To a large extent, scholarship on black politics often focuses primarily on institutions, rule of law, processes, political actors, and citizens but with very little attention to issues of gender and sexuality. In contrast, the principal aim of this book is to explore what the author sees as the inextricable links between racism and gender. The basic thesis of this well-written, important, and provocative book is that the fight against racism, especially the “new racism,” can never be won without first challenging sexism, which simultaneously oppresses African-American men and women.

In a genre wherein scholars are used to minimizing questions of gender and sexuality, Patricia Hill Collins roots her argument in critical social theory that is fiercely interdisciplinary. Furthermore, she argues that viable explanations of black politics must not marginalize but include gender, race, and sexuality as intersecting components in analyses of the black experience. She also relies heavily on discourse analysis to underscore how media representations of blacks in magazines, newspapers, music videos, and television perpetuate racial discrimination in gendered ways.

Black Sexual Politics is divided into three sections, each containing three individual chapters. In the first section, Collins lays out a basic rationale about the need for a black sexual politics by arguing substantively that racism is not dead, just different from the days of Jim Crow. She contends that black sexual politics must be taken seriously because racial stereotypes and racial discrimination, as applied to blacks, take on a gendered form. In a nutshell, she contends that African-American women are stereotyped as sexually promiscuous objects to be enjoyed and then discarded, while African-American men are perceived as unruly sexual predators who need to be controlled.

As part of her rationalization for black sexual politics, Collins contends that we live in a society in which sexual repression reigns alongside racial repression. In this context, sexual repression is seen in society's ability to eliminate sexual alternatives and also to shape the public debates that occur. More importantly, however, she argues that black institutions, including churches, families, and neighborhoods, perpetuate the sense of sexual repression by oppressing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered individuals in their communities. Meanwhile, black men are encouraged to express hypersexuality as a badge of masculinity.

The second section of the book examines how representations of gender, sexuality, class, and race become important in perpetuating the new racism that is evident in American society. Here, Collins implicates the role of the media in presenting distorted images of blacks and Latinos, while simultaneously casting whites as the norm as well as the yardstick by which all other groups are to be measured. Especially interesting about this section are the ways in which the author provides class-specific representations of African-American men and women. For example, working-class African-American women are often represented as being promiscuous and fertile and as bad mothers. Such representations, according to critics, justify the draconian policies of limiting resources and forcing mothers of young children to go to work. In contrast, representations of middle-class African-American women as being cutthroat and not “ladylike enough” justify the continued racial discrimination that persists in some employment arenas.

Just as media-generated images of African-American women create representations that make it easier to justify racial discrimination, similar situations occur with African-American men. According to Collins, African-American men are often portrayed as being oversexed and violent, a situation that justifies incarceration and a reluctance by whites to integrate schools. Yet another image that populates mass media is the overly strong African-American woman and the weak African-American male. Such explanations are destructive to African Americans in general, especially to the extent that they compel individuals to feel that the key to fixing such problems lies in changing individual behavior and not in a societal-based reconfiguration of racial, sexual, and gender relationships.

The final section of the book forces readers to focus on three different areas in which a change would bring about a more “progressive” black sexual politics. Within the context of the new racism, Collins argues that we need a more expansive view of social justice that focuses not only on racial problems of lynching but also on problems of rape and incarceration, two issues that affect black women and men in gendered ways. She further argues that black sexual politics cannot thrive in environments where individual blacks treat each other in inhumane and unloving ways. This vibrant section ends with the author's proposal of the HIV/AIDS epidemic (or pandemic) in the black community as the sort of issue needed to drive traditional black politics toward a more progressive black political arena.

Substantively, Collins offers readers a lot of food for thought, and it is in this sense that the book makes its greatest contributions. Above all, it demonstrates a great deal of thoughtful analysis and scholarship, as the author culls evidence from myriad sources to substantiate her arguments. At the same time, her greatest challenge is a tendency to assume that the reader understands what the “new racism” means and, indeed, how she intends it to be defined in her text. Since this concept is so central to the book, it would have been more useful for her to offer a careful treatment of new racism before attempting to utilize it very widely in her work. At the same time, Collins forthrightly declared that her book is not an empirical study but a diagnostic project. Within this framework, it is definitely a winner and a great success. For not only has she provided us with different insights, but she has also helped her readers to consider the role that gender and sexuality play in the perpetuation of discrimination and oppression.