Abstract
In her book, Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos, Juliet Hooker charts a new representation of the contemporaneous contributions to political thought about race in the Americas by these four influential thinkers. The book guides readers through a journey of complex political and philosophical ideas by means of juxtaposition. Booker places each thinker’s political and philosophical contributions on race alongside each other, building a case for a dialogue between and hemispheric intellectual genealogy of Latin American and African American political thought.
The book devotes one chapter to each thinker and is structured in two different time periods during which a Latin American and African American political thinkers are placed alongside each other: Douglass and Sarmiento during the second half of the 19th century, and Du Bois and Vasconcelos during the first half of the 20th century. It’s an innovative exercise in political theory because it introduces a comparison of Western and non-Western thinkers, a practice that has been generally absent in the Western canon. Juxtaposition takes these thinkers out of a space where they are exceptional theorists of race and politics within their own nations and places them in a space where they can no longer be read solely within a national frame. Douglass’s view of a multiracial U.S. polity cannot exist without turning his gaze toward black self-government of the Caribbean. Simultaneously, Sarmiento’s nationalistic and anti-imperialistic thinking cannot be untied from his shift in gaze from Europe to the United States as a model for governance and a new imperialistic threat for Latin America.
The book is a seasoned contribution to scholarship in comparative political thought with an unquestionable benefit to social work scholarship and practice. First, our profession’s intrinsic concern with social justice is inextricably tied to race relations and the struggles of marginalized and oppressed peoples. Juliet Hooker emphasizes the ongoing struggle for racial equality today in the United States through a portrayal of the historic struggle of the Global South with Western ideas about race. Particularly, she highlights how the Americas have grappled with race as an essentialist construct within their polities.
Second, key theoretical concepts presented in the book, ranging from Douglass’s black fugitivity to Vasconcelos’s mestizo futurism, are central to the social work profession’s understanding of the makeup of our multicultural and multiracial society. We serve the social work profession better, for example, if we understand that Latin Americans and their descendants have had centuries-old reasons to distrust the imperialistic intentions of Europe and the United States while simultaneously believing that democratic values promoted by the United States are desirable and worthy of emulation. One of the benefits of juxtaposition is that we can understand our own ideas about race and politics as an ongoing historical process involving a cross-pollination of ideas that occur within our hemisphere and goes beyond national borders.
Many ideas about race advanced by these thinkers omit a discussion on gender relations. In this case, juxtaposition identifies what is lacking in even the most progressive ideas about race, politics, and hemispheric relations. The “Me-Too” and “Black Lives Matter” movements place a spotlight on the centuries-old absence of intersectional discussions about gender and race, an absence that is not overlooked by the author.
To point out a drawback of the book, Hooker’s presentation and analysis of heavy theoretical content sometimes requires the reader to crawl patiently through tall weeds in order to grasp the book’s main themes. If the author had included more specific illustrations of the theorists’ overarching concepts, she would have made reading the book easier. Some readers may think the book is too wonky or not applicable enough to our discipline. However, these difficulties can be overcome by readers’ trust that the author has a process for getting readers from point “a” to point “b.” Also, it is important for readers to keep an open mind to the “big takeaways” or “big-ticket items.”
Overall, this book is an essential exercise in intersectional political thought for scholars and practitioners of social work and social sciences. The book advocates for a dialogue, rather than a competition between thinkers from the Global North, the Global South, and other intellectual traditions. Theorizing Race in the Americas enables readers from anywhere in the world to gain an enhanced perspective of racial issues in the Americas and sheds light on the continental coexistence of race in political thought.
