The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. By Lawrie Balfour. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 192p. $37.50 cloth, $17.50 paper

Extract

As its title implies, this book is less about race, or democracy, than about what Lawrie Balfour sees as a lack of real discussion about race in America since the civil rights era. Balfour sees in James Baldwin's criticism a “moral psychology of the color line” that explains the persistence of racial injustice and that should shatter our optimistic belief that such injustice “needs only to be exposed to right thinking in order to be overcome” (pp. 17, 135–36). The project could be called a genealogy of the American dilemma.