SOURCE: A review of Race Matters, in Christian Century, June 30-July 7, 1993, pp. 684-5.

In the following review, Jelks offers a positive assessment of Race Matters, though disapproves of West's humorlessness and the book's title.

The eight essays in this collection extend themes that Cornel West has been developing over the past ten years. This is the eighth book for this wide-ranging academician and cultural critic, who is director of the Afro-American Studies Program and professor of religion at Princeton University.

West has been concerned with the advancement of democracy, politically and culturally. He has sought to deconstruct “race” as an essential category for defining African-American life, and he has attempted to show the richness and the poverty of African-Americans by investigating popular culture. In all his thinking he is intensely concerned with dread, death and moral decay. He has insisted that intellectual and political leaders be “prophetic,” by...