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Black studies as an institutional discipline emerged out of the many sacrifices of passionate, youthful advocates of Black power in the mid- to late 1960s. Today, the term Black power seems almost quaint, although such was assuredly not the case in the 1960s. Black power reverberated in a context of societal tremors as Black people assaulted the ramparts of de jure Jim Crow. De jure Jim Crow did crumble, and over the next two generations, Blacks made considerable societal gains. Still, the scope of Black people's empowerment that Black power envisaged remains unrealized. It is thus well to look again at the principles, objectives, resources, and strategies of Black power to call out its continued germaneness, and by extension Black studies, to the lives of Black people and others, as a disproportionately large Black underclass blurs a small but continually expanding Black middle class.

Introduces an edited Vol of 16 Chpts (each abstracted) that investigates the status of the categories of race, ethnicity, & nationalism at the end of the 20th century. Despite the relativism that must accompany any comparison of these categories across cultures, it is suggested that all cultures share at least seven attributes: species life & being, language, religion, literature/art/science/technology, institutions, & transgenerational memory. It is observed that at the end of the 20th century, self-determination has been a battle cry for many ethnicities, who on the basis of one or a number of these cultural attributes proclaim the right to form a sovereign state. To obtain these dreams, ethnic groups have had to define themselves in opposition to others, & then to embed these differences in a system of social institutions that might perpetuate the ethnic identity. It is concluded that, although contributions examine a variety of contexts in which this process has occurred, they share the hope of building institutions & languages that unite rather than divide people across racial, ethnic, & national lines. D. M. Smith

Considers Richard J. Herrnstein & Charles Murray's The Bell Curve (1994 [see abstract 95c02104]) in the context of a tradition of studies purporting to explain variations in human intelligence via racial categories. From the first instance of contact between Englishmen & Africans, whites have assigned superior status to white skin, which attitude continued in the US, from the early colonialist days to the 20th century. The Bell Curve is read as another in the long line of studies seeking to perpetuate this cocoon of inferiority. Thus, Herrnstein & Murray's work is taken to be nothing more than a late-20th-century version of the well-worn theme of racial inferiority of black people that bears a strong affinity to the racialist tradition in white US culture. It is concluded that this study also represents a gauntlet thrown down before black people, challenging them to articulate principles more commensurate with the more egalitarian principles & practices of US history. D. M. Smith