Synopsis
The fundamental litmus test for American democracy-its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture-remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the problem of the color line. —from the new Preface
First published in 1993 on the one-year anniversary of the L.A. riots, Race Matters was a national best-seller, and it has since become a groundbreaking classic on race in America.
Race Matters contains West's most powerful essays on the issues relevant to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X. And the insights that he brings to these complicated problems remain fresh, exciting, creative, and compassionate. Now more than ever, Race Matters is a book for all Americans, as it helps us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium.
Publishers Weekly
In eight brief but powerful essays, West, director of Afro-American Studies at Princeton, delivers innovative analyses of our nation's racial dilemmas. West is insistently moral, criticizing racial hierarchy and black leaders who cannot transcend race to fight for ``fundamental social change.'' Though he does not spare black liberals, he more harshly criticizes ``new black conservatives'' who in his view ignore the damaging cultural force of black sexual and military images as employed in advertisements and mass media. Exploring black-Jewish relations, he suggests that the moral voices in black America have been drowned out, and in ``Black Sexuality,'' takes on what has long been considered a taboo subject. These essays, none written in the first person, can have an air of detachment: when West calls for a ``politics of conversion'' to fight black nihilism, his best example comes from Toni Morrison's novel Beloved; when he criticizes Malcolm X for having ignored the culturally hybrid character of black life, he proposes the figure of ``jazz freedom fighter'' as one who could ``promote critical exchange and broad reflection.'' But West is more healing visionary than historian. These essays, most of which first appeared in such magazines as Dissent and Z , solidify his position as one of the nation's leading public intellectuals. 40,000 first printing; paperback rights to Vintage; BOMC selection; QPB featured selection; author tour. (Apr.)