The Color of the Law: Race, Violence and Justice in the Post-World War II South Book

There are some insights in this large tome, but it's lack of clarity makes it disappointing. It's written in a ponderous style, post-modernist in some ways, tho not as impenetrable as a lot of pomo writing. His discussion of authoritarian & proto-fascist tendencies in black politics, such as Garvey's movement in the '20s is interesting. He sees black nationalism as simply accepting, or being the other side of the coin, the "raciology" as he calls it invented by European colonizing powers to subjugate non-Europeans and justify slavery, rather than rejecting a racial definition of a project of liberation. At the end he hints at the need for what he calls looking to the future, that is, for black communities to try to define what future world they want. Given that he's a sociologist, i was surprised there wasn't more about the severe economic problems & severe inequality still faced by the black American working class.