Juliet Hooker’s Theorizing Race in the Americas is a welcome new entry in the growing body of work in political theory and race. That general description alone would make it a valuable contribution, insofar as mainstream American political theory and political philosophy have historically marginalized race as a critical lens for examining the polity’s workings and as a crucial metric for normatively assessing its achievement (or not) of social justice. But apart from this general identity, and the considerable merits of political insight and intelligence displayed in its composition, the book is particularly valuable for the theoretical originality and ingenuity of its conception. As her title announces, Hooker’s canvas extends to the “other” America (nuestra América) rarely thought of as such in the self-absorbed and ethnocentric Anglo Norte. She is seeking to bring together in “conversation” (albeit a displaced and indirect one) two central black race theorists of Anglo America (Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois) and two central nonblack race theorists of Latin America (the white Argentinian Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and the mestizo Mexican José Vasconcelos).

Straightforwardly structured into four chapters, one per thinker, the book looks at Douglass and Sarmiento in Part I under the heading “Ambas Américas” and Du Bois and Vasconcelos in Part II under “Mestizo Futurisms.” Hooker elucidates how for both Douglass and Sarmiento, the “other” America played a crucial role in shaping their putatively “nationalist” thought, even if that America was misread: Douglass’s romanticization of Caribbean and Central American “racial democracy” as an ideal, Sarmiento’s original theoretical neglect of American slavery and later misconception of the Civil War and Reconstruction in his attempt to use the American polity as a model for tackling the problem of Argentinian caudillismo (charismatic authoritarian rule: pp. 79–88). Part II maps out the cosmopolitan visions of Du Bois and Vasconcelos, a cosmopolitanism in both cases self-consciously devised to overcome racial subordination on a global scale and, thus, different from the nominally abstract and colorless cosmopolitanism that has gained such wide influence in political theory in recent years.

Hooker’s “juxtaposition” (to use the term she prefers to “comparison”: pp. 11–17) accomplishes several things. To begin with, she breaks from the tradition of comparing the marginalized nonwhite/“Southern” figure with the established white/“Northern” canon representative whose unassailable disciplinary respectability is supposed to at least somewhat uplift the former. This is a South-to-South exercise. As such, its “lateral” cognitive geographical reorientation enables an unfolding for us not merely of a revisionist cartography of political reference points and an expanded political canon but a complication of the discipline’s orthodox categories.

Second, she makes clear the hemispheric (indeed global) reach of white racism and white racial domination, and the importance of attending simultaneously to both their overarching reality and their internal complexities and variations, temporal and ethno-geographic (e.g., Latin contestation of Anglo-Saxon “superiority”). In his neglected Toward the Final Solution (1978), George Mosse had insisted decades ago that racism should not be reduced to individual “prejudice” but recognized as a political ideology, indeed the most important political ideology of modernity. So if in the standard Western narrative, Filmerian premodern patriarchy and absolutism are taken to shape the context in which and against which liberalism as a (qualifiedly) egalitarian political ideology develops, so in the “New World” in particular (though in the “Old World” also) we need to understand the climate of racial thought and how it affected the self-conceivedly emancipatory ideals of the day.

Hooker documents how the different varieties of “scientific racism”—polygenist and monogenist, “ethnological-biological,” social Darwinist, and eugenicist—“dominated intellectual production in the Americas and Europe” (pp. 5–11) during the period in which these authors were writing, thereby constituting the ideational background against which their political theorizing took place. Any erasure of this background—such as is standard in our narratives of American political thought (and, more generally, modern global political thought)—will in effect be distorting the actual intellectual history.

