Ambivalent Affinities

"Ambivalent Affinities charts the messy responses of Black liberals to the reverberations of sexual exclusion in American life and law. The private lives of African Americans - their intimate relationships, kinship networks, reproductive capacities, gendered behavior, and sexual acts - have long been vulnerable to white scrutiny and disparagement, given their centrality to the construction of racial difference and racial hierarchies. In looking at the intersecting courses of African American, liberal, and LGBT organizing efforts from the 1940s through the 1990s, Jones exposes the persistent conflict between immediate political goals and deep-seated desires to recuperate Black intimate life"--