences of race in the past and what this might mean for our present and, most importantly, our future.

We were stolen, sold, and brought together from the African continent. We got on the slave ships together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships in each other’s excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown overboard together. Today, we are standing up together, with faith and even some joy. Within the last seven years or so, the development of postracial politics has been based on and grounded in a central (...) contradiction found in public memory. On the one hand, therefore, we can address our racist past as a collective. On the other hand, political policy and discourse seem to indelibly invoke tropes of color blindness and reverse racism to further the .. (shrink)

The proliferation of conspiracy theories is seemingly on the rise. Among them, are many that are explicitly racist. Examples of this include Great Replacement Theory, White Genocide, QAnon, and Eurabia, which each convey the idea white people are being covertly attacked and replaced. In this article, we examine the structure of these conspiracy theories and argue that their proliferation in liberal-democratic societies is not a coincidence. Our argument is three-fold. First, we argue the proliferation of racist conspiracy theories in liberal-democratic (...) societies has been enabled by the racial contract that underpins them. Second, we argue that in these contexts, even conspiracy theories that are seemingly non-racial, can be underpinned by structures of race and racialisation. This is because in liberal-democratic contexts, the other (who conspires) is always-already racialised, even if racialisation is disavowed. We therefore argue that the categorisation of conspiracy theories as being either ‘racial’ or ‘non-racial’ constitutes a postracial manoeuvre that obscures the racialising function of conspiracy theorising in liberal-democratic societies. Finally, we argue that the dominant trend of attributing the rise of conspiracy theories to the notion we are living in a ‘post-truth era’ obscures the connection between liberal-democratic societies and racist conspiracy theories, effectively solidifying the postracial conceptualisation of both. We argue the ‘post-’ of ‘post-truth’ works to sever the past from the present, thereby masking historical continuities of racism and depicting conspiracy thinking as a ‘new’ problem stemming from the margins of society. By contrast, we argue the phenomenon, and its attendant racism, originates from the mainstream of liberal-democratic society. (shrink)

Enlightenment thought is widely considered to consist of four key features--atheism, democracy, humanism, and modernity. Common to all is an explicit process of desacralization. Yet the intellectual history of these concepts reveals that in the process of desacralization new sacred spaces arose in their name. The aim of Nothing Sacred is to question this second-order sacralization and consider, in a form of negative dialectics, whether (and how) these domains can argue against themselves in order to once again desacralize their own (...) self-sacralization. Secular critique is not simply an attack on religion but rather on the range of society's unavowed self-occlusions. Its object is to elucidate the politics and practices of knowledge that animate them. In the field of religion critique challenges the alleged permanence of political theology and transforms the epistemologies of both sacred and secular. For Stathis Gourgouris the state of nature that he terms political animality critiques political theology much as the anarchy of democracy, inhabited by it, critiques sovereignty. He takes aim at the desacralizing capacity of these historical formations, which produce their own historical conditions for self-sacralization, in order to demonstrate their dynamic subversive power against deeply ensconced conditions of disempowerment and incapacitation and to understand how societies and individuals are driven to self-subversion and self-disempowerment. These forces are alive today in the form of discursive "posts"--posthumanism, postdemocracy, post-truth, postracial--which are just as self-sacralizing. Exposing them is not a nostalgic liberal return to an idealized past but an expansive anarchic ontological affirmation of the political dimensions of human animality on a planetary scale and of a radical politics in which democracy has severed its bind to capitalism. Nothing Sacred thinks across orders, obstacles, and intersectional spaces in a world of warring multipolar oligarchies and psychotic rage. (shrink)

The Scandinavian welfare states are known for their universal access to healthcare; however, health inequalities affecting ethnic minority patients are prevalent. Ethnic minority patients' encounters with healthcare systems are often portrayed as part of a system that represents objectivity and neutrality. However, the Danish healthcare sector is a political apparatus that is affected by policies and conceptualisations. Health policies towards ethnic minorities are analysed using Bacchi's policy analysis, to show how implicit problem representations are translated from political and societal discourses (...) into the Danish healthcare system. Our analysis shows that health policies are based on different ideas of who ethnic minority patients are and what kinds of challenges they entail. Two main issues are raised: First, ethnic minorities are positioned as bearers of ‘culture’ and ‘ethnicity’. These concepts of ‘othering’ become both explanations for and the cause of inappropriate healthcare behaviour. Second, the Scandinavian welfare states are known for their solidarity, collectivism, equality and tolerance, also grounded in a postracial, colour‐blind and noncolonial past ideology that forms the societal self‐image. Combined with the ethical and legal responsibility of healthcare professionals to treat all patients equally, our findings indicate little leeway for addressing the discrimination experienced by ethnic minority patients. (shrink)

