Ironically, because of the centrality of “whiteness” within the dominant national identity of being “American,” most of us make few distinctions between our “ethnicity” and our “race,” and the two concepts are usually used interchangeably. “Black” and “white” are usually perceived as very fixed, specific categories that define millions of human beings and their behavior. Yet in reality, “ethnicity” refers to the values, traditions, rituals, languages, music, and family patterns created by human beings within all social groups. All of us have some kind of ethnic identity that has nothing to do with the color of our skin.

Dazzling collection of essays sketching how race, class, and gender divide Americans but can serve to empower Americans disaffected and disempowered by traditional institutions. It’s a great primer on how leftist thought can speak to the problems facing black America, framed in the midst of the euphoria at the century’s turn about a return to unmitigated prosperity thanks to the Soviet Union’s disintegration and meteoric rise of the New Democrats. Ultimately, the two parties represent graveyards for ideas alleviating black suffering; the way forward requires sustained activism–vigilance–to achieve black liberation.

Racism and patriarchy are both precapitalist in their social and ideological origin. The successful seizure of state power by the U.S. working class and the creation of workers' democracy within the economic sphere would destroy the modern foundations for racial prejudice and sexism; however it would not obliterate the massive ideological burden of either form of oppression in the practices of millions of whites and males.

Marable attempts to grapple with the crisis that is the massive political and economic underdevelopment of black people in the United States. The long list of facts detailing black poverty poverty, differential treatment by criminal justice, depiction in society, and access to self-determining institutions, all go to highlight the legacy of centuries of state-sanctioned violence and plunder of African Americans. One of the most illuminating parts, still true today, is the attack on the myth of “black capitalism”–that black people have notable access to levers of power. In the face of such devastation, Marable sees socialism as the answer; a great exploration of what it might hold for Black people.

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

You cannot understand American life if you do not understand James Baldwin. Most books that tackle IDEAS do it by making them center then documenting how each character drives into them. That’s not how life works though. Life is not each person walking into “race” then dealing with it–life is in the details, the interactions between people that create a tension and nuance feeding into race, into sexuality, into faith, to all these intangible feelings that no one ever fully grasps–not even the author. For packaging all that into the most hard-hitting, bare-bone, functional sentences possible, Baldwin is truly transcendental.