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

In its simplest rendition, Black Is a Country is a work of hope that holds the potential to guide us out of our current state of racial dilemmas. Nikhil Singh points to the futility of relying on U.S. nationalist traditions in dismantling racism by illuminating the dialectic of race and nation, two concepts that have always been ineluctably intertwined, yet have largely remained fixed at opposite ends of the spectrum. Black intellectuals throughout the "long civil rights era" had articulated a vision of democracy that stretches beyond the parameters of American nationalism, and by doing so, they pointed to the failures of American universalism by shining light on the contradictions between American claims of universal democracy and the realities of systemic racial oppression. Recalling these bold visions and radical conceptions of democracy from the past, Singh ultimately suggests, will potentially lead us once again to "an effective antiracism" (14). In framing his argument, Singh re-envisions a "long civil rights era" that defies the "King-centric" and universalist version that remains engraved in the annals of American history. This new framework accomplishes four things. First, it suggests that civil rights made up only one part of a much broader and expansive struggle. As Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized toward the end of his life, "justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from the fountains of political oratory" (13). Second, rather than emphasizing the March on Washington or the passage of the Civil Rights Act-two landmark occurrences that reinscribed the notion of American universalism-as the apex of the movement, it centers the formation and expansion of the black public sphere as the movement's most phenomenal achievement. Third, as had already been implied, the long civil rights era embraced a host of intellectuals and artists who experimented with a range of politics with the ultimate vision of forging an independent black radicalism. Far from recognizing American nationalism as the suitable arena to achieving democracy, these black leaders (who have tragically become overshadowed by the figure of an idolized Martin Luther King, Jr.) looked beyond national borders and tapped the wells of their radical imaginations to locate an independent and transformative conception of democracy. Finally, it illuminates a long, unbroken line of black radicalism that stretched from old intellectual sages like W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to young black nationalists like Stokely Carmichael and Amiri Baraka. This black radical tradition, although distracted by the repressive nature of McCarthyism and despite taking on different political guises, remained at heart one continuous struggle. Simply put, Black Is a Country is a work of great urgency that forces us to seriously rethink the dialectic of race and nation, a concept that had for the most part been taken for granted by historians. It