Likewise, white racial domination, whether in the crude form of U.S. white supremacy or subtler Latin “pigmentocracy” or world-spanning Euro-colonial hegemony, needs to be seen as itself “political,” a form of group rule still largely unnamed in and excluded from our textbooks, with their familiar taxonomies of absolutism, aristocracy, democracy, fascism, socialism, and so forth. To fully understand and appreciate the significance of Douglass’s aspirant “fugitive democracy” (orig. Sheldon Wolin), shaped by the slave and post-slave experience (pp. 29–39), or the impetus behind Du Bois’s creation in his 1928 romance Dark Princess of an anti-imperialist international of color (pp. 118–24, 134–43), or Vasconcelos’s manifesto for a (supposedly) race-transcending new race (pp. 169–88), we need to recognize the existence at the time of a white domination that was global. The global reach of white racism created a macropolity that required confrontation by political outlooks and political ideologies no less internationalist in their conception. Hooker’s book, along with such recent revisionist work in “critical” IR as Robert Vitalis’s (2015) White World Order, Black Power Politics and Alexander Anievas et al.’s (2015) coedited Race and Racism in International Relations, makes understandable what from the (race-erasing) present may seem like concepts puzzlingly oxymoronic—a “black” or “colored” cosmopolitanism, or a racially conscious (rather than racially color-blind) vision of a utopian future. The refusal in mainstream literature to admit the significance of the colonial past (and present) does not transcend race, but in effect, through its systemic evasion of these political realities, ratifies as raceless the Euro-dominated world order, and thus obstructs an understanding of what would really be necessary to overcome it.

Finally, as the last point brings home, Hooker’s text is not merely a valuable revisiting and reconstruction of an occluded (but anyway happily bygone) political past but a work of significant current import. Written during the Obama presidency, its pertinence for a dialogue now, in the second year of the Trump administration, is greater than ever. White supremacy, a term in recent post–Civil Rights years largely limited to the discourse of black radicals, has now forced its torch-bearing, Confederate-flag-waving presence into the national conversation in a way unthinkable in the heyday of Obama-era “postracial” delusions. Who today can seriously maintain that race is irrelevant to national politics in the United States?

That brings me naturally to the question of what lessons we can learn from Hooker’s reconstructed history for effective antiracist political strategy today. In a time of increasingly polarized communities of belief—not only around race but also far more broadly—can Du Bois’s recourse to the aesthetic serve as a model for reaching those who are simply going to ignore the latest depressing social-scientific study on the racial situation (segregation, the wealth gap, the criminal justice system . . .), thoroughly documented as it may be, especially when they have their own “alternative facts” to rebut it? Can the affective be more effective in changing recalcitrant white minds, through appealing to white hearts?

Think of Lincoln’s famous tribute (if apocryphal) to Harriet Beecher Stowe (“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book [Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852] that started this great war”), or the later muckraking fiction of the twentieth-century social realist tradition, with its black variants in such best-sellers as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), or in another—surrealist—key altogether, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Should we be pinning our hopes for eventual racial attitudinal transformation on artistic productions rather than manifestos, for example, movies (books, after all, are so passé) like the crossover 2017 sleeper hit Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele) or the 2018 blockbuster Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler), already one of the top-10-grossing movies of all time? Or is the problem, as with the similarly optimistic prognoses originally made about rap back in the 1980s—the ghetto’s CNN, in one of the characterizations of the time—that white consumption of black entertainment, even when its message is racially progressive, can readily coexist with ongoing practices of black exclusion? One becomes a teenage “whigger” in the white suburbs, affecting ghetto style, but one does not grow up to be a white adult demanding the dismantling of the ghettos where the actual “niggers” live. Du Bois concluded that his original faith in the power of facts and rational argumentation had been naïve. But can art-as-propaganda really overcome vested white interests in the racial order, or is this hope likewise illusory?

The other natural question for Hooker, given her “mestizo futurism” label for both Du Bois and Vasconcelos, and the contemporary uptake of the latter in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Chicano activists (pp. 188–94), is whether an increasingly multiracial and “mixed” U.S. population is actually going to be a movement toward or away from a genuinely democratic multiracial polity. Though modified in his later work, Vasconcelos’s original conception of a new “cosmic race” exemplifying a transformative mestizaje was, as Hooker emphasizes, originally actually quite racist, stigmatizing blacks and Amerindians as inferior components of the “mixture” (pp. 169–72). Moreover, as various prominent sociologists have pointed out, such as Richard Alba and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, predictions of an impending nonwhite demographic majority may be underestimating the capacity of “whiteness” to transform and expand itself.

It would be an ironic twist to Hooker’s narrative if the two Americas are headed to an ominous convergence, with pigmentocracy established from the North to the South, and Euro-Anglos and Euro-Latinx—now ethnoracial allies rather than ethnoracial adversaries—ruling triumphantly (though not, of course, self-proclaimedly) over the darker-skinned and “unmixed” in what will be advertised as having now become (at last) a genuine racial democracy. At any rate, these are some of the many challenging questions raised for political theorists, and indeed a much broader potential audience, by Juliet Hooker’s important book.