This is a timely, engaging, and illuminating study of Black Nationalism. The book's “fundamental project,” Melanye T. Price writes, “is to systematically understand individual Black Nationalism adherence among African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era” (p. 60). Black Nationalism has a long history in African American politics, but with the demise of Jim Crow and the election of our first black president, we may reasonably wonder whether ordinary African American citizens are disposed to endorse it. Price's book is important because it addresses this question head-on, defending the thesis that a renewal of Black Nationalism remains a viable possibility in post-Obama America.
In her first chapter, Price draws on primary texts and the writings of scholars to sketch an historically informed overview of Black Nationalism and to defend the thesis that its ideology has tended to coalesce around four central principles: support of black self-determination through the control of homogeneous black institutions; support for black social and economic independence through self-help programs; psychological and social disentanglement from whites and white supremacist notions of black inferiority; and support for a global or pan-African view of the black community. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, she turns specifically to African American public opinion in the post–Civil Rights era, relying on evidence provided by the focus groups she conducted to give an idea of how “ordinary citizens” express Black Nationalist beliefs (p. 102).
In Chapters 5 and 6, in the spirit of methodological pluralism, Price turns from her focus groups to the 1996 National Black Election Study (NBES), treating Black Nationalism as a dependent variable and then as an independent variable. Regarding the first task, she holds that Black Nationalist appeals are more attractive to women, but less so to conservatives, to blacks demonstrating positive white affect, and to blacks who believe that their interviewer is white. Regarding the second, she shows that where rejecters of Black Nationalism exhibit high political efficacy and trust the government to act to benefit them and those similar to them, Black Nationalists exhibit lower levels of political efficacy and trust. And, not surprisingly, Price finds that they are more likely to support the formation of an all-black political party.
In Chapter 7, Price returns to her focus groups and to its members' reflections on “what it would mean if a self-determining black nation were actually achieved” (p. 150). And in her conclusion and afterword, finally, she explores the broader implications of her study, stressing in particular the tension between her focus-group findings, which suggest that blacks moderately support Black Nationalism and “seem primed for increased support for Black Nationalism” (p. 164; emphasis mine), and her survey results, which suggest that among blacks “there are very few Black Nationalists, and to the extent that they exist, they are not relying heavily on Black Nationalist principles to make decisions” (p. 168). Price implies that this tension may be due in part to the presence of white interviewers in the NBES study, but she also emphasizes the need for survey research that is more nuanced in its approach to the theme of linked fate, that is more attentive to questions about class differences and blame assessment, and that explores in greater depth the ideological diversity among African Americans. This last theme is especially important to the author, who notes “the diminished importance of racial group membership among younger African Americans” and asserts that “understanding, negotiating, and accounting for in-group diversity are the tests of post-Civil Rights black politics” (p. 171). Concluding her afterword in the wake of Barack Obama's election, Price argues that while “the current political climate appears to be less fertile for Black Nationalist activism, the door remains open for resurgence in support for Black Nationalism as long as discrimination and inequality persist” (p. 179).
Dreaming Blackness is a rich contribution to the study of Black Nationalism and raises a number of questions, just a few of which I am able to discuss here. I begin with her largely unobjectionable overview of the history of Black Nationalism, with regard to which I should like to enter two caveats. The first is that the story she tells—which distinguishes between pre-Garvey, elite-based, classical Black Nationalism and modern, mass-based, Black Nationalist movements said to stretch from Garvey to contemporary times—needs to be complicated by recent scholarship suggesting that, as a mass phenomenon, Garveyism itself had roots in the nonelite grassroots emigrationism that emerged in the American South in the aftermath of Reconstruction (see, e.g., Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 2003). The second is that in thinking about what Black Nationalism has been, we should take into account the history of the different arguments that so-called “nationalists” have adduced on behalf of principles such as “self-determination.” Price tends to ignore these arguments, but I wonder whether we can appreciate the significance of Black Nationalist principles without a careful consideration of the reasoning advanced to support them. For example, I doubt that we can understand what is at issue in Martin Delany's understanding of self-determination, and exactly how his thought at once diverges from and converges with that of other nationalists, if we ignore the particulars of his understanding of oppression or the point of his appeals to the rights of citizenship.
