[In the following excerpt, Nicholson offers a favorable assessment of Race Matters.]

If questions of morality are largely absent from Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy [by Houston A. Baker Jr.], they are always present in Cornel West’s Race Matters. There are parts of this book that are as moving as any of the sermons of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as profound as W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, as exhilarating in their offering of liberation as James Baldwin’s early essays.

This is not to suggest, however, that West, director of Afro-American Studies at Princeton University, is as skilled a writer as any of these. While moving and powerful, this collection of eight essays (there is also a preface and an introduction) on topics that include black sexuality, black-Jewish relations, Malcolm X and black conservatives, is something of a hodge-podge. The copyright page notes that eight of these chapters have been published previously, and that is part of the problem—this is a collection of discrete essays that has not been woven together seamlessly enough.

West’s publisher makes much of the fact that Race Matters appears on the anniversary of last year’s Los Angeles riot, but almost the only mention of L.A. is West’s claim that it was “neither a race riot nor a class rebellion … [but] a multiracial, trans-class, and largely male display of justified social rage.”

Los Angeles, he goes on, shows us that the challenge for all Americans is to “determine whether a genuine multiracial democracy can be created and sustained in an era of the global economy and a moment of xenophobic frenzy … Either we learn a new language of empathy and compassion, or the fire this time will consume us all.”

Here and elsewhere, one has a sense of being preached to, and none of what West writes is any more objectionable than is a Sunday sermon. This is both the strength and the weakness of this collection. Yet it seems to me that the language of civil rights, so fresh and vigorous when articulated by Martin Luther King, has suffered since its appropriation by feminists, gays, the handicapped and every other group with claims based on a history of actual or imagined oppression. Another way of putting it is to say that King’s passionate call to the American conscience, and the concomitant promise of redemption for all Americans, has become a chorus of shrill cries for pieces of an ever-diminishing pie.

West seeks, not always successfully, to reinvigorate the language of the civil rights movement, the language of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, and to invest it with a new authority. Where he succeeds is in his unrelenting insistence that morality must be part of the public discourse. He succeeds, too, in his attempts to reconcile seemingly disparate viewpoints and in his unorthodox view of events such as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings.

In a chapter titled “Nihilism in Black America,” West attempts to reconcile liberal and conservative takes on the problems that bedevil black America insisting that “the debate must go far beyond the liberal and conservative positions.” Rejecting the notion that any critique must be either-or, he calls for an examination of the effects of institutions and structures and values and behavior. When he does, he finds nihilism—“the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness”—the greatest threat to black America.

West goes on to argue that structures that once sustained black Americans do so no longer, in part because of “the saturation of market forces and market moralities in black life and the present crisis of black leadership.” In the end, he calls for a “politics of conversion,” which (as liberals would have it) does not forget the societal conditions that shape black people’s lives, but which also (as conservatives insist) “openly confronts the self-destructive and inhumane actions of black people.”

Similarly, he finds most troubling in the Thomas-Hill hearings “the low level of political discussion in black America … a crude discourse about race and gender that bespeaks a failure of nerve of black leadership.” Though Thomas’s appointment was an act of “cynical tokenism,” black leaders failed to confront Thomas’s mediocrity and undistinguished record, fearing that to do so would confirm white stereotypes of black intellectual inferiority. Yet their failure, West concludes, was evidence of how “captive” black leaders were to those stereotypes.

Though it is clear West believes Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment, these are scarcely mentioned in the essay. Instead, West exposes the fallacies of “racial reasoning” and Thomas’s claims to “racial authenticity,” asking the questions “What is black authenticity?” and “Who is really black?”

“Blackness is a political and ethical construct,” he concludes. “Appeals to black authenticity ignore this fact … This is why claims to racial authenticity trump political and ethical argument—and why racial reasoning discourages moral reasoning.” Such reasoning based solely on race is seductive, West argues, because it “invokes an undeniable history of racial abuse struggle.” And yet Bush’s claims for Thomas and Thomas’s own defense of his worthiness were uncomfortable bedfellows with black nationalist claims—“all highlight histories of black abuse and black struggle.”

It is in arguments like this that West transcends mere earnestness. In the final analysis, that is why Race Matters is more valuable, more significant, than Baker’s Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Baker is too much fascinated by the abstract and ideas for the sake of ideas. West understands that ideas cannot be separated from morality and the realities of daily life.