Seven Oaks Magazine.

Nikhil Pal Singh. Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004.

When the history of the civil rights movement is told, most people look to images of the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech. Alongside these images are ones of well-dressed college students sitting-in at restaurants in the South, Rosa Parks on board a bus in Alabama, and police dogs and fire hoses in the streets of Birmingham. Collectively, these images have been amalgamated to represent a curiously redemptive moment in U.S. history, when the ideals of so-called American democracy were successfully tested with the passage of landmark civil rights legislation, the end of de jure segregation in the American South, and the subsequent triumphant Cold War posturing made by American presidents.

The results of these interpretations, according to Nikhil Pal Singh in his recent book Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, has been the affirmation of a “mythic nationalist discourse” with King at its center and the triumph of American racial liberalism – a form of anti-racism that Singh feels has not only lost its salience today, but actually reinforces latent white supremacy in purportedly color-blind state-centered policies that retreat from pressing issues of racial injustice like black criminalization, racialized urban poverty, and affirmative action in post-secondary education.

What is missing in these interpretations is an account of how black activists like King underwent significant political transformations over the course of their lives. In King’s case, the years prior to his assassination in 1968 saw him make substantive links with the anti-Vietnam war movement and the struggles against poverty and colonialist racism. Drawing on the life-works of numerous black intellectual/activists like W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, and King, Singh demonstrates how (beginning in the 1930s through to the 1970s) the varied worldly visions espoused by black social movements combined with the “Keynesian transformation of the liberal capitalist state” to form what he calls the “long civil rights era” – a narrative he juxtaposes to the “national narrative of racial progress” embodied in the “short” Montgomery bus boycott, to 1963 March on Washington, to 1964/5 Civil Rights legislative progression.[1] Singh challenges some of the prevailing assumptions that mark many interpretations of the civil rights era whereby black social movements in the U.S. are seen to have deviated from a “normative nationalist trajectory” leading to the gradual dissolution of state-sponsored civil rights imperatives following the Democratic National Convention of 1964 and the emergence of separatist militancy. Alternatively, Singh views this shift in national imperatives as emblematic of the accumulated national and global contradictions of America’s “racial-imperial history” -- what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the tragic evasions and defaults of several centuries,” and what Singh summarizes as the genocidal indigenous removals and imperial interventions from Latin America, to the Philippines and Vietnam, to the current war in Iraq.[2]

While Singh’s book will stand as an important contribution to understanding how civil rights history needs to be viewed in the context of the international struggles against colonialism, it still reverts subtly to a tragic (though comprehensive) view of black social movements during the 20 th Century. Thus, Singh correctly demonstrates how conventional interpretations of the civil rights movement rely on an exceptional understanding of the 1960s, “when black people emerged…as individual subjects of capitalist-liberalism and as formal participants in democratic-nationalism.” He maintains, however, that these interpretations simply do not “provide a full picture of the genuine creativity and political gravity of black movements during this period, nor of the ultimate defeat of their most profound animating visions” which not only “mounted a definitive challenge to white supremacy at home, but also established race as a framework from which to enlarge upon the public meanings of words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ within the wider world.”[3]

In Black is a Country, Singh has applied a much needed dialectical understanding of race and nation to the history of American imperialism. This dialectical framework enables him to discredit the persistent assumption that the liberal and universal ideals of the American state can perpetually transcend the racial contradictions of U.S. history. Although he ultimately reverts to a tragic narrative for the black social movements he examines, his complication of the conventional understandings of the worldly context in which these movements arose provides a basis for further study under the rubric of a “long” continuous civil rights era tied to the global expansion of (and resistance to) international capital and empire.

[1] Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004. 6.