These two books nicely complement each other as a survey of antiracist struggles in the Americas. Sharon Stanley focuses innovatively on struggles for racial justice in the United States by reclaiming the fraught ideal of integration. Juliet Hooker advances a novel interpretation of four important theorists of race in the Americas, North and South—Frederick Douglass, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos—that contributes to debates about the promise and pitfalls of “comparative” political theory.

Stanley's book centers on the continuing racial injustice suffered by black citizens of the United States. Although much of Stanley's analysis will be familiar to scholars of US racism, her significant contribution lies in the way that she distinguishes integration from desegregation and relates integration to racial justice. She notes that given the history of state-supported racial segregation in the United States, we might be tempted to think that desegregation equals integration equals racial justice. She explains that integration, as a positive ideal, means more than merely desegregation, a “negative” ideal signaling the undoing of segregation. Stanley reverses Elizabeth Anderson's “claim that integration is an imperative of justice” by treating “justice as an imperative of integration”: “a model of integration that does not secure key components of racial justice for blacks is not simply a partial but incomplete step forward, but may in fact be experienced as an intense new loss” (8). The crucial damage done by segregation was maintaining racial subordination, not just separation (172).

Stanley elaborates this thought with reference to school integration. This goal been pursued mostly on terms that ask little of whites and force blacks to adapt to white norms, while undermining black solidarity and black institutions (e.g., through busing). Additionally, without an accompanying commitment to racial justice in housing, wealth, and opportunities within and beyond “integrated” schools, integration is too often manifest in practices like tracking in schools that re-entrench “segregation within the schoolhouse walls” (137, 172). Accordingly, Stanley maintains that, “at the very least … we need to address residential, school, and economic segregation to lay the groundwork for stable, healthy patterns of integration” (140).

Stanley also compellingly advances several more specific points: that “true integration” must encompass two processes, “an internal process of psychic conversion” and a “substantial redistribution of power”; it would entail “mutual transformation” among black and white Americans (9). She highlights three policies to advance these goals: black reparations, metropolitan regional governance, and criminal justice. Furthermore, given the role of whites in maintaining ongoing racial segregation and injustice, she counters the view that whites and blacks have the same moral obligations to integrate society: whites have a more pressing moral obligation to sacrifice for the sake of integration; blacks already have shouldered most of the burden in the struggle to overcome racial injustice and establish democratic equality and have good reason to doubt that white Americans are committed to this goal (167). Indeed, Stanley argues persuasively that the major barrier to true integration in the United States is the unwillingness of a critical mass of whites to “relinquish their claim to superior citizenship” (50). This would require them to overcome their complicity in ongoing racial injustice and to demonstrate “a true commitment to white relinquishment” regarding that advantaged racial status (167, 170–77).

Stanley's conception of integration would go a long way to achieve racial justice. In this regard, her view is not so different from Anderson's view that integration is “an imperative of justice.” Stanley departs from Anderson most sharply in confronting “the obdurate problem posed by whiteness itself” (173). She does not provide much reason to think that white Americans will overcome their whiteness problem any time soon, however; the task would seem to demand, as Du Bois envisioned, that a critical mass of whites stop conceiving of their interests in “white” terms and support a social justice movement that encompasses injustices of race, class, gender, and globalization.

Juliet Hooker's Theorizing Race in the Americas provides a hemispheric angle on struggles for racial justice in “two Americas,” the United States and Latin America. She explains that we get a better “understanding of African American and Latin American ideas about race if we place them within a hemispheric frame,” rather than treating them as two separate traditions (11). Hooker places these traditions in dialogue by highlighting how the theories of race and politics expounded by the four subjects of her inquiry—Douglass and Du Bois from the United States, Sarmiento from Argentina, and Vasconcelos from Mexico—have been shaped by their respective engagements with the racial politics of the “other” America.

Hooker uses the historical-interpretive method of “juxtaposition”—situating historically “the resonances and/or discontinuities between traditions”—to avoid the “pitfalls of comparison” in political theory. Chief among these are how “comparison constructs the racial, national, and cultural differences it purports to analyze” and how it “has been used to rank different units of analysis,” obscuring “persistent forms of racial exclusion in both the United States and Latin America” (13, 11). Hooker notes that a loosely shared “transnational intellectual context” framed the writings of the four thinkers—pervasive white supremacy along with “different varieties of scientific racism that dominated intellectual production in the Americas and Europe between 1850 and 1890,” the era of Douglass and Sarmiento, and between 1890 and 1940, the era of Du Bois and Vasconcelos.

Hooker's main interpretive claim is that hemispheric juxtaposition “reveals the inadequacy of the orthodox interpretations” of the four thinkers’ ideas about racial politics (16). Her approach yields fresh readings by bringing the four thinkers into dialogue around their “preoccupation with the other America” (16). She underscores ways in which their engagements with the other America enriched their thinking, as well as how their reflections on the other America sometimes embodied “pitfalls of comparison”—selectively interpreting “the other” to buttress the “thinker's particular political and philosophical preoccupations” (69).

For example, Hooker's hemispheric frame challenges the idea that Frederick Douglass was a steadfast “believer in the redemptive power of de-racialized American liberalism” (66). She explains how Douglass shifted his thinking in more radical directions in his journalism concerning racial-justice struggles in the Caribbean and Central America (17). And she illuminates Douglass's contribution to democratic thought by joining Sheldon Wolin's notion of “fugitive democracy” with black fugitive thought, which highlights the experiences of “fugitive ex-slaves” who learned to “distrust and disobey” American law (29–30). Douglass “forged a radical black fugitive democratic ethos that impacted his vision of a future US multiracial polity,” shifting between “fugitive democratic” hopes and “black fugitivity” (29). He favored the former when, as during Reconstruction, he thought “that the US polity was in the process of radical refounding” (54); and he embraced black fugitivity—looking to black freedom struggles in Haiti and Central America—when, as in the 1890s, he questioned whether democracy in the United States could be disentangled from white supremacy (30, 60–61).

Douglass also prefigured Stanley's notion of “white relinquishment.” He insisted that (in Hooker's words) “because racism was a white, not a ‘negro problem,’ it required changes on the part of whites, not black striving” (62). Yet, Douglass did not escape the pitfalls of comparison. In the 1870s, he echoed prevalent ideas about “Anglo-Saxon superiority” in relation to the “deficient” political culture implanted in Latin America by Spanish colonization to justify “voluntary” incorporation of Latin American states into the United States; “but he bent [this line of argument] to his own purposes” based on his belief “that the voluntary incorporation of Latin American states would help to transform the United States into a more racially egalitarian and multiracial polity” (53, 55).

All in all, Hooker sheds light on the “uneven reach of democracy” in the Americas once we confront its racialized contours (198); she explores how Sarmiento, an anti-imperial Latin American political thinker, could sometimes propagate anti-indigenous and antiblack racism in the course of his comparisons to the United States; and, with reference to Du Bois's literary experimentation, she highlights the limited power of science “to change white hearts and minds” (123). While Hooker is reticent to take normative positions, this stance seems warranted by our current conjuncture in the Americas in which developing effective strategies requires a solid understanding of racial complexities.