| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century. By Rod Bush. (New York: New York University Press, 1999. xvi, 315 pp. $32.50, isbn 0-8147-1317-3.)

Rod Bush's We Are Not What We Seem is a wonderfully idiosyncratic tour through a plethora of twentieth-century African American movements. It is an activist's meditation on one strain of African American radicalism. Unfortunately, the core of that radicalism is never adequately explained. We Are Not What We Seem is not programmatic. Indeed, one of its unintended benefits is that it indicates the various meanings and projects that have attached themselves to the term "black nationalism." 1

Bush takes on a number of current public intellectuals, among them Henry Louis Gates and Cornell West. He cites the former as providing no critique of liberalism and the latter for seeing the justified rage of black youth as nothing more than nihilism. One of the points on which the book does strike home is in its analysis of Marcus Garvey and Garveyism. Bush realizes, as few have, that Garvey had a class analysis far in advance of many of his more intellectual black compeers. It was Garvey, not W. E. B. Du Bois, who saw the class problems inherent in North American ghettos and in African states such as Liberia and Ethiopia. . . .

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