SOURCE: “Race, Culture, and Morality,” in Washington Post Book World, June 13, 1993, p. 5.

In the following excerpt, Nicholson offers a favorable assessment of Race Matters.

If questions of morality are largely absent from Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy [by Houston A. Baker Jr.], they are always present in Cornel West’s Race Matters. There are parts of this book that are as moving as any of the sermons of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as profound as W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, as exhilarating in their offering of liberation as James Baldwin’s early essays.

This is not to suggest, however, that West, director of Afro-American Studies at Princeton University, is as skilled a writer as any of these. While moving and powerful, this collection of eight essays (there is also a preface and an introduction) on topics that include black...