description: An "Indispensable" Book of The Black World Today website"In broad strokes, Bush takes readers from the early challenges to the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington through the tumultuous years of the 1960s."--Choice"This story of Black social movements in the U.S., as seen from the inside by a theoretically sophisticated and committed analyst, is mandatory reading for those who don't knowthis story, which is most of us."--Immanuel Wallerstein"A crucially important and incisive work on the Black Power movement, its aftermath and its antecedents. By not treating race and class as an 'either/or' proposition . . . Bush has given us one of the mostcomprehensive analyses of the current crisis of Black leadership thatI've read in a very long time, on par with Harold Cruse's classicCrisis of the Negro Intellectual and Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism:The Making of the Black Radical Tradition."--Robin D. G. Kelley"Rod Bush's We Are Not What We Seem is a wonderfully idiosyncratic tour through a plethora of twentieth-century African American movements."The Journal of American History"Fascinating . . . A must read for students of politics and social movements and a basic text for Black militants and students in Black Studies."--Abdul Alkalimat, The University of ToledoMuch has been written about the Black Power movement in the United States. Most of this work, however, tends to focus on the personalities of the movement. In We Are Not What We Seem, Roderick D. Bush takes a fresh look at Black Power and other African American social movements with a specific emphasis on the role of the urban poor inthe struggle for Black rights. Bush traces the trajectory of African American social movements from the time Booker T. Washington to the present, providing an integrated discussion of class. He addresses questions crucial to any understanding of Black politics: Is the Black Power movement simply another version of the traditional American ethnic politics, or does it have wider social import? What role has the federal government played in implicitly grooming social conservatives like Louis Farrakhan to assume leadership positions as opposed to leftist, grassroots, class-oriented leaders? Bush avoids the traditional liberal and social democratic approaches in favor of a more universalistic perspective that offers new insights into the history of Black movements in the U.S.
language: English
title: We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century
titlecomplete: We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century
genres: Labor, History
ratings_count: 17
awards: awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award
publisher: NYU Press