Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Book Review‪)‬

Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), xiv + 320 pp. 1. We Who Are Dark is Tommie Shelby's attempt to rethink political blackness for a post-civil rights world. In this remarkable book, Shelby argues that black solidarity is still "valuable" (20) and viable, and he reinterprets the best moments in the Black Nationalist tradition to find the "conditions of possibility" for this solidarity (255). The result is an approach that focuses on oppression and justice rather than on identity, that treats black self-organization as a means to an end--to the end of racial justice--rather than as an end in itself.