Responding to Tommy Curry’s contention that Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, is a worthy theoretical exemplar for examining anti-Black racism, I draw on critical race theory and critical race discourse analysis to detail how Ye offers a model of what I call anti-Black postracialism. I argue that anti-Black postracialism extends our thinking about postracialism by examining the ways postracial ideals are discursively embedded in anti-Black racist discourse and ideology. Using radio show and televised interviews with Ye from 2013 (...) and 2018, and his subsequent Twitter comments following his infamous 2018 TMZ Live appearance, this article traces the ways his talk evolves into a postracial ideal couched in contradictory critiques of anti-Black racism, and explores how anti-Black postracialism unfolds discursively through universalism, racial scapegoating, and racial nonracialism. (shrink)

The university is situated within white colonial projects that underpin the nation in the UK, US and Canada. While the institutional whiteness of universities reflects these structural conditions of whiteness in society, it is also more flexible and dynamic in the present, reflecting both national and transnational racial politics. The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 and student movements calling on universities to be accountable for their ties to slavery and colonialism have made this connection visible. In (...) this context, this paper examines how racial politics affects postracial whiteness in the university, using two cases from a British and Canadian university, respectively, and drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2007;, 2019) work on whiteness and the university and David Theo Goldberg’s (2015) theorization of the postracial. (shrink)

W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1960 essay, “Whither Now and Why,” is a neglected but brilliant sequel to his 1897 essay, “The Conservation of Races,” which inspired much of the pioneering work in philosophy of race. In both works DuBois stresses perpetuation of black racial identity and cultural difference; a race should predominantly be understood as a kind of cultural group. Discrimination must end, but cultural identity must remain. In “Whither Now” his position evolves to state the need for education of black (...) children in socialism, but he also states that historical consciousness necessary for social progress mandates that all people, but especially African Americans, recognize Africa and the American Negro’s distinct identity and cultural contributions to world civilization in ancient and modern times. For Dubois postracial thinking was dangerous if it went beyond dismantling an unfair American social hierarchy to blotting out voluntary education in cultural diversity and a pan-African cultural identity. (shrink)

Despite the resistance from radical antiracist formations, autonomously organised by racialized minorities and migrants themselves, that can be witnessed in many spaces, the success with which antiracism has been both appropriated and relativized by the state as well as hegemonic activist voices poses a significant threat. The politics of diversity and the consensus around the notion that western societies are post-race contribute to portraying the critique of racism from people of colour as inaccurate, alienating and counter-productive to the achievement of (...) social cohesion. The necessity of dismantling the idea of race as suggested by antiracist activists and scholars has been subverted in the deconstruction of the experience of racism by an ‘antiracialist’—rather than a more radical antiracist—agenda intent on relativizing the struggle against racism as one among many. The consequence of this in the context of postracialism is for racism itself to be departicularized and dissociated from its historical roots. Antiracism needs to reclaim the risk, that Goldberg argues is inherent to it, and rescue it from being universalised into meaninglessness. (shrink)

Perez-Rodriguez and de la Fuente (2017) assume that although human races do not exist in a biological sense (“geneticists and evolutionary biologists generally agree that the division of humans into races/subspecies has no defensible scientific basis,” they exist only as “sociocultural constructions” and because of that maintain an illusory reality, for example, through “racialized” practices in medicine. Agreeing with the main postulates formulated in the article, we believe that the authors treat this problem in a superficial manner and have failed (...) to capture the current state of the field of knowledge in science and the humanities. In our commentary, we want to highlight two main omissions, and to notice three important implications for “a postracial medicine.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Philosophers who work on race and racism have been reluctant to embrace the notion that the United States is, or will soon be, a postracial society. For many, this view is refuted by a wealth of evidence that racism persists in many forms and that race continues to have a significant impact on one's life chances. Nevertheless, some critics of postracialism have refused to reject it in principle or have exempted a particular variety of it from their critiques. (...) This essay attempts to show that the ideal of a postracial society is actually a combination of two contradictory tendencies, each defined by its temporality. Distinguishing these tendencies allows us to see that there are two fundamentally different types of postracialism with contradictory assumptions and conflicting priorities. (shrink)

In the twenty-first century, 70.6 percent of Americans self-identify as Christians,1 58 percent of them still segregate themselves by race on Sunday mornings, and white Protestants make up the majority of this 58 percent.2 These facts belie the claim, popularized after Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election, that America is living in a postracial society3 And yet, the role played by religion in white people's lived experiences of race, racism, and white class privilege in the United States tends to be (...) neglected by philosophers and religious studies scholars, except perhaps when considering white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.4 Contemporary philosophy is secular in a way that generally excludes and... (shrink)

The consideration of racial differences in the biology of disease and treatment options is a hallmark of modern medicine. However, this time-honored medical tradition has no scientific basis, and the premise itself, that is, the existence of biological differences between the commonly known races, is false inasmuch as races are only sociocultural constructions. It is time to rid medical research of the highly damaging exercise of searching for supposed racial differences in the biological manifestations of disease. The practice not only (...) condoned but required by the National Institutes of Health of utilizing racial identification as a demographic characteristic with assumed biological implications is at best badly flawed, and at worst unintentionally contributes to perpetuating the fallacy of natural differences between persons of different skin color, which has been used in the past to advance the cause of racial discrimination. (shrink)

