The State of Black America is a much-needed antidote to the madness-inducing contradiction of woke orthodoxy. These essays carefully consider the importance of human agency, culture, character, and the resilience of the human spirit. It is a meditation for grown-ups and not a fairy tale. If you want to know how to heal the afflictions of identity politics and restore the promise of the American republic, read this book.

This book combines an admirable attention to empirical reality with moral seriousness and reasoned hope in the promise of America. Where so many recommend fatalism and despair, the contributors to this volume celebrate the achievement of the black middle class and the moral and civic agency impressively displayed by black Americans even under conditions of distress. A most welcome plea for sanity and the recovery of the moral promise of the American republic.

Here is a sober and hopeful book. In it, you will not find the leftist tale of a black America that must be rescued from ‘systemic racism’ by ever-more state intervention. Nor will you find the right-leaning claim that America is color-blind. This book gives a believable history of black America, which is to say, one beset by moral agony and ongoing labor to make good on an American promise longing to be fulfilled.

In the face of a plangent chorus of ‘white guilt,’ ‘black victimization,’ and ‘green’ futility, this book revives the American dream and drama of triumphant possibilities and creative abundance for all. Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, 19th century pioneers of the American dream, would gladly welcome these authors into their pantheon of true heirs and proponents of the promise of 21st century American abundance and opportunity.

The significance of black patriotism, among many other compelling issues, is given penetrating reflection by the authors assembled in a new book edited by political philosopher and former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William B. Allen.