Reflecting critically on the discipline of African American studies is a complicated undertaking, and making sense of the black American experience requires situating it within the larger cultural, political-economic, and ideological dynamics that shape American life. Renewing Black Intellectual History moves away from privileging racial commonality as the fulcrum of inquiry and moves toward observing the quality of the accounts scholars have rendered of black American life.This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation.

Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality questions, examines, and explains the way a new orthodoxy of American leaders has contributed to the social stratification and inequality which plagues America today. By looking at the history of our social policies since the New Deal, as well as the status of specific

Reflecting critically on the discipline of African American studies is a complicated undertaking, and making sense of the black American experience requires situating it within the larger cultural, political-economic, and ideological dynamics that shape American life. Renewing Black Intellectual History moves away from privileging racial commonality as the fulcrum of inquiry and moves toward observing the quality of the accounts scholars have rendered of black American life.This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation.

"Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality "questions, examines, and explains the way a new orthodoxy of American leaders has contributed to the social stratification and inequality which plagues America today. By looking at the history of our social policies since the New Deal, as well as the status of specific policy arenas, essayists show how political shifts over the past fifty years have moved us away from a more egalitarian politics. Throughout, the book responds critically to the now conventional argument that liberalism must be reconfigured in ways that retreat from immediate identification with the interests of labor, minorities, and the poor. From a look at federal housing policy and the failure of New Deal social programs to an examination of long established public assistance programs and Affirmative Action, "Without Justice for All" is a timely and important contribution to the dialogue on race in modern America.

Skeptical of received wisdom, Reed casts a critical eye on political trends in the black community over the past thirty years. He examines the rise of a new black political class in the aftermath of the civil rights era, and bluntly denounces black leadership that is not accountable to a black constituency; such leadership, he says, functions as a proxy for white elites. Reed debunks as myths the 'endangered black male" and the "black underclass, " and punctures what he views as the exaggeration and self-deception surrounding the black power movement and the Malcolm X revival. He chastises the Left, too, for its failure to develop an alternative politics, then lays out a practical leftist agenda and reasserts the centrality of political action.

This lively and provocative collection of essays on the social upheavals of the 1960s is a major contribution to our understanding of that tumultuous decade. Written by a group of former sixties activists, most of whom are now academics, it combines a unique transracial dialogue on that activism with incisive analyses of the context within which radicalism developed.