Nikhil Pal Singh

This new collection of essays, contributed by scholars and former Panthers, is a ground-breaking work that offers thought-provoking and pertinent observations about the many facets of the Party. By placing the perspectives of participants and scholars side by side, Dr. Jones presents an insider view and initiates a vital dialogue that is absent from most historical studies.

"Donald Trump's election to the U.S. presidency in 2016, which placed control of the government in the hands of the most racially homogenous, far-right political party in the Western world, produced shock and disbelief for liberals, progressives, and leftists around the world. Yet most of the immediate analysis neglects longer-term accounting of how the United States arrived here. Race and America's Long War examines the relationship between war, politics, police power, and the changing contours of race and racism in the contemporary United States. Nikhil Pal Singh argues that the United States' pursuit of war since the September 11 terrorist attacks has reanimated a longer history of imperial statecraft that segregated and eliminated enemies both within and overseas, frequently blurring the boundaries between the two. America's territorial expansion and Indian removals, settler in-migration and nativist restriction, African slavery and its afterlives were formative social and political processes that drove the rise of the United States as a capitalist world power long before the onset of globalization. Spanning the course of U.S. history, these essays show how the return of racism and war as seemingly permanent features of American public and political life is at the heart of the present crisis and collective disorientation."--Provided by publisher.

"Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened, to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W.E.B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to the history of black struggle." "Finding racism embedded within the universalizing tones of reform-minded liberalism at home and global democratic imperatives abroad, race radicals alienated many who viewed them as dangerous and divisive. Few wanted to hear their message then, or even now; and yet, as Singh argues, their passionate skepticism about the political promises made on behalf of the U.S. liberal democracy remains as indispensable to the project of racial justice today as it ever was."--Jacket.