Price's definition of Black Nationalism in terms of a set of principles also raises a question regarding her interpretation of her focus-group responses. To be sure, the responses reveal the political outlooks of her interlocutors, but Price's interpretations of those responses as expressing Black Nationalist principles are not uniformly persuasive. One reason is that she declines to make the case that the attitude positions (what she also dubs “ideological characteristics”) she invokes as criteria of Black Nationalism (a strong sense of linked fate; a dominant African American identity; a collectivist social outlook; negative white affect and so forth), taken either singly or in combination (one position with one or more of the others), logically entail or are highly correlated with an adherence to Black Nationalist principles. A second is that she neglects to consider the viability of equally and perhaps more plausible alternative interpretations of those responses.
One example of the second problem is the way Price construes the remarks of a focus-group participant, Keesha, who expresses a care-taking, other-oriented personal ethic that she associates with Africa. Price sees Keesha as reflecting a Black Nationalist commitment to “community empowerment” and a characteristically nationalist sense of connection to the African diaspora. But Keesha's remarks can just as plausibly be taken to express little, if any, interest in group empowerment or self-determination, or even in preserving a tie to the African diaspora for its own sake, so much as a desire to cultivate the virtue of trust—a good that Keesha seems to value, not because (she believes) it is a non-European, African value but because it can help her to improve her life and cure herself of her unhealthy, phobic relations to her friends (pp. 61–62). Although Keesha is Price's paradigmatic example of a Black Nationalist, it is possible, I suggest, to explain her statements coherently without ascribing to her an adherence to Black Nationalist principles.
Price better addresses the question as to whether her criteria actually serve to pick out Black Nationalism in her discussion of the NBES, for here she relies on statistical analysis to argue that the items comprising the “Black Nationalist Index (BNI)” capture a single phenomenon, and that this phenomenon is, in fact, adherence to Black Nationalist principles (pp. 103–108). A difficulty arises, however, when she seems to identify Black Nationalist ideology as conceptualized by the BNI with that ideology as conceptualized in terms of the attitude positions she studies in her focus groups. For the criteria she uses to define Black Nationalism in the former case—attendance at Afrocentric schools, always voting for black candidates, shopping in black-owned stores, and having nothing to do with whites—are not the criteria she uses to define it in the latter. Setting aside my worries as to the validity of Price's interpretation of her focus-group material, it occurs to me that this difference in sets of criteria may help to explain the discrepancy between her NBES and focus-group findings.
Notwithstanding the questions I have raised here—most of which I expect that Price can cogently address—I do not wish to gainsay the great achievement of her book, which is to provide a multifaceted picture of African America's ideological diversity. But, as she recognizes, this diversity represents a challenge to the possibility of a resurgence of Black Nationalism, which tends to define problems “through a narrow group membership lens” (p. 171). Still, as noted above, the author believes that the door for such a resurgence remains open so long as discrimination and inequality persist—a point that resonates with Tommie Shelby's recent defense of “pragmatic Black Nationalism” (see We Who Are Dark, 2005).
Even here, I think, there is reason to be skeptical. For it is not clear that the persistence of discrimination and inequality is a sufficient basis for the sort of race-base political solidarity that Shelby and, apparently, Price believe is required to meet the threat that class, generational, and other forms of diversity pose to the prospects for a renewed Black Nationalism. Price gives no argument for her belief that the persistence of discrimination and inequality can galvanize a Black Nationalist politics with broad appeal among ordinary African Americans, despite black ideological diversity. Shelby defends the thesis that such a politics can be grounded on principles that all blacks can reasonably expect all other blacks to endorse because they are black. But that thesis is false for, as I have argued in my book, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (2009, pp. 217–242), Shelby's foundationalist understanding of black politics is not tenable. This means that African American politics is likely to remain more complex, and fractious, than Shelby and Price imagine.
