Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul

A powerful polemic on the state of black America that savages the idea of a post-racial society.
 
America’s great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. From the murders of black youth by the police, to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergency—at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we’ve solved America’s race problem.
 
Democracy in Black is Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s impassioned response. Part manifesto, part history, part memoir, it argues that we live in a country founded on a “value gap”—with white lives valued more than others—that still distorts our politics today. Whether discussing why all Americans have racial habits that reinforce inequality, why black politics based on the civil-rights era have reached a dead end, or why only remaking democracy from the ground up can bring real change, Glaude crystallizes the untenable position of black America--and offers thoughts on a better way forward. Forceful in ideas and unsettling in its candor, Democracy In Black is a landmark book on race in America, one that promises to spark wide discussion as we move toward the end of our first black presidency.

• Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
• The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story
• What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America
• White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
• Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
• Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
• Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America
• Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom
• The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church's Complicity in Racism
• How to Be an Antiracist