The Black Cultural Pathology Paradigm and George W. Bