This is an exceedingly useful study in helping to clarify some of the conflicting findings of researchers addressing the viability of the political representation of African Americans, in this case, within the U.S. House of Representatives. Katherine Tate begins to clarify, at the outset, the frequently used categories of “descriptive” and “substantive” representation by including Hanna Pitkin's “symbolic” representation, or descriptive representation devoid of substance, as the major conceptual focus of discussion.

The primary database of this study is twofold: the pattern of issue representation by black members of the 104th Congress and the 1996 National Black Election Study (NBES) directed by Tate at the Ohio State University. The first two chapters expertly describe the growth of black members of Congress over time, driven by the electoral support of black constituencies. Here, she finds characteristics of black congresspersons that differed from their white counterparts, such that blacks raised $100,000 less than whites in an electoral cycle, black incumbents have higher reelection rates, and black women are “overrepresented” in Congress. Tate also found that the geographical areas where additional blacks can be elected are decreasing due, in part, to recent Supreme Court decisions that have allowed racial packing of congressional districts, together with the difficulty of winning in majority white districts.

In Chapters 4 and 5, the author describes the legislative style and voting behavior of blacks in Congress, discovering that their issue engagement yielded less congruent support for their constituency's positions on those issues. While, as she suggests, this is often obscured by the averages used in constructing composite voter ratings scores, it is also confirmed by the voluminous literature that gives representatives space for behavior related to their own convictions, based often on a different basket of information. Moreover, although she questions this aspect of black representation in Chapter 8, deviations from the orthodox position of a constituency should not automatically be construed to violate issue accountability.

Tate provided further clarification to the work of Robert Singh (The Congressional Black Caucus: Racial Politics in the U. S. Congress, 1998) and others who have suggested that as the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) membership expanded, it became less unified on issue positions. However, the lessening of unity was mild, and she points to its source as nonideological but caused by the strains created in the inclusion of untraditional issues, such as agriculture, immigration, and others in the organization's urban-oriented agenda. In any case, the CBC, a liberal organization, illustrated its unity in support of President Bill Clinton, who proposed conservative measures, such as welfare reform legislation. Tate's position is tenable that such unity was born of caution because of 1) Clinton's popularity with black voters, 2) the added pressure on his administration created by the 1994 Republican revolution in the Congress, and 3) the institutional pressures on black members who had achieved a significant degree of institutionalization within the House and the Democratic Party. Thus, I agree with her lack of support for Robert Singh's conclusion of the increasing irrelevancy of the CBC, based on his narrow criteria of legislative productivity, rather than upon her wider criteria that involved symbolic representation as well.

Part IV (Chapters 6 and 7) makes the most important contribution to the debate on the extent to which race matters in black representation. Tate invoked the perspective of black voters as respondents on the NBES, finding a pattern that they consistently gave higher evaluations to representatives of their race than to white representatives, averaging one-half point higher. However, primary racial causality for this finding was tested by a regression analysis, which revealed that “political party overshadowed race in the overall evaluation of the legislator's approval, but race mattered more when members were rated on specific aspects of their service and representation” (p. 122, Table 6.2). This conclusion is a substantial and more empirically based departure from the theses of Carol Swain (Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress, 1993) and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom (America in Black and White, 1997).

Nevertheless, in addressing whether descriptive representation had an empowering (knowledge, interest, and efficacy of voting) effect on blacks, Tate posits a new finding that party mattered more, theorizing that the causes are vested in the behavioral effects of such empowerment at the local rather than national (i.e., congressional) level. Both of these findings of the importance of party on evaluations of legislator approval and on descriptive representation, however, should have elicited an extended discussion of the role of political parties in political identification and mobilization.

The analysis in Chapter 8 assesses the parallel trend in the decline of political trust in government by both blacks and whites between 1958 and 1994, finding that black trust in government was unaffected by black descriptive representation. The fact that it was affected negatively by highly educated blacks and conservative blacks is consistent with other data in the NBES that attributes higher levels of alienation to more highly educated blacks and to conservative attitudes toward government's role in their advancement.

Tate's concluding Chapter 9 on the future of black representation is more controversial. It makes the strong inference that given the possibility that “the Voting Rights Act will expire in 2007” (pp. 162, 168)—a misleading point, since only section 5 of the Act expires—other methods, such as proportional voting, should be considered for advancing black descriptive representation. However, this proposal rests on a flawed supposition of potentially weak support for the renewal of the Voting Rights Act by black political and civil rights leadership, when no such evidence is presented.

Otherwise, a change in racially sensitive, district-based representation to a more “race neutral” method presents a series of problems, the most important of which is that any electoral system change perceived to threaten the vested political interests of either blacks or whites, in districts with clear racial majorities, would likely be resisted. Second, the trend in redistricting toward the creation of more racially identifiable districts would likely strengthen their opposition. Third, reaction to the perceived fairness of the change to proportional voting, based on my most recent work (White Nationalism, Black Interests, 2003), would be evaluated, especially by conservatives, not only on the racial fairness of the method but also on the extent to which the result is perceived to have racially preferenced black representation, questioning its “race neutrality.” In any case, in anticipation of a number of future studies on the efficacy of the Voting Rights Act, Black Faces in the Mirror makes a unique and positive contribution in affirming its basic underlying concept, the legitimacy of descriptive black representation.