The intellectual and strategic moorings of contemporary black political solidarity are increasingly unstable. As the political memory of the race-specific Civil Rights movement fades further into history, intraracial differences that have always existed, such as gender, religion, sexuality, multiracial identification, immigration, region, cultural affiliation, political ideology, and generation, are being highlighted by race scholars from a variety of fields as reasons for rethinking race-based political cohesion. Tommie Shelby acknowledges all of these internal pressures, but sees the widening gap between poor and more affluent blacks as the intraracial fissure that most threatens political cohesion among today's African Americans. From this sociological premise, Shelby sets out to articulate a “progressive,” philosophically sound basis for black political organization that appeals both to the class interests of poor and working-class blacks and to those of middle- and upper-class blacks. By “progressive,” Shelby means a recognition that basic social injustices linger, and can and should be corrected through state intervention and/or collective political action. Remedies for current racial inequalities cannot be found in a “conservative” return to a former era of ostensibly better social organization.

The unifying progressive principle that Shelby develops is a political black identity grounded in a sense of common oppression that is expansive enough to capture class as well as other differences among blacks. Somewhat counterintuitively, he finds the raw material for this political accord in a particular strand of black nationalism he names pragmatic black nationalism. Pragmatic black nationalists invoke a “thin,” strategic notion of racial identity, as a practical way of overcoming the collective action problem of black diversity, in order to identify and pursue political goals that will benefit all blacks. By contrast, he describes classical black nationalism as demanding a “thick” sense of pan-ethnoracial blackness that conceptualizes black racial identity as a worthy and necessary end in itself. Shelby performs this philosophical surgery “from the standpoint of persons who identify with the tradition [of black nationalism], from a hermeneutic point of view” (p. 32), with the goal of drawing out the nascent progressive potential of a philosophical tradition that has long been respected, if not wholly endorsed, by a great many African Americans. He rightly chides liberals and progressives for using the personalities and institutions associated with black nationalisms to prejudge all black nationalist thought as fanatical and unprincipled.

Through a close reading of the nineteenth-century black nationalist Martin Delaney, Shelby extracts the features of black nationalism he finds most conducive to his project of conceptualizing a strategic sense of black identity. Although Delaney “wavered” between a thin and thick sense of racial identity, Shelby maintains that his deepest and most abiding commitment was to a progressive, pragmatic black nationalism. Africa, for Delaney, was not a predestined, terminal homeland for blacks, but represented instead a reprieve from American racism. In contrast to cultural nationalists who invoke racially simplified conceptions of Africa to ground a politics of racial separatism, Shelby argues that Delaney's pan-African cultural appeals were meant to “rejuvenate” democratic independence in black minds. Delaney's political principles are illuminated through Shelby, but whether Delaney's “pragmatic” nationalist principles really do trump his “classical” nationalist principles is another matter. Delaney's calls for black sovereignty may have been inconsistent, but they were calls for black sovereignty nonetheless.

Shelby's methodology, which he states forcefully at the outset, provides some conceptual clarity. He is a philosopher committed to reforming, rather than overturning, the methods of his discipline. Whereas many race theorists deem abstraction and generalization to be irrelevant, and even counterproductive, to the study of racial politics, he deftly demonstrates how these tools can serve the practical purpose of forcing us to articulate the antecedent principles that support and justify political practice. Empirically tracking when thin blackness morphs into thick blackness may be practically impossible. But for Shelby, this practical problem does not release us from the duty of guarding against what Tocqueville derisively called “spontaneous” or unreflective solidarity, the kind of group think found in Shelby's depiction of classical nationalism. Black individuals are free to embrace black cultural practices, but no conception of black culture can provide a sound philosophical anchor for black solidarity. He sees personal racial self-identification as neither imprisoning (Naomi Zack) nor fascist (Paul Gilroy). His concerns with identity are strictly political. One can be unashamed of being black without staking one's pride upon racial identification. The least and most culturally identified black individuals can and should unite under pragmatic black political solidarity.

They should do so because antiblack racism still affects all African Americans, albeit in different ways. Poor blacks seek basic material goods, such as well-paid employment and affordable housing. Middle-class blacks, Shelby opines, are preoccupied with the “public image” of blackness because they see racial stereotypes as impeding their social mobility (e.g., career advancement). And more generally, they suffer the psychological costs of these stereotypes. More affluent blacks thus have an economic and psychological interest in improving the material conditions of the black poor because the condition of the black poor fuels a more broadly disseminated racial stigma from which middle-class blacks cannot escape. The objective of black political solidarity should be to “release” all blacks from racial stereotypes.

In the end, Shelby leaves us without any sense of what sort of policies might flow from this interest convergence. Pragmatic black nationalism ends up being so expansive, so “thin,” that it is hard to imagine that black women, black LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) persons, black immigrants, and other black subgroups will find this loose economic and psychological tie sufficient for the expression of their particular political needs within and outside of black communities. Yet it is precisely such internal divisions that make it philosophically necessary to predicate black politics on a thin, rather than thick, sense of racial identity. Whether the language of nationalism furthers this foundational project is questionable, given that Shelby's definition of black political solidarity bears so little resemblance to what most perceive, rightly or wrongly, to be black nationalism.