Is black nationalism compatible with liberal values and principles? Some have argued that it is not, that black nationalism, as Michael Dawson puts it, cannot “be made to march under the liberal banner” (Reference Dawson2001, 13). In many of its historical guises, black nationalism has certainly contained illiberal elements, and in contemporary scholarship it is sometimes defined in contradistinction to liberalism and presented as an alternative to liberal approaches to race (see Peller Reference Peller, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller and Thomas1995). This article argues to the contrary that the core goals of black nationalism are compatible with liberal political theory, and indeed that liberal norms of justice require support for some black nationalist claims. It makes this argument by bringing together the literature on black nationalism with that on liberal views of group rights, from secession to more modest forms of group autonomy.

In recent years political theorists and philosophers have devoted a great deal of attention to issues of nationalism, self-determination, and multiculturalism, and in the process they have challenged the notion that liberal values and principles require the integration and assimilation of minorities (see Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka1995; Laden and Owen Reference Laden and Owen2007; Levy Reference Levy2000; Tamir Reference Tamir1993; Taylor Reference Taylor1994). Indeed, Will Kymlicka has suggested that there is now a consensus among liberal theorists in support of “liberal [multi]culturalism”—the idea that certain group rights are compatible with liberal principles. The issue, he suggests, is no longer whether this is the case but rather what specific policies and institutional arrangements are appropriate for particular kinds of minorities (Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka2001, chap. 2).

Despite this shift in liberal theory toward a more friendly view of group rights, public and legal discourse in the United States with regard to African Americans continues to emphasize integration and colorblindness as the route to racial equality (Peller Reference Peller, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller and Thomas1995; Cochran Reference Cochran1999). In the case of other minorities, liberal theorists have shown that integration and group-blindness impose considerable and unfair costs on minority group members, and hence that justice requires group-consciousness rather than group-blindness, group autonomy rather than integration and assimilation. Yet this position has not been prominent in liberal discourse on race.

Liberal multiculturalists usually focus on minorities that are defined foremost by cultural differences, and this has led to an estrangement in work on minority rights, where African Americans are treated in one literature and cultural minorities are treated in another. As one observer put it, “when liberal political theorists tackle matters of group difference, they often evade race in general and the case of African Americans in particular. On the subject of multicultural challenges to liberal neutrality, for instance, political theorists tend to focus on minority groups with a high level of cultural cohesion” (Fogg-Davis Reference Fogg-Davis2003, 557). Because African Americans are not necessarily a cultural minority, liberal theorists interested in minority rights have had too little to say about them (but see Cochran Reference Cochran1999; Gutmann Reference Gutmann, Appiah and Gutmann1996; Ingram Reference Ingram2000; Spinner Reference Spinner1994).

Yet this focus on culture and culturally defined groups has begun to shift. Many scholars now argue that the real issues at stake in debates about multiculturalism are not cultural per se, but have more to do with power, history, material inequality, and institutional arrangements. Earlier arguments about culture, it is now often suggested, reified cultures, seeing them as more stable, bounded, and distinct than they in fact are. Hence, to take just one recent example, Anne Phillips argues for “multiculturalism without culture,” a version of multiculturalism that “dispense[s] with strong notions of culture.” This kind of multiculturalism, Phillips suggests, “put[s] agency much more at its centre,” emphasizing the ways in which multicultural accommodations may or may not enhance individual autonomy (Phillips Reference Phillips2007, 9).

This article attempts to extend this development in liberal multiculturalism to provide a defense of black nationalist claims. It begins, in the first section, by arguing that, for most of U.S. history before the civil rights movement, African Americans had a strong claim to secede from the United States based upon the human rights abuses that they suffered. After the civil rights movement, the issue became whether the legal reforms and protections that that era brought completely expunged any autonomy claims, short of independent statehood, that African Americans might have. I argue that they did not, and that despite the successes of the civil rights movement, more limited autonomy claims can be justified. To make this argument, I examine the work of Will Kymlicka as it relates to African Americans, and I argue that Kymlicka's work (properly modified) is helpful for thinking about black nationalist claims, despite Kymlicka's own dismissal of them. I then turn to the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and examine the version of black nationalism, often called “community nationalism,” that it reflected. Community black nationalism advocates black autonomy and self-determination through “black control of political and economic institutions in the black community, and the building of autonomous black organizations” (Dawson Reference Dawson2001, 101). I argue that black nationalists made two main arguments in support of this position, addressed primarily to two distinct audiences. One argument, grounded in justice and addressed mainly to whites,Footnote ¹ maintained that the terms of the dominant understanding of integration were unfair because they imposed substantial costs on African Americans. They demanded support for black institutions and communities as a necessary condition for black freedom and racial equality. The second argument, addressed mainly to fellow African Americans, urged them to participate in and support black institutions. I argue that liberal theory supports the former argument and, although agnostic about the ultimate success of the latter, provides a fair basis for the conditions under which it can succeed or fail on its own merits.

CLASSICAL BLACK NATIONALISM AND SECESSION

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, classical black nationalists advocated the establishment of an independent nation-state for African Americans. There are two main forms of classical black nationalism—emigrationist nationalism (which supported a mass exodus of African Americans out of the United States, to a place where they could establish an independent state) and secessionist nationalism (Draper Reference Draper1970). After the demise of Marcus Garvey's emigrationist movement in the 1920s, secessionist black nationalism became the dominant strain. The normative question I examine in this section is whether, under the conditions that prevailed under the Jim Crow system of racial segregation, black nationalist claims of a right to secede from the United States could be justified on liberal grounds. The position that such a claim was justified, sometimes called “The Black Belt Thesis” (Forman Reference Forman1984), traditionally focused on areas of the American South, where African Americans were concentrated and where they constituted a majority or near-majority.

To examine the black belt thesis, it is perhaps best to focus on a work that historian George Fredrickson calls “the definitive restatement of the case for the right to establish a black nation in the American South” (Reference Fredrickson1995, 349 n. 24)—Harry Haywood's book, Negro Liberation (Reference Haywood1976 [1948]). Putting aside his Marxian analysis of the Southern economy (and his glowing references to Lenin and Stalin), Haywood's argument can be summarized as follows (Reference Haywood1976, chap. 7). African Americans were not merely an exploited class or caste, but “an oppressed nation” (1976, 140). They satisfied “all the prerequisites for existence as a nation” (1976, 145), including geographic concentration in the Black Belt of the South. African Americans also had their own institutions and a common culture, which, though expressed in the English language, was nevertheless distinct from white American culture. Though blacks in the United States, according to Haywood, had “weak development of national consciousness,” this is characteristic of a “young nation” (Reference Haywood1976, 152). White domination of African Americans was “equivalent to foreign rule [over] a people who comprise the majority of the population of a contiguous land area, a people of common ethnic origin, and with a common history” (1976, 156). As a consequence, in Haywood's view, African Americans in the Black Belt enjoyed the right to self-determination, which included the right to secede. However, he added, self-determination does not necessarily require secession, and the African American nation “may decide on federation with the former oppressing nation, or it may decide upon territorial autonomy within the borders of the former oppressing state, with a varying degree of sovereignty over its own internal affairs” (1976, 159). Haywood argued that African Americans actually enjoyed some measure of autonomy during the Reconstruction period of 1867–77, but had been deprived of this since the advent of Jim Crow. All of these considerations, on his account, supported the claim to black self-determination, up to and including a right of secession.

