Review Essay: “Keeping It Real”

• Author: Eric Ishiwata
• Published date: 01 October 2007
• Date: 01 October 2007
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591707299819
• Subject Matter: Articles

666

Political Theory

Volume 35 Number 5

October 2007 666-675

© 2007 Sage Publications

10.1177/0090591707299819

http://ptx.sagepub.com

hosted at

http://online.sagepub.com

Author’s Note: I would like to thank William J. Chaloupka and Geoffrey Whitehall for their

comments.

“Keeping It Real”

Race, Theory, and the

Return to Identity Politics

Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, by Linda Martín Alcoff.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 344 pp. $29.95 (paper).

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity,by

Tommie Shelby. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University

Press, 2005. 336 pp. $27.95 (cloth).

Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, by Andrew Valls, ed. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 2005. 294 pp. $21.95 (paper).

The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial

Identity, by Bruce Baum. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 352

pp. $45.00 (cloth).

On January 16, 2006, at the commencement of New Orleans’s first post-

Katrina Martin Luther King Jr. parade, Mayor Ray Nagin let loose with a

now-infamous invocation:

We, as black people, it’s time. It’s time for us to come together. It’s time for

us to rebuild a New Orleans—the one that should be a chocolate New

Orleans. And I don’t care what people are saying uptown or wherever they

are, this city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a major-

ity African American city. It’s the way God wants it to be.

In the firestorm that ensued, Nagin was cast in a number of shades—none

of which were gray. To some, he was a champion of the black community,

a straight-shooter who rightly addressed the fear that New Orleans would

be rebuilt richer and whiter. To others, he was an opportunistic politician,

one whose sudden commitment to “chocolate” flew in the face of his

administration’s near-total assault on public services. And to others still, he