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The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. By Cathy J. Cohen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999. 394p. $18.00 paper.
What defines the political interests of African Americans? It is usually assumed that black politics centers on a political agenda defined by racial issues. African Americans see themselves bound together by a linked fate grounded in a common experience of oppression and mistreatment. This linked fate overrides other divisions among them, notably social class and gender; race comes to be seen as a proxy for individual self-interest and the crucial resource for political mobilization. In The Boundaries of Blackness, Cathy Cohen takes dead aim at the notion of a widely shared political agenda at the core of black politics. She states that "where once consensus issues dominated the political agendas of most black organizations, these concerns are now being challenged and sometimes replaced by cross-cutting issues and crises rooted in or built on the often hidden differences, cleavages, or fault lines of marginal communities" (p. 9).
Cohen examines the rupture in black politics by looking at the response of African American opinion makers and political elites to the AIDS crisis, an event that has disproportionately affected African Americans. Cohen is interested in understanding "how groups, in particular African Americans, came to conceptualize [the AIDS] epidemic and their relationship to it" (p. 119). To answer this question she examined the response of black newspapers and magazines; black political organizations, such as the NAACP, Urban League, and SCLC; and the congressional black caucus. Her research is as revealing as it is meticulous....