The Great Wells Of Democracy: The Meaning Of Race In American Life

by Manning Marable

In his boldest and most accessible book to date, Manning Marable lays out a new way to think about the past and the future of race in America. Building upon a unique framework for understanding black history from slavery to Jim Crow to the modern urban ghetto, Marable charts a new course for racial progress. He looks beyond the impasse of liberal strategies such as affirmative action and proposes a new kind of inclusive democracy. Exploding traditional lines of left and right, Marable stakes out such controversial and seemingly incompatible positions as the re-enfranchisement of felons, state support for faith-based institutions, reparations for slavery that systematically inject capital into the black community, and a reconfiguration of racial identities that accounts for the increasingly multi-racial nature of our society. He exhorts us to construct a new political language and practical public policies to bridge the racial divide -- so that we do no less than reinvent the democratic project called America. Combining the breadth of C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow with the urgency of Cornel West's Race Matters, Manning Marable offers the most challenging and important book on the politics of race to appear since the heyday of the civil rights movement.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, Race, Grad School, Anthropology

384 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2002

About the author

Manning Marable was an American professor of public affairs, history and African-American Studies at Columbia University. He founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He authored several texts and was active in progressive political causes. At the time of his death, he had completed a biography of human rights activist Malcolm X, entitled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

Reviews

[David Hollingsworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manning Marable is one of my favorite historians and social commentators of all time. Having already read his history of the civil rights movement, his political biography of WEB Du Bois, and his excellent contemporary commentary of the 80s-00s, I knew I wanted another Marable book to be among the books I read for Black History Month this year.

This book is basically Marable's attempt to write about the issue of race in the US for a more general audience than his usual works. Not that his usual works are especially stuffy or wordy, but they can have a lot of data and are written as if he is talking to people who already generally agree that issue of race, class, gender, etc are worth paying attention to. This book, by contrast, marks an attempt to start a conversation.

The book starts off talking about racism in the US, while also keeping in mind other factors like class/socio-economic status, gender, and sexual orientation. It's good overall, but a little clumsily worded. You can tell Marable is used to more substantive conversations where there are already common understandings of these things. Further into the book he gets into the more in-depth territory we usually see in a Marable book, and this is where he shines.

The only issue with this book is that it hasn't aged the best, but not even in a problematic way. He just uses terms that are less common to use in present conversations about race, class, and gender even if they haven't been fully discarded. For example, pretty much no one says "African American" anymore, but he uses that term throughout the book. Stuff like that makes this book feel very mid-00s even though it hasn't actually aged badly if that distinction makes sense.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, especially once I got past the beginning. Marable is excellent at articulating racism and its intersections with class, gender, and other topics, compared to many other scholars who talk about the black experience as if it were generally monolithic. I'd recommend this book to anyone, but especially anyone either interested in the subject matter or interested in insightful commentary on events of the 90s and 00s.

[Harrycorbiniv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read excerpts for class

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an extremely accessible explanation of structural racism and its effects on American Blacks and American democracy. Marable provides an excellent, albeit light, history of the establishment of structural racism in the United States. He gives separate accounts of structural racism in electoral politics, education, the criminal (in)justice system, etc. He shows that white supremacy structures American political life.
My only complaint with this book is that the definition and explanation of structural racism at the outset isn't as robust as I would like it to be. If I were to teach this to undergraduates, I feel as though I would need to supplement his "Structural Racism" chapter with something a little more data heavy and direct in definitions.
Ultimately, Marable is a generous writer--making space for whites to read this book and join the struggle for racial equality, without letting them off the hook one bit. This would be a great book for an undergraduate course on the continuing problem of white supremacy in American political life.

[Tom Darrow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this book right around the time I was reading The Debt by Randall Robinson. Because of the power of Robinson's book, I ultimately forgot pretty much everything that this book was about. Must not have been that earth-moving of a read for me.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important voice for structural racism- one if its most current and pervasive forms.

[Mike]

Manning Marble on Race.

Very well done a must read for anyone interested in America.