In this essay Sandra Vanderbilt explores philosophies of peace and protest through a dialectical reading of the works of Martin Luther King Jr., Daisaku Ikeda, and Paulo Freire, and considers these philosophies in relation to her own activism, specifically in the context of dealing with White postracial myths and more overt acts of racism. This essay outlines what she learned from her dialectical reading across several works by King, Ikeda, and Freire, and how these philosophies of peace and protest (...) informed the ways in which she has been able to initiate and sustain conversations across the chasm that separates her antiracist positioning from the stance of friends and family members who deny and enact racism and White supremacy. The three theorists Vanderbilt focuses on here all point to ongoing engagement among individuals as necessary to sustaining the collective. Drawing on their work, Vanderbilt suggests that we have to begin with a critical understanding of Whiteness in our efforts to engage someone, in radically loving acts, in confrontation with their own words and behavior. Opportunities for this sort of confrontation have the potential to bridge the conversational chasm and to open discussions wherein one can practice the virtue of justice, and importantly racial justice. (shrink)

This book understands the postracial as a genre—like the zombie apocalypse—that signals a disturbance in society that is felt as terrifying and exciting. The postracial is repetitive and reproduces blackened biothreat bodies, rituals of securitization, and fantasies of the reclamation of white masculine sovereignty. Eric King Watts examines key moments when Blackness became an object of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preparing the "scientific" and philosophical ground for interpreting zombie lore. The book treats the "Greater Caribbean" (...) as a transformative space in which an antiblack infrastructure arose and interrogates the US's militarized domination of Haiti that was the context in which the zombie emerged. Watts traces variations of the form and function of the zombie to contemplate how it matters to our contemporary struggles with racism and pandemic policies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Community of “Neighbors”:A Baptist-Buddhist Reflects on the Common Ground of LoveJan WillisToday we are all aware that the concept of “race” is a mere construction. There is only one “race”: the human race; to think otherwise is like still believing that the earth is flat. But “racism” is a different matter. It exists as a system of beliefs and prejudices that people differ along biological and genetic lines and (...) that one’s own group is superior to another group. When these beliefs and prejudices are coupled with power—especially the power to negatively affect the lives of those perceived to be inferior—we have a serious problem. And no one should downplay or underestimate the harm that such an ideology inflicts upon everyone who participates in it. According to one African American professor of social work, “America’s history is inextricably bound to this racist ideology. From the codifying of slavery, to the belief in ‘Manifest Destiny,’ to the treatment of ‘illegal immigrants,’ many of America’s actions continue to conflict with its creed that ‘All men are created equal.’”1Over the past decade or so, I have written a number of pieces that focus upon racism in America and racism in so-called American Buddhism.2 Being African American myself, my reasons for this focus may perhaps be clear though not necessarily inevitable. I have written on a number of other topics: Buddhist philosophical discourses and life stories of Buddhist “saints,” for example. In my writings on racism, I have tried to communicate something of the emotional and psychic toll it takes to live in this country as a person of color. In a number of these writings, I have called myself a “Baptist-Buddhist,” and thus this is also one of my “dual belongings,” one of my “multiple identities.”When I speak of racism, I am not concerned with garnering pity, or playing the “race card” of guilt, or telling you, from some assumed position of superiority on the matter, that there is simply no way for you to understand this toll. I certainly cannot speak for all African Americans, or even for most of them. Early on in the process of writing this paper, I emailed Jung and Paul to say that I found the title of the panel both much too broad and much too narrow. “Too broad” because one person cannot possibly channel and/or verbalize the countless instances of suffering endured by African Americans (and more broadly, by persons of color) throughout space and over centuries in this country owing to slavery and its aftermath. And “too narrow” [End Page 97] because, ultimately, we want to do more than just rehash our many sufferings. We don’t want to wallow in victimhood. We want to move on—from the recognition of that immense suffering, seen and unseen—and to go out into the world and act to bring about social, economic, and ecological justice. That’s what we are called upon to do: to form a new community wherein there is compassion and caring for one another, where there is love and peace, nonviolence, reconciliation, and justice.So, even though I am quite frankly tired—as are so many people of color—of being the “token” African American who can add visible “diversity” to a group in order to show that it is now more “inclusive” than before, nevertheless, in this so-called postracial society where we have a black president and the demographic of “person of color” now comprises an actual majority of the United States’ population, I must still rise to say that, sadly, racism is not dead in this country! Its painful vestiges exist, and those vestiges are far from being either innocent or unharmful.I truly believe that—for African Americans, in particular—it is the trauma and the legacy of slavery that haunts us in the deepest recesses of our souls. It is hard to imagine what having been bartered and sold as though mere property does to a human being, what being dehumanized, infanticized, and divested of all rights and liberties does to one’s sense of self-worth and well-being. As... (shrink)

Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible. In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers a (...) groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra’s cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice. (shrink)