| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Rod Bush. We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century. New York: New York University Press. 1999. Pp. xiii. 315. $32.50.

Rod Bush offers this book as an intellectual history of twentieth-century black nationalism. What he actually presents is a polemic in defense of xenophobic fringe behavior among black radicals of the 1960s, a treatment that intentionally blurs distinctions between the Marxist left and the fascist right and also confuses his subjects' political rhetoric with their sometimes criminal activity. Bush refuses to distinguish such truly radical left activists as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers from criminal psychopaths like the Blackstone Rangers. He ignores the fundamental ideological distinctions between social democrats like the late Kenneth Cockerel and black chauvinists like Maulana Karenga. 1

American black nationalism as a movement saw periods of ebb and flow from the end of the eighteenth century to the Civil War but experienced a hiatus with the coming of Emancipation. The movement was revitalized at the end of Reconstruction, then eclipsed again after the deportation of Marcus Garvey in 1927. During the 1930s and 1940s, there were various black belt schemes and a plan for a forty-ninth state, to be carved out of the segregated South. There was also Mittie Gordon's Ethiopian Pacific Movement, with its putative connections to Japanese imperialists and white supremacists. Bush shows little interest in the historical scholarship that has begun to address black nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. He ignores expressions of Christian black nationalism in the 1960s (e.g. the Shrine of the Black Madonna) and fails to address the complicated ties between the older and newer traditions of religiously based black nationalism. . . .

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