How does Haywood's argument stand up in light of recent liberal theories of secession? The discourse on the ethics of secession, instigated largely by the publication of Allen Buchanan's book, Secession (Reference Buchanan1991), has been characterized by a debate between more restrictive and more permissive views. The more restrictive views are what Buchanan calls “remedial right only” theories, which hold that a group has a right to secede from a state only to address a prior injustice. Injustices that would underwrite a right to secession, Buchanan argues, include “genocide or massive violations of the most basic individual human rights” (Reference Buchanan2004, 351) or the violation of an existing autonomy agreement between the state and a minority within it. The main alternative to remedial right only theories is “primary right” theories of secession, which hold that no prior injustice is required to justify secession. The most permissive of these is the plebiscitary theory, which holds that any group constituting a majority within a territory can vote to secede. An intermediate view is the nationalist theory of secession, which holds that only a certain kind of group—a nation—may secede, and its right to secede need not be a response to a prior injustice (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2004, chap. 8). Although all of these theories of secession can claim a liberal pedigree, or at least come in liberal versions, Buchanan argues for the restrictive, remedial right only theory, in part because he sees it as most firmly grounded in the doctrine of basic human rights (2004, chap. 3).

Each theory of secession has implications for Haywood's argument, which, depending on the aspect of his account that is emphasized, can be read as appealing to various theories of secession. If one endorses the plebiscitary theory of secession, then there will be little trouble in endorsing Haywood's conclusion. The plebiscitary view would imply that anywhere that African Americans constitute a majority, they may hold a vote on seceding. Of course, whether African Americans would in fact vote to secede is another question, and the votes of whites within the same geographic area would have to be counted as well. But if a majority of votes in a particular territory favored seceding, then on this view secession should be permitted. For obvious reasons, though, the plebiscitary theory of secession is rejected by most as too permissive, because it would permit the proliferation of a large number of very small states—which David Miller (Reference Miller1995, 111) has called “a recipe for anarchy.”

Much of Haywood's discussion has its greatest affinity with the primary right, nationalist theory. Haywood seems to believe that in order to make the case for secession he must establish that African Americans constitute a nation, if a “young” one. Yet the nationalist case for secession is controversial in itself, and all the more so when applied to African Americans. If not quite a recipe for anarchy, the nationalist theory of secession does countenance the proliferation of many small states, the establishment of which would only create more minorities within those new states. As applied to African Americans, the nationalist case for secession is particularly problematic, because it requires its advocates to argue that African Americans constitute a nation. Such arguments are confounded by the ambiguity in the idea of nation, and by the complex nature of African Americans as a group. African Americans, it is often said, do not have the characteristics of a nation—such as a distinct language and culture—and hence nationalist claims on their behalf cannot be justified. Despite these difficulties, Haywood seems to have assumed that the case for secession must rest on establishing African Americans' bona fides as a nation.

Haywood does discuss past black self-rule during Reconstruction, which calls to mind what Buchanan would call a violation of an intrastate autonomy arrangement—and which (if sustained) would underwrite a remedial claim to secession. However, because black participation in self-rule during Reconstruction was not really a case of a minority autonomy arrangement but rather a result of democratic participation in Southern politics, the end of Reconstruction cannot really be characterized as the violation of an autonomy agreement between the federal government and a minority black nation.

The theory of secession that best underwrites Haywood's argument is, rather, the remedial theory of secession that responds to human rights violations. In this view, a group is justified in seceding if it suffers serious and systematic violation of basic human rights, and if the prospects of addressing and ending the abuses under the existing institutional arrangements are dim. If this view is correct, African Americans certainly had a legitimate moral claim to secede during the period of slavery, and almost as certainly during Jim Crow. Surely chattel slavery constitutes a paradigm case of systematic and serious violations of basic human rights. Arguably there was no right to secede during Reconstruction, when the federal government undertook efforts to address the effects of slavery and to prevent further violations of the human rights of African Americans. However, after the federal government retreated from these efforts, inaugurating the period of Jim Crow, the right to secede was given new life. Under Jim Crow, federal, state, and local governments, as well as private individuals, conspired to systematically oppress African Americans and deprive them of the enjoyment of their basic human rights. These conditions violated the most fundamental liberal values of individual freedom and equality in their most rudimentary sense. While this took place, and while there was little reasonable hope of alleviating these violations under the existing institutional arrangements, African Americans had a strong case for secession, under Buchanan's remedial right only view. Hence when Haywood argued for secession based on the claim that African Americans were “an oppressed nation,” the emphasis should be on the oppression rather than on the nationhood.

Even in a restrictive view of secession, then, African Americans would have had a strong case for secession at any point in American history until the civil rights era, with the exception of Reconstruction. Of course, any claim to secession involves a number of thorny issues, including the fate of the new minority that would be created by the secession (in this case, the white southerners who would find themselves in the new majority-black state), and the status and basis of territorial claims would have to be worked out. But the point is that, if any claim to secession is justified, then for much of our history classical black nationalist claims to secession were justified, and this justification need not be based on the claim that African Americans constitute a nation, but rather on their oppression. In short, the classical black nationalists were right (if not always for the right reasons), at least until the advent of the civil rights era.

Obviously, however, the achievements of the civil rights movement substantially undermined the basis for this drastic solution to the problem of black oppression. Yet the protection of African Americans' basic human rights and the achievement of formal equality did not resolve all issues regarding what institutional arrangements (and resource distributions) were required by justice. Instead, as in other cases where secession is contemplated but not achieved, it raised new questions about the terms on which the majority and minority would coexist. These are some of the questions that the Black Power movement raised, and they will be considered below. But first, to provide a more contemporary theoretical context for these concerns, I consider a prominent liberal multiculturalist account of minority autonomy.

KYMLICKA, NATIONAL MINORITIES, AND AFRICAN AMERICANS

Will Kymlicka's arguments for liberal multiculturalism are well known among political theorists and philosophers, and constitute an important achievement in giving minority rights a firm grounding in liberal values and principles. For both of these reasons, Kymlicka provides a helpful point of reference in the present discussion. However, Kymlicka also exhibits the general tendency on the part of liberal multiculturalists identified earlier to neglect the case of African Americans. Indeed, although Kymlicka discusses African Americans in a number of places, he puts them in a residual category and withholds support for certain claims made on behalf of African Americans that are similar to the ones he defends in the case of other minorities. He does so on the grounds that African Americans lack a distinct culture and language, but I attempt to show that, despite this, much of Kymlicka's framework for minority rights, suitably modified, can support many black nationalist claims. In particular, Kymlicka's defense of institutional arrangements that ensure a measure of minority autonomy can be extended to African Americans.

Kymlicka argues that liberal theory can underwrite minority rights by focusing on national minorities. A national minority is “an intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history” (1995, 18). Such minorities have what Kymlicka calls a “societal culture,” by which he means “not just shared memories or values, but also common institutions and practices.” Societal cultures are “institutionally embodied—in schools, media, economy, government, etc.” (1995, 76). Because minority nations are “institutionally complete,” and provide for the whole range of needs of their members across their lifetimes, they have a strong claim to self-government. Kymlicka contrasts national minorities with ethnic groups, which do not have these characteristics: ethnic groups usually lack a societal culture, geographic concentration, and so on. Furthermore, national minorities are often incorporated into a state involuntarily, whereas ethnic groups arise through voluntary immigration. The latter have legitimate claims of inclusion in the larger society through reasonable accommodation of some cultural differences, but have no claim to autonomy or self-determination.

Kymlicka's argument for self-determination of national minorities focuses on the conditions necessary for the realization of two liberal values, individual freedom and equality. He observes that one such condition is that people have a stable cultural and institutional context that makes certain choices available and meaningful (1995, chap. 5). Individual liberty requires a stable context in which to formulate and carry out a life plan. Kymlicka then argues that, in light of this, liberal equality requires that members of minority nations receive certain provisions such as a degree of self-government, in order to protect them from the vulnerability that is created by their minority status. Members of the cultural majority that dominates the central state can take for granted the survival of their language, their culture, and the institutions that embody these, but members of the minority cannot take these things for granted. Without some protections, members of a national minority have two choices: to assimilate to the majority culture, or to attempt to maintain their minority culture and institutions without the support of the state. Both of these options impose costs that are unjust because they are a product of individuals' unchosen cultural membership. There is also a cost to the self-respect of minority group members: the vulnerability of a minority culture would mean that its members would be uncertain that they could carry out their life plans, creating what Rawls called “social conditions that undermine self-respect” (Rawls Reference Rawls1971, 440; cited in Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka1989, 166). Relying on Rawls and Dworkin, Kymlicka argues that liberal egalitarianism must make a distinction between choices and circumstances, and compensate for differences in circumstances that place individuals at a disadvantage in pursuing their conceptions of the good life. Membership in a minority nation is just such a disadvantage, whereas being an immigrant is a matter of individual choice. For this reason, national minorities can sustain strong claims to autonomy, whereas immigrants can support only weaker claims to inclusion and accommodation (1995, 108–15).

What are the implications of Kymlicka's theory for African Americans and for an understanding of black nationalism? The first thing to note is that African Americans fit neatly into neither of Kymlicka's main categories, but share characteristics of both. African Americans are unlike national minorities in that they are no longer concentrated in a single geographic region where they constitute a majority of the population. Yet they are unlike immigrant groups in that their original incorporation into the polity was not voluntary.Footnote ² Furthermore, when Kymlicka focuses on culture and language as a basis for minority institutional autonomy, his argument seems not to apply directly to African Americans. Though we may speak loosely of a “black culture,” this culture has a great overlap with, and influence on, “mainstream” American culture. The focus on culture also misses the significance of African Americans as a racial minority.

Kymlicka is of course aware of all of this, and says that “we should not expect policies which are appropriate for either voluntary immigrants or national minorities to be appropriate for African-Americans” (1995, 25). Still, Kymlicka believes that most minorities are either national minorities or ethnic minorities, and that the case of African Americans is “anomalous” (Reference Kymlicka1989, 257). He suggests that “the situation of African-Americans is quite distinct,” “very unusual,” and even “virtually unique in the world” (1995, 24, 60). Elsewhere, Kymlicka provides a typology of minorities, which includes the following categories: national minorities, immigrants, isolationist ethnoreligious groups, metics (that is, noncitizen guest workers), and African Americans (Reference Kymlicka2002, 348–65). It is striking that only the last specifies a particular group, rather than a type. This reflects Kymlicka's judgment that African Americans are a very distinctive case, ill suited as a model for thinking about other kinds of minorities.

Indeed, Kymlicka argues that much harm has been done by taking African Americans to be a typical minority. He notes that the civil rights movement in the United States had a considerable—and, in his view, unfortunate—influence on how many Canadians viewed indigenous peoples. “American liberals rightly take pride in their role in the struggle for the civil rights of blacks,” he writes. “But it detracts from the quality of that victory when the principles relevant to blacks are thoughtlessly and insensitively applied to the situation of American Indians, or the members of any other minority culture” (Reference Kymlicka1989, 258). (Kymlicka recently has suggested a more benign view of the impact of the civil rights movement; see Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka2007, 88–92.) The integrationist thrust of the civil rights movement led to efforts in Canada to eliminate the special status of indigenous peoples, because the notion of “color-blindness” came to be seen as a core tenet of liberalism. But these efforts were resisted by the indigenous peoples, who valued their place outside of white Canadian culture. “The crucial difference between blacks and the aboriginal peoples of North America is, of course, that the latter value their separation from the mainstream life and culture of North America” (1989, 145). The primary injustice to African Americans was their exclusion from the dominant culture, whereas the forced inclusion of Indians would be an injustice to them. Kymlicka states that “most blacks do not have or want a distinct national identity. They see themselves as entitled to full membership in the American nation . . . and so have fought for full and equal participation within mainstream society” (1995, 25). Kymlicka offers no evidence for his assertions about what African Americans want and how they see themselves, and seems to take for granted the dominant integrationist view of racial justice in the United States. Indeed, although he notes that integration on the immigrant model has failed in the case of blacks, he says that “it is increasingly accepted that some new model of integration will have to be worked out” (1995, 25).

In a later essay, Kymlicka (Reference Kymlicka2001, chap. 9) briefly sketches what such a model might look like (see also Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka2002, 360–62). He notes that under Jim Crow, African Americans developed essentially a separate society with a parallel set of institutions, and states that, in this respect, they constitute something “closer to the ‘national minority’ pattern than to the immigrant pattern” (2001, 181). But he emphasizes that African Americans did not have “an already existing culture,” distinct from white American culture, that they sought to preserve through these institutions. “In terms of their uprootedness, therefore, African-Americans are much closer to immigrants and refugees than to national minorities” (2001, 181). Kymlicka also notes that the effect of integration during the civil rights movement was to undermine black institutions, although at the same time blacks continued to feel excluded from white institutions, leading many “to look with some nostalgia at the era of separate institutions” (2001, 182). He therefore sees the attraction of black nationalism as understandable, but emphasizes that the “idea of creating a ‘Black state’ . . . was never realistic,” and besides, “most Blacks do not have or want a distinct national identity” (2001, 183). Kymlicka concludes that “we have no clear theory or model for understanding or meeting the needs of African-Americans,” but suggests that such a model might include measures appropriate to both immigrant communities and national minorities: policies promoting inclusion in the larger society plus some policies to support black institutions (2001, 184). Still, he emphasizes that the support for such black institutions would constitute “short-term separateness and colour-consciousness [that] is needed to achieve the long-term goal of an integrated and colour-blind society” (2001, 184).

This is a helpful set of suggestions, which, as we will see, shares some features with community black nationalism, but there are some problems with Kymlicka's outlook. First, it is odd that Kymlicka equates black nationalism with the desire for an independent black state. Historically, black nationalism has taken many forms, from the demand for an independent state to claims to more limited autonomy. And much recent theorizing about nationalism and self-determination, including Kymlicka's, has portrayed nationalism as the basis for claims to autonomy short of an independent state. Yet Kymlicka ignores his own work on nationalism, and that of many others, in order to reject black nationalism as unrealistic by equating it with the claim to an independent state.

Second, Kymlicka's position that the long-term goal of any program for racial justice should be integration and the achievement of a color-blind society is problematic. His position reflects a tendency to continue to see African Americans as being (more) like immigrant groups, which may lead him to presume that, like immigrants, African Americans ought eventually to be assimilated into “mainstream” American culture and institutions. Kymlicka may be supposing that this is what African Americans want, or what they should want, but in any case the normative implication is that any vision of racial justice that does not embrace a color-blind society as its long-term goal is ruled out. Kymlicka, then, makes the same error he identified earlier—taking principles appropriate to one kind of minority and applying them to another. Despite the qualifications and nuances he has added to his reflections on African Americans over time, his analysis is still driven by the nation/ethnic group dichotomy, with African Americans being shoehorned into the latter category.

This problem may be based on the specific arguments that Kymlicka offers for minority autonomy. Kymlicka's defense of minority institutions is based on their role in preserving culture and language, so when it comes to African Americans, he sees no grounds for protecting black institutions indefinitely. Yet minority institutions can serve other important functions and may be justified on other grounds. Kymlicka points to language and culture as the source of unchosen costs to members of a minority, but other kinds of costs may justify similar claims. In this light, some of what Kymlicka says about the value of minority institutions may be relevant to African Americans, but it must be decoupled from the rationale of protecting language and culture and grounded instead on the particular history and current predicament of blacks in American society.

Many reactions to Kymlicka's work attempt to undermine the privileged position of national minorities in his theory and displace culture and language as the grounds for minority autonomy. For example, Margaret Moore (Reference Moore, Macedo and Buchanan2003) argues that self-government rights of indigenous peoples should be based, not on language and culture, but on grounds of historical injustice that they (in many cases) have suffered. She suggests that if their incorporation into the settler state was involuntary, then that state's authority over them is illegitimate. Justice then requires the restoration, to the degree practicable, of their self-government. No recourse to culture or language is necessary to reach this conclusion, she argues.

Iris Young has questioned the central dichotomy in Kymlicka's thought between nation and ethnic group, and urges that we think of various minorities as lying along a continuum of difference (Young Reference Young1997). She finds Kymlicka's concept of nation to be problematic and questions whether the boundaries of the concept can be precisely delineated. Young suggests that any argument for self-government based on a set of (necessary and sufficient) characteristics of national groups is doomed to be circular. Both political theorists and political actors tend to call those groups whose self-determination they wish to vindicate “nations.” She argues against “the either/or conception of nation” and urges that we consider “the distinctness of peoples . . . as a matter of degree” (Reference Young2000a, 253; see also Reference Young, Shapiro and Macedo2000b, 153). Other theorists, such as Jacob Levy (Reference Levy and Lanham2004) and Yael Tamir (Reference Tamir1993), concur that one cannot delineate in advance the features that characterize a nation, and then proceed on this basis to a normative argument for a right to self-determination. These critiques of Kymlicka suggest that his reliance on culture and language and on a conception of nation as sharply distinguished from other kinds of groups is problematic. Greater reliance on historic injustice and on context can more successfully ground a noncircular argument for some minority claims.

Kymlicka does consider historical injustices as one basis for minority rights, but he maintains that these considerations are subordinate in his overall account (1995, 116–20). If the thrust of these critiques of Kymlicka is persuasive, then we would do well, in the case of some groups at least, to place greater emphasis on historical injustice and other contextual factors in making the case for minority autonomy. What we need, I suggest, is Kymlicka's appreciation of the ways in which minority institutions can protect individuals from threats to their liberty and equality, but detached from his emphasis on language and culture, and from his restrictive conception of nation. In the case of African Americans, there may be a number of grounds on which support for black institutions might be based—grounds that have little to do with language and culture and much to do with the distinctive history of blacks in American society and the disadvantages that they face. In short, if we reject Kymlicka's view that African Americans are more like immigrants than like national minorities, then much of what he says about the importance of societal culture and minority institutions may be highly relevant to the case of African Americans. Such a view may begin to provide the theoretical resources with which to understand and defend many of the claims advanced by community black nationalists.

THE JUSTICE OF COMMUNITY BLACK NATIONALISM

We are now in a better position to assess the claims of community black nationalism. Recall that community black nationalism is the view that supports black autonomy and self-determination through “black control of political and economic institutions in the black community, and the building of autonomous black organizations” (Dawson Reference Dawson2001, 101). This was a dominant form of black nationalism during the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, though it was not the only variant. As historians have shown, the Black Power movement consisted of an array of organizations that had differing, and often conflicting, goals (see Ahmad Reference Ahmad2007; Joseph Reference Joseph2006; Ogbar Reference Ogbar2004). Yet community nationalism, emphasizing the value to African Americans of black-dominated institutions, often couched in terms of “community control,” was certainly prominent during this period (Robinson Reference Robinson2001, chap. 5; Van Deburg Reference Van Deburg1992, 113–29).

Some observers might doubt whether community black nationalism is properly labeled as a form of nationalism, because it is not a program for an independent state. Yet just as we ought to reject a constricted and exclusive conception of nation (as Iris Young has suggested), so too should we reject a strict either/or conception of nationalism. Community black nationalism bears a strong resemblance to what Kymlicka has described as minority nationalism (2001, chap. 5). Minority nationalists often seek “some form of political autonomy” but not necessarily secession; secession may become their demand “[a]t the extreme” if their desire for autonomy short of independence cannot be satisfied (2001, 95). If they can achieve a degree of autonomy, say, through federal arrangements, then minority nationalists may be satisfied—yet remain nationalists nonetheless. Similarly, Brian Barry argues that it is a “mistake” to see nationalism as necessarily involving a demand for an independent state. Though many nationalist movements do make this claim, “it would be highly artificial to deny the bona fides of nationalist movements that do not [make this claim, and aim instead] for increased political autonomy.” A movement that seeks autonomy rather than independence “is not the less a nationalist movement for that” (Reference Barry, Miller, Coleman, Connolly and Ryan1987, 353). So we need not, and indeed should not, equate nationalism with secessionist movements.

Still, minority nationalist claims usually have a territorial basis, a basis that community black nationalism would seem to lack. The Black Belt thesis did, of course, have a territorial basis, but just at the time of Haywood's defense this basis was being undermined by the migration of many African Americans out of the rural South to the urban North. At the time of the Black Power movement, some activists did declare a Republic of New Africa, comprising several states of the South, but under the prevailing circumstances, sustaining this claim would have required a reversal of at least some of the migration of previous decades—not a likely prospect (Draper Reference Draper1970, chap. 5; Hall Reference Hall1978, 129–38). Community nationalists had to find a way of revising traditional nationalist ideas to suit the conditions that they faced—especially the concentration of much of the black population in urban centers. Thus, they came see black neighborhoods in urban areas as the territorial basis of their claims (Dawson Reference Dawson2001, 97–100). Because this territory is noncontiguous, being disbursed among a number of cities, and because African Americans did not have the longstanding tie to these “territories” that national minorities often have to “their” land, community black nationalist claims to autonomy are not precisely analogous to other minorities' nationalisms. If a longstanding claim to a relatively large, contiguous land is an essential feature of genuine nationalism, then community black nationalism fails this test. (This point, of course, bears only on the appropriate label for the claims, not on their merits.)

Yet for the community black nationalists themselves, the important thing was not so much land itself as control of certain institutions. Malcolm X reflects this shift from land to institutions when he states that the struggle is “to gain control of the land and the institutions that flow from that land” (quoted in Dawson Reference Dawson2001, 99, emphasis added). Roy Innis similarly shifted from territory to institutions: “Large, densely populated black areas, especially in urban centers, must have a change in status. They must become political sub-divisions of the state, instead of sub-colonial appendages of cities. Blacks must manage and control the institutions that service their areas” (1997, 177).

Which institutions, exactly, did community black nationalists seek to control? As a group, they were often vague and inconsistent on this question. Sometimes the institutions are “churches, professional societies, schools and social groups” (Ogbar Reference Ogbar2004, 124); sometimes “credit unions, co-ops, political parties” (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Reference Van Deburg1997, 122); sometimes schools, housing authorities, and businesses (Ture and Hamilton Reference Ture and Hamilton1992, 167–73); sometimes governmental bureaucracies and programs that serve black communities (Ture and Hamilton Reference Ture and Hamilton1992, 183); and sometimes “schools, hospitals, and government agencies” (Van Deburg Reference Van Deburg1992, 115). These lists include institutions in civil society, such as churches and professional associations, so that the “demand” to “control” them would seem odd; as voluntary associations, all that is required would seem to be that blacks have the freedom of association to form and participate in the institutions. Similarly, supporting black businesses is presumably a matter of individual choice and freedom of contract. Other cases, however, might require state action to support black control—particularly schools, government programs, and housing (at least with regard to public housing). And even in the case of economic institutions and those in civil society, public policy can play a role in determining the conditions under which they operate, and thus in determining their chances of success or failure. In any case, there is no definitive list of which institutions community black nationalists had in mind, though generally their emphasis was on the institutions that, as Malcolm X put it, flow from the localities where African Americans predominate, and that exercise direct authority in those localities (Bareka Reference Bareka and William1997, 153; Foner Reference Foner1995, 178–79; Innis Reference Innis and William1997, 177).

Although black nationalists demanded control of the institutions most directly related to black communities, they realized that, given the limited nature of the territory dominated by African Americans in any given city, complete autonomy would not be practicable. So they usually called for the extent of autonomy appropriate in light of this, and for fair representation in decision-making where this took place at a jurisdictional level where African Americans did not predominate. “This is what they seek: control. When the black people lack a majority, Black Power means proper representation and sharing of control . . . [We seek] the inclusion of black people at all levels of decision-making. We do not seek to be mere recipients from the decision-making process, but participants in it” (Ture and Hamilton Reference Ture and Hamilton1992, 46, 183). Community black nationalists “demanded inclusion while advocating autonomy and self-determination” (Ogbar Reference Ogbar2004, 2). Hence, although this program contains separatist elements, it is a mistake to characterize it simply as separatism, or to place it in opposition to integration itself. Black Power advocates were well aware—how could they not be?—that African Americans were a minority in the United States, and that (barring secession) total separation from whites was not possible. What they objected to was not integration but “integration-as-assimilation” (Robinson Reference Robinson2001, 71). Hence Ture and Hamilton, in their book Black Power, are careful to reject, not integration itself, but “integration as it is currently practiced,” which they characterize as “a one-way street” (1992, 55). Black Power “embodied . . . the desire of a minority to be included, but on its own terms, within a society that it could never dominate” (Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson1995, 315). One can say that is it “both anti-integrationist and anti-separatist” (Draper Reference Draper1970, 119) in that it is opposed both to the mainstream vision of integration and to the total separation of classical black nationalism. We might call this vision, following Bush (Reference Bush1999), “pluralist integration,” or, following Brooks (Reference Brooks1996), “partial separation.”

But what was the argument for “community control”? I suggest that community black nationalists made two arguments, one based on justice and addressed to the broader, white-dominated society, and the other addressed to their fellow African Americans to support black institutions. I treat the former in the remainder of this section, and the latter in the next.

Community black nationalists argued that justice demands the support of black institutions and communities by the broader society. This argument focuses on the costs to African Americans of integration as it was usually understood—costs that were unfair to impose on them. These costs are similar to the costs Kymlicka draws attention to in his argument for autonomy for minority nations, and the circumstances and vulnerabilities underlying the costs are also similar. Kymlicka emphasized that a stable communal and institutional context are necessary for individual freedom. Without these, individuals cannot make and carry out coherent life plans. In the context of the civil rights movement and its aftermath, the implications of this insight for the case of African Americans are clear. Under Jim Crow, African Americans possessed something very close to a societal culture. Though they operated under very adverse and unjust conditions, black institutions—schools, businesses, professional organizations, media, hospitals, churches, etc.—provided for a substantial degree of black autonomy. Though born of oppression, these institutions took on a life of their own and came to be deeply valued by many African Americans. Although the conditions that gave rise to black institutions were unjust, undermining or destroying these institutions in the name of integration was arguably another injustice. At the very least, the fate of these institutions should have been an explicit topic of discussion during the civil rights movement and its aftermath. Yet this issue was largely ignored (Peller Reference Peller, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller and Thomas1995).

After the civil rights movement, and under the banner of integration, African Americans were essentially told that racial discrimination and de jure segregation would no longer be tolerated as a matter of policy, but that further progress toward racial equality would be achieved through integration. This, in turn, would be achieved through, as Norman Podhoretz put it, “the gradual absorption of deserving Negroes one by one into white society” (quoted in Steinberg Reference Steinberg1995, 110). This way of conceiving the route to racial equality imposes enormous costs on African Americans and represents a great disruption to the context in which they had formed their life plans. It undermines the associative and communal ties that many deeply valued. It is also, many black nationalists argued, incompatible with the self-respect of African Americans to place themselves in the position of supplicants, hoping to be found “deserving” by whites. Black nationalists often focused on the “price” of integration (Browne Reference Browne1968, 51; Ture and Hamilton Reference Ture and Hamilton1992, 54)—a price that they argued was unfair to impose as a condition of racial equality, and a price that many whites, taking white culture and institutions as normative, usually failed to see at all. Furthermore, the disruption of African American communities and individuals had little analog in white communities: African Americans were being asked to bear costs that white Americans were not. Black individuals, institutions, and communities were to be transformed, whereas their white counterparts were asked little, beyond “tolerating” the presence of a few blacks. Hence, considerations of both liberty and equality support black nationalist claims in resisting the costs that integration imposed on African Americans, and support their alternative vision of maintaining stable black communities and institutions.

Now some might argue that the costs associated with integration—the disruption to African American individual life plans and communities—were necessary and inevitable, but this is not so, at least not to the extent threatened by the dominant conception of integration. These costs are a result of a set of policies that place little or no value on the continued health and prosperity of black institutions and communities. An alternative set of policies might offer African Americans a different array of choices: between participating in well-funded, thriving white-dominated institutions, on the one hand, and participating in well-funded, thriving black-dominated institutions on the other. But this is not the set of choices African Americans were offered. Instead, the set of choices that African Americans faced came to be, essentially, between well-funded white institutions on the one hand and black institutions that had been underfunded and disadvantaged under Jim Crow and continued to be so during and after the civil rights movement. They faced an intrinsically unfair set of choices that heavily favored integration into white institutions. This is precisely the kind of coercive assimilation pressure that national minorities have rightly resisted. There is, then, a strong parallel between the black nationalist case for support of black institutions and Kymlicka's argument for national minority autonomy: members of a minority should not have to pay costs that members of the majority do not, as the price of participating in the communities and institutions of which they are members, especially when such membership is a result not of their choices but of the circumstances in which they find themselves.

Perhaps the best example to illustrate this argument is the case of integration of public schools. During and immediately after the civil rights movement, black nationalists argued against the terms on which school integration usually took place. If they were given a choice at all, black students were often, in effect, forced to choose between inferior schools in their own neighborhoods and being bused to better schools in white neighborhoods. Many understandably chose the latter, despite the substantial costs it involved. A more fair set of choices would have included staying closer to home in neighborhood schools that had an equitable share of educational resources (Valls Reference Valls, Macedo and Tamir2002). Today, many advocates argue for greater focus, not on integration for its own sake, but on the distribution of resources among schools—particularly between poorer, predominantly black schools and better-resourced, predominantly white schools. Although this is, of course, a complex issue in its own right, black nationalists (and others) would argue that the benefits to students of being in a predominantly black school, and the costs of integration, should at the very least be considered in any approach to these questions, and that ideally black students would have a choice between good options, not between bad options and worse.

One indication of the dominance of the integrationist point of view in discussions of school equity is that statistics on levels of black (and other minority) concentration in certain schools are often cited as evidence of the failure of American society to progress toward greater racial equality. Of course, under current conditions there is ample reason to be concerned about minority concentration in schools and the general lack of integration. But in principle, it is a mistake to equate racial clustering with failure. This is one of the main upshots of the black nationalist position: racial clustering is not in itself a bad thing, and may in some respects be a good, valued thing, as long as it results from uncoerced individual choices under just conditions. It is a mistake to say that “If racial segregation is the problem, then racial integration is a remedy” (Anderson Reference Anderson2004, 20). De jure segregation was certainly a “problem” but it does not follow that integration is the remedy. Rather, black nationalists argued, the remedy is the creation of conditions that ensure freedom and equality for African Americans.

So community black nationalists did not call for a return to de jure segregation. They affirmed that African Americans ought to be included in white-dominated institutions, and ought to be able to pursue the opportunities offered by the wider society without facing racial discrimination. What they contested was the terms on which individual African Americans must make their choices about where to live, where to work, with whom to associate, etc. As we will see in the following section, black nationalists did argue that their fellow African Americans should choose to associate with their racial kin, but the argument from justice is distinct: it is a matter of principle and of policy, addressing the institutional constraints that African Americans should and should not face in pursuing their life plans. It is important to emphasize, then, that black nationalists did make arguments grounded in justice.

Of course, black nationalists realized that institutional autonomy was not enough; resources were needed as well. As one observer put it, “In reality, of course, control can operate to our advantage only if we have something to control, if we have the necessary resources” (Tucker Reference Tucker1971, 116). So an essential part of the black nationalist program was the call for redistribution from white institutions to black institutions, on both compensatory grounds and more forward-looking equity grounds. Because the period of de jure discrimination was so recent, the compensatory grounds were usually given pride of place, and distributive issues were therefore discussed under the banner of “black reparations.” For example, in his “Black Manifesto,” James Forman (Reference Forman, Lecky and Elliott Wright1969) called on white churches and synagogues to pay $500 million as part of a program of reparations to which other institutions, including the federal government, would contribute. The money would be spent on supporting institutions that served African Americans, including banks, publishing houses, television networks, and job training. The Black Panther Party also combined demands for black control with demands for resources as compensation for Jim Crow (Foner Reference Foner1995, 2–4). So it is not accurate to say that black nationalists who advocated community control failed to realize that the sources of many of the problems in the black community lay outside of it (see Robinson Reference Robinson2001, 102–03). They did realize this, and the call for black reparations was one attempt to address this problem. It is also somewhat beside the point that this means that the ultimate success of the community black nationalist program depends on whites' support. This is to some extent true, but this is surely the case for any vision of justice: its realization depends on garnering sufficient political support. But if that support is not forthcoming, this does not tell against the justice of the claims themselves.

Finally, the argument for support for black institutions and communities should be distinguished from that in the case of immigrant communities. Recall that Kymlicka argued that immigrants have a much weaker set of claims that they can press against their adoptive countries, both because their membership is voluntary and because they do not already possess a societal culture that is more or less institutionally complete. African Americans, on the other hand, had well-established, separate institutions formed largely as a result of the extremely unjust and oppressive conditions of Jim Crow. Black nationalists themselves often compared their program to what immigrant groups had achieved for themselves, and sometimes couched their demands as in line with the ethnic pluralism that already existed in the United States (see Hough Reference Hough1968; McCartney Reference McCartney1992; Van Deburg Reference Van Deburg1992). Yet to compare their own case with that of immigrants was a mistake, because it substantially understated the grounds for their claims. Given the nonvoluntary and highly unjust conditions under which black institutions and communities were formed, African Americans have a much stronger case for autonomy than immigrant groups.

A LIBERAL “NATION-BUILDING” PROJECT?

Successfully pressing community black nationalist claims requires not only establishing just conditions vis-à-vis the society as a whole, but also gaining the support of African Americans themselves. So the other argument that black nationalists made was addressed to their fellow African Americans, whom they urged to reject integration on the terms on which it was offered them, and to choose instead to rally around the communities and institutions of which they were already a part. Black nationalists urged African Americans to see black institutions, not as necessarily inferior to white ones, but as an aspect of and vehicle for community self-determination.

I call this a “nation-building” project to emphasize the similarities between the community black nationalists' efforts and those undertaken by some national minorities. But the scare quotes are meant to indicate that it is not actual nation-building that the black nationalists were engaged in, except in a loose sense. Most called not for creation of an independent black nation (though the Republic of New Africa continued to have its adherents), but rather for a degree of institutional autonomy that was in fact far more modest than the autonomy usually sought even by national minorities that reject secession. Still, as I have suggested, the similarities are sufficient to warrant the label, and emphasizing these similarities facilitates the use of the theoretical resources that have been developed to analyze and evaluate other minority claims.

What reasons did black nationalists offer in their call to African Americans to support black institutions and communities? There were several. First, black nationalists appealed to African Americans' interests, arguing that they would be better served in thriving black institutions than as a minority in predominantly white ones. Given the continued salience of race, they argued, African Americans would be better off controlling their own institutions than being a minority within institutions dominated by whites (Innis Reference Innis and William1997, 176; Ogbar Reference Ogbar2004, 3). Second, some argued that African Americans had a moral duty—to themselves or to their racial kin—to support black institutions. That is, even if some African Americans could do well for themselves in white-dominated contexts, they nevertheless had special obligations to other members of the black community to support institutions on which these others depended (Boxill Reference Boxill1992, 176). Third, black nationalists argued that African Americans should see integration (in its dominant, assimilationist guise) as an affront to their self-respect, because they interpreted it as carrying the message that white norms and institutions are superior to their black counterparts (Boxill Reference Boxill1992, 176–85; McGary Reference McGary1999, 49). Fourth, some argued that American society remained racist, and that the promise of integration was essentially a sham or a ploy—that integration, even on whites' terms, would not take place in the foreseeable future (Dawson Reference Dawson2001, 87; Ture and Hamilton Reference Ture and Hamilton1992, 44).

Now these may be good arguments or bad ones; they may be plausible or implausible, and judgments may reasonably vary depending on one's point of view. The present argument need not endorse them. Rather, the important thing from the perspective of a liberal theory of racial justice is that black nationalists be able to make these arguments under conditions in which individual African Americans are not being coerced into rejecting them by the nature of the choices available to them. That is, the argument from justice discussed above requires that the black nationalists making their appeals to support black institutions be able to do so under conditions that are fair, and that give black “nation-building” a fighting chance.

That is not all a liberal theory of racial justice has to say about the community black nationalist project, because it must concern itself not only with threats to liberty and equality that arise from the conditions under which the project is pursued, but also with the way it is pursued. The call by black nationalists for all African Americans to get behind their program worried some liberals, so it is important to be clear about the extent to which, and the conditions under which, liberalism supports the community nationalist project. There would seem to be ample reason to be concerned. After all, black nationalism has often been charged with being patriarchal and even misogynist (Shelby Reference Shelby2005, 8). More generally, it has sometimes been identified with what Michael Dawson describes as “nonliberal elements” in black politics. “Perhaps the most obvious example of a nonliberal (some would say antiliberal) political tradition within Black politics has been the consistent demand that individual African Americans take political stands that are perceived by the community as not harming the Black community” (Dawson Reference Dawson1995, 206). These concerns about the potential of a black nationalist project to oppress and subordinate some members of the black community raises significant questions about the internal dynamics of black institutions and the appropriate liberal stance toward community black nationalism.

These questions are not unique to black nationalism, but have strong parallels to questions discussed in debates over liberal multiculturalism. As with black nationalism, other minority nationalisms make claims to a degree of institutional autonomy that then raise the question of the treatment of individuals within those institutions, that is, of the position of “internal minorities” (Green Reference Green and Kymlicka1995; Weinstock Reference Weinstock, Laden and Owen2007). These concerns have been pressed particularly by feminists concerned that empowering cultural and other minorities merely empowers the dominant forces within them, and deprives internal minorities of the protections offered by the dominant liberal legal and institutional framework.Footnote ³ Ever since Susan Moller Okin asked, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” (Reference Okin, Cohen, Howard and Nussbaum1999), this has been a dominant theme in work on liberal multiculturalism (see, for example, Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev Reference Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev2005).

Simplifying greatly, the ensuing debate has fallen roughly along the following lines (Deveaux Reference Deveaux2006, chap. 2). On one side there is a group of theorists who argue that liberal multiculturalism, while extending certain kinds of autonomy and accommodation to minorities, must uphold the rights of individuals within the minorities. These rights include the right to equal consideration and to participation in democratic decision-making. For these theorists, minority autonomy must not become an excuse to oppress “minorities within minorities” (Deveaux Reference Deveaux2006; Phillips Reference Phillips2007; Song Reference Song2007). On the other side is a group of scholars who argue that liberal toleration requires that a liberal state take a more “hands-off” approach to certain minorities, even those that are patriarchal or that deprive their own members of certain liberal rights. This is permissible, it is argued, as long as minority group members have a right of exit (Kukathas Reference Kukathas2003; Spinner-Halev Reference Spinner-Halev, Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev2005). If they have such a right, then their association with their cultural kin is voluntary, and the liberal state has no right to interfere with their choice to go on associating with the group—even if, in the minds of some observers, this makes the internal minorities complicit in their own oppression.

I cannot fully engage this debate in the present context, but I want to endorse the position of the former camp, that the proper liberal approach to the problem of internal minorities is to ensure that they are not oppressed by the “internal majorities,” or by the dominant powers within their group. The most telling argument against the hands-off approach is that it does not take adequate account of the costs of exit, and therefore there is little warrant to infer that, if internal minorities choose not to exit, their association must be voluntary. Once we reckon with the costs of exit, it is not plausible simply to say that the failure to exit implies consent. “If circumstances are sufficiently extreme in terms of coercion or probable consequences of exit . . . we would not want to say that the right of exit is genuinely enjoyed by all” (Deveaux Reference Deveaux2006, 52).

This is the position taken by Kymlicka, who distinguishes between external protections accorded minorities (which he defends) and internal restrictions that minorities impose on their own members (which he rejects) (1995, 35–44). Kymlicka also emphasizes that the competition, so to speak, should be fair between the majority nation's nation-building, which may attempt to persuade some putative minority members that they should see themselves as members of the cultural majority, and the (would-be) minority nation's nation-building efforts. They may use the same methods of persuasion, but must also both respect the same constraints, particularly individual rights. Fairness requires, he suggests, that “national minorities should have the same tools of nation-building available to them as the majority nation, subject to the same liberal limitations. What we need, in other words, is a consistent theory of permissible forms of nation-building within liberal democracies” (2001, 29).

The implications of this position for the community black nationalist project are clear. Black nationalists may engage in attempts to rally their fellow African Americans to see themselves as members of “a nation within a nation,” to affirm their black identity, perhaps to embrace a particular vision of black culture, and to support and participate in black institutions. At the same time, white institutions may attempt to attract black members by propounding a vision of a color-blind society, affirming the value of diversity, engaging in affirmative action, and the like. Liberal theory, I suggest, should be agnostic about which side, if any, should ultimately win this competition, but it concerns itself with the fairness of the terms on which the competition is waged. The set of options that African Americans face should not be between impoverished and disadvantaged black institutions, on the one hand, and well-heeled white institutions, on the other. This set of options, I have argued, is intrinsically coercive and unjust. Rather, justice requires a more equitable distribution of resources among institutions, which can then vie for the participation and loyalty of individuals. Black nationalists may make their case on fair terms, but they have no guarantee of success.

It is in this way that the present argument resonates with Anne Phillips's notion of “multiculturalism without culture,” a vision, she says, that “put[s] human agency more at its centre” (2007, 9). For in the argument presented here, as with some other recent treatments of liberal multiculturalism, culture and the preservation of culture do not play a dominant role. The point is not, for example, to protect a set of cultural practices from contamination or from other influences that might induce change. Rather, the emphasis is on protecting individual members of minority groups both from undue pressure to integrate into the majority, and from undue pressure from the minority to toe the line. A consistently liberal approach to these issues is equally concerned with both kinds of threats to individual freedom.

Now, it may be that the black nationalist project is doomed to fail, as many commentators have suggested, but it is important to be clear about why it might fail—or, more precisely, the legitimate versus the illegitimate reasons for failure. The illegitimate reasons for failure, I have suggested, are those related to the unfair circumstances in which black nationalists make their case, in which black communities and institutions are so disadvantaged that anyone with the option to exit them will choose to do so. The legitimate reasons for failure, from the point of view developed here, would be ones where, in the context of a fair competition between predominantly black and white institutions, African Americans choose the latter. We simply do not know whether this would occur, however, because the conditions for this sort of fair competition have not yet been created.

It is also important to be clear about why the community nationalist project may fail, even under fair conditions. Some commentators have suggested that black nationalism is doomed to fail because it has only bad arguments. The arguments are said to presume identity of interests among African Americans, whereas in fact African Americans have diverse and divergent interests depending on their gender, sexual orientation, or (especially) their class position. Or the arguments are said to presume a black culture that is common to all African Americans, or to presume that blacks have a moral duty to sacrifice their own interests for that of the group (see Glaude Reference Glaude and Eddie2002; Reed Reference Reed and Glaude2002). On the interpretation offered here, however, black nationalism need not presume these things—rather, the project is best understood as attempting to create what its critics say it presumes. That is, it is an attempt, among other things, to convince African Americans that they ought to see their interests as closely connected to that of other African Americans; that they ought to embrace a certain version of racial or cultural identity; that they ought to affirm special duties toward other African Americans. There is nothing incoherent about this project. After all, interests, identities, and one's sense of special obligations to particular others are not objective facts, but mediated by one's self-understanding. The black nationalist project is an attempt to advance one such self-understanding among African Americans.

Once fair conditions of individual choice for African Americans were created, it would not be surprising if the black nationalist project proved successful, given what we know about black attitudes toward community nationalism, which tend to be very supportive—even under current conditions. Michael Dawson tells us that blacks' sense of a “linked fate varies very slightly with socioeconomic variables” (Reference Dawson1994, 79). That is, better-off African Americans are about as likely as less well-off ones to see themselves as sharing a common interest with other African Americans. More recently, Dawson has examined African American attitudes toward black nationalist ideas (2001, chap. 3), and he finds little support for the classical nationalist goal of a separate nation-state but finds substantial support for more modest kinds of black autonomy and self-determination. According to Dawson, “there is broad support for a moderate position in favor of controlling, building, and supporting institutions in the black community. . . . Black nationalism . . . remains, particularly in its ‘community nationalism’ variant, a strong force in black politics and public opinion” (2001, 123, 133). Indeed, many scholars have found strong support for community black nationalism among African Americans, and this support is often even greater among middle-class blacks than among the poor (Brown and Shaw Reference Brown and Shaw2002; Davis and Brown Reference Davis and Brown2002; Hochschild Reference Hochschild1995). Black solidarity, then, is alive and well, with many African Americans expressing a willingness to support black-dominated institutions. Indeed, to the extent that conditions have improved for some African Americans over the last several decades, what is really surprising is the degree of ideological and interest cohesiveness that African Americans continue to exhibit. It may also be surprising that community nationalism enjoys the support that it does in light of the often disadvantaged conditions that predominate in black institutions. If there were a more equitable distribution of resources, then the disincentives to supporting black institutions would only diminish.

Finally, the focus on threats to the liberty and equality to African Americans posed by the conditions under which they choose to support black institutions marks a significant divergence between the position defended here and that of Tommie Shelby, whose book, We Who Are Dark (Reference Shelby2005), is the most sustained and sophisticated theoretical engagement with black nationalism to appear in some time. In many respects Shelby's conclusions are similar to those defended here: Shelby argues that (a version of) black nationalism is compatible with liberal principles and that black nationalism need not rest on a conception of black essentialism or on a belief in a distinct black culture or identity. Yet Shelby argues that any liberal approach to black nationalism places such severe constraints on the black nationalist project as to make it unviable as a strategy for institution- and community-building. He argues that the interests of individual African Americans are now so widely divergent that the idea of building black institutions as the path to advancement is not realistic. Shelby is rightly concerned about the potential threat of the black nationalist project to individual liberty—the threat that advocates of the project will pressure or coerce others to “get with the program,” to advance a vision of collective black interests at the expense of their own interests. In particular, Shelby argues that the class interests of better-off African Americans are so divergent from those of the less well-off that the former cannot reasonably be expected to be interested in the black nationalist project.

Shelby's diagnosis of the prospects for community black nationalism may be accurate under present conditions, but it focuses on only one of the two sources of threat to the freedom of African Americans: that internal to the black community. His argument, focused on the choices likely to be made by better-off African Americans, takes as given the current conditions under which those choices would be made. That is, Shelby assumes that the options among which better-off blacks would choose are, on the one hand, deprived black neighborhoods and institutions, and, on the other, more comfortable but more racially mixed neighborhoods and institutions. Yet, as I suggested above, these are the very conditions of choice that black nationalism challenges on the grounds of justice. The choice ought not to be between deprived black settings and well-resourced settings where blacks are a small minority. In order for the choices African Americans make not to be highly coerced ones, and for them not to entail unfair costs, these conditions themselves must be changed. Yet Shelby accepts as given one of the main conditions that community nationalism challenges, and uses this condition as an objection to community nationalism.

This reflects an interesting asymmetry in Shelby's view. His argument reflects an acute awareness of the danger of coercive pressure within the black community, and he staunchly defends the right of better-off African Americans not to sacrifice their own interests and autonomy for the sake of some conception of the common interests of black Americans. He is right to do so, because a liberal black nationalism must respect this autonomy. Yet Shelby is arguably too willing to accept the coercive pressures that are created by the unjust circumstances of choice that better-off—and indeed all—African Americans face. In confronting the possible danger of coercion internal to the black community, he inadequately scrutinizes the very real presence of external coercion created by the circumstances of choice. Justice requires, I have argued, that African Americans not be faced with the set of choices that Shelby accepts. Only if African Americans have a choice between equally well-resourced black-dominated settings and non–black-dominated settings can their choices be considered uncoerced.