Joan L. Bryant’s Reluctant Race Men examines the deliberations within the nineteenth-century free black community about the nationality, racial identity, and citizenship of the African Americans both enslaved and free. Bryant’s book interrogates this complex situation–not enslaved but not free–surrounding Black intellectuals as they wrestled with deciding on where they belong or where they should live in the world during the nineteenth century. Their lives, though burdened by the problematic expectations of race, resist the roles that American society has prescribed for them. This book certainly resonates during these times of conversations and controversies surrounding the concept of Diversity, Equity Read more