Balfour takes from Baldwin a belief in “the silent workings of racial assumptions or beliefs,” especially the belief “that blacks are somehow less than fully human,” which lets Americans endorse race equality in principle while opposing “mechanisms designed to implement the principle” (pp. 8, 6, 5). To challenge this assumption we must become, Balfour argues, more conscious of history and more willing to acknowledge the reality of racial oppression and its psychic legacies. Baldwin's role in this, as an “honest man” and “good writer,” is as a witness who “uncovers” the deep fears that lie behind silences (pp. 12 [citing Baldwin's own aspirations], 14). Such witnessing exemplifies, Balfour claims, Judith Shklar's effort to “give injustice its due” (p. 20; cf. pp. 66–67): to go beyond abstract theory and portray the plight of those whose condition violates our professed ideals.

Chapter 2, a reading of “Many Thousands Gone,” explores the complexities of identity. Baldwin's essay, Balfour argues, “make[s] real the weight of racial oppression without reducing African Americans to that experience of oppression” (p. 48). Particularly striking is Balfour's account of how Baldwin uses “we”: She argues that in successively using the word to mean Americans as a whole (implicitly, mostly white), black Americans, and something more subtle and interracial, Baldwin subtly subverted “racial authenticity” and rigid identities more generally.

In Chapter 3, the best chapter, Balfour uses “Notes of a Native Son” to explore how Baldwin's descriptions of black Americans’ experience challenge our racial blindness. Baldwin writes to make racism vivid: His story, “personal but not only personal … reveals not only that racial segregation is wrong but also how it is wrong”—without making “victimization beautiful or suffering virtuous” (pp. 75 [emphasis in original], 74). Through this reading, Balfour develops her own subtle, persuasive position, opposing both “deindividualizing” race portrayals that flatten personal experience and a “hyperindividualization” that blames racial problems on personal fault (pp. 78–79).

Chapter 4, on social criticism, discusses how “the appeal of innocence” leads even “historically conscious” theorists to slight the full political and psychic impact of racial consciousness (p. 97). Balfour faults Michael Walzer's criticism in particular for being less sensitive to racial evils than he thinks. While some criticize his work for being too particularistic and neglectful of abstract principles, Balfour calls Walzer “insufficiently situated in a racially saturated context” (p. 100; emphasis in original). And she questions whether Walzer's categories of “connection” and “home” capture black Americans’ ambiguous membership in America's identity and deep but distrustful attachment to its ideals.

Two final chapters summarize Baldwin's importance for social criticism: “Baldwin both speaks in the name of democratic principles and unsettles received understandings of those principles,” is politically committed while reminding us that causes flatten human complexity, and places justice and freedom above security and moral certainty (pp. 117, 120, 137). While Baldwin's work lacks a political program, his writing, by “describing the spaces between principle and practice … lays critical groundwork for the construction of political theories that tackle the challenges of race consciousness” (p. 135).

Missing from this short book are a sense of history's complexities, a sense of Baldwin's art, and a sense of politics. Balfour endorses Baldwin's view that addressing the race question requires engaging above all with history—but never quite demonstrates why. A little Nietzsche (or common sense) suggests that political action requires remembering some aspects of history and forgetting others, lest the burdens of past injustice keep us from starting anew.

Overemphasizing history can also entail missing progress. Balfour suggests, without quite saying explicitly, that America since the postwar era (when Baldwin wrote his greatest essays) has changed only its racial opinions—that real racial conditions have changed only slightly or superficially (pp. xii, 5, 28, 30, 35, 81–82, 132). This is one-sided. Housing and educational integration may remain elusive, police brutality common (depending on the place); Balfour rightly sees such grievances behind the 1992 Los Angeles unrest (pp. 81–82). But other things have changed. Highly intelligent and ambitious black Americans are no longer restricted to menial jobs—an injustice Baldwin mentioned as a cause of riots in “Notes of a Native Son” (cited on p. 81), and as a cause of black suicide in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952). Baldwin's reference to how we feel “when we give our maid her wages” (cited on p. 47) hardly captures white-black relations today: Few blacks are domestic workers, few domestics are black, and most whites meet at least a few black Americans in very different contexts. And while Balfour deftly analyzes blacks’ profound sense of powerlessness, she does not discuss how the end of unpunished lynching and all-white voting lists may have affected it. Missing the changes here, or downplaying their importance, gains us no clarity.

Balfour also fails to stress how Baldwin's vocation as writer and artist affected his social criticism. She does not fully acknowledge that Baldwin's view of freedom (which she rightly calls existential [p. 131]) was bohemian, directed against oppression—but also mediocrity, materialism, and bourgeois conformity. No political discussion or action could easily satisfy a longing for this kind of freedom. Nor is such longing, which affects mostly artists and intellectuals, a sure path to a more inclusive democracy.

This brings up the book's third omission: It leaves unbridged the gap between discussion and politics, “democracy” as ideal and actual democratic institutions and practices. Balfour defines democracy in terms of “conversation among citizens;” she argues approvingly that Baldwin's essays resemble “love letters” that seek social transformation through intimacy; she rightly notes—but dubiously endorses—Baldwin's quasi-transcendentalist view of democracy, under which the true “majority” consists not of average citizens but of every age's moral heroes (pp. 1, 8, 13, 137). Such epic aspirations for democracy, themselves noble, contain the roots of contempt. They led Baldwin's characters, mirroring his own opinions, to despise those who “did what they were supposed to do, and … raised their children,” to dismiss most Americans as “football players and Eagle scouts. Cowards” (Another Country 1960, pp. 130, 406).

This sensitive, superbly written book teaches that social criticism must make people face their deepest fears and renounce comfort and security as selfish illusions (pp. 111, 132). It remains unclear whether criticism that pursues this much honesty furthers the racial redemption Baldwin sought—or aims too high to engage a democratic citizenry that will never be mostly heroes.