Barack Obama used the occasion of Father's Day 2008 to broach the topic of the state of the Black family. From the pulpit of the Apostolic Church of God on the South Side of Chicago, the then-presumptive Democratic nominee reminded congregants, “Fatherhood does not end at conception.” That the son of an absent Black father delivered these remarks endowed the message with new poignancy, but African American men's alleged filial abandon has long been a focus of national attention.

The paradigm-defining text was Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (1965), which attributed pervasive social, political, and economic injustices experienced by African Americans to a “tangle of pathology,” a cultural deficiency inherited from slavery and manifested in domestic arrangements, the prevalence of single mothers in particular. Despite the furious debates that ensued, this explanation for entrenched racial inequality continues to pervade popular and academic discourses, becoming a widespread, even hegemonic, metanarrative warping political thought, behavior, and policy.

Employing a “post-positivist,” “post-empiricist,” Black feminist, narrative analysis, Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics unravels how the “Black Cultural Pathology Paradigm” (BCPP), as well as its progeny—the Emasculated Black Male, and his twin female tropes, the Black Welfare Queen and the Black Feminist Traitor (the “Black Malinche”)—deflect attention from structural inequities to matters of individual character and moral uplift. Most provocatively, and most importantly, Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd aims to expose the “hidden transcripts of complicity” of purportedly progressive Black forces (which, for her, encompass a range of political groups and cultural expressions from the Nation of Islam and rap artists to the Black Church and the NAACP) in perpetuating the BCPP (p. 49).

While Black nationalists position themselves in opposition to White (American) nationalism, Alexander-Floyd avers that the two are “symbiotically” related, even constitutive of each other, in their mutual preoccupation with damaged and derelict Black men (p. 79). The logic of masculinism, combined with what E. Frances White termed “the middle class ideology of respectability,” leads to unexpectedly similar policy preferences. Both groups, for instance, targeted the program of Aid to Families with Dependent Children; though White nationalists emphasized government-bred dependency that encouraged Black men's paternal irresponsibility, whereas Black nationalists stressed how the welfare state displaced Black men and thereby enabled Black matriarchy. In this way, according to Alexander-Floyd, Black nationalists ironically accommodated the pernicious “stealth urban policies” of the current Bush administration (p. 97).

Louis Farrakhan's 1995 Million Man March serves as a case study to scrutinize Black nationalists' reliance on and reification of the BCPP. From activism on the mall of the nation's capitol, the book then turns to policies instigated by the White House and supported by members of the “Black establishment.” Alexander-Floyd views “compassionate conservativism” as George W. Bush's version of the BCPP, the rhetorical and “action frame” for both his Faith-Based Initiative (expanding religious organizations' eligibility for federal funding while undercutting government programs and civil rights organizations) and Fatherhood Initiative (an effort to restore traditional family formations).

The metonymic conception of Black community upheld by the BCPP, whereby “the plight of black people is seen as co-extensive with that of the males of the race,” disregards the inequities Black women endure, requiring their dutiful deference to Black men's vulnerable authority (p. 144). Those who fail to conform to this gender script are branded “racial traitors” and risk “excommunication” (p. 158). One chapter details the uniformly hostile censure of Black feminism; another revisits several scandals in which Black women were charged as co-conspirators in the disgracing of Black leaders, including NAACP-head Benjamin Chavis, DC Mayor Marion Barry, and even Al Sharpton (when former Senator Carol Mosley Braun challenged him in the 2004 Democratic primaries, some claimed she had been recruited by Whites). In the tradition of critical race theory, the book ends on a very personal note, painfully recounting the challenges the author faced in presenting her academic work.

After an outpouring of scholarship about the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, Alexander-Floyd's focus on Executive initiatives is refreshingly different. That both were ultimately legislative failures, however, diminishes her argument somewhat. Additionally, the Fatherhood Initiative began during Clinton's second term, as much an extension of his efforts to “end welfare as we knew it” as a product of Bush's compassionate conservativism.

Even as she deconstructs the retrograde gendered assumptions behind universal proclamations of nationhood, the text remains strangely silent about the heteronormative presumptions animating such politics. After all, homophobia is notoriously pervasive among nationalists, Black and White, and has been duly exploited by Republicans. Like the Faith-Based Initiative, moreover, the fight against legalizing gay marriage offers another example of how Black churches helped propagate conservative “family values.”

The crusade to resurrect patriarchal masculinity, restore manhood, and re-domesticate women, which she explicates so deftly in Black politics, is part of a national jeremiad that casts all men and the entire nation as emasculated, and blames feminism and feminization for economic malaise, cultural decay, and even 9/11 (e.g., William Bennett, Why We Fight [2001]; Laura Bush, “Putting Boys in the Spotlight” [February 9, 2005]; Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys [2001]). Alexander-Floyd, therefore, might have usefully situated the BCPP in the context of this larger campaign to reconfigure the role of suffering and personal responsibility in public life in order to rid the body politic of vulnerable groups, indeed, of vulnerability itself. The BCPP is not simply undemocratic, as she notes, but virulently anti-political, part of a discursive shift into a therapeutic, neo-liberal vernacular of self-help, self-discipline, and self-empowerment that makes it nearly impossible to articulate and advance social justice claims.

Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship by a cohort of second generation Black feminist political scientists, such as Ange-Marie Hancock, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Evelyn Simien, and Julia Jordan-Zachery, who press the disciplinary boundaries of traditional political science in crucial ways. By reading the BCPP as a narrative, Alexander-Floyd reveals not only the significance of the cultural dimension of politics, but also how conventional social science paradigms often obscure rather than clarify. In addition to an interdisciplinary mix of feminist analysis, cultural studies, and policy analysis, her work offers an excellent illustration of how to examine the imbrications of race, gender, and class. Thus far, “intersectionality” has served more as a reproach of scholarship, jurisprudence, and metaphysics that approached subject positions as static and separable, than as a coherent alternative theory or method. The “constitutive model of identity” applied in this project may be a more promising way to comprehend “the boundaries of categories as expressed … through the production of other ‘categories’” in order to capture better the simultaneity of oppressions (20). With her rich analysis of the BCPP, Alexander-Floyd succeeds in her goal to redeem and extend Michele Wallace's shrewd Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), demonstrating how sexism regrettably still remains an integral part of many forms of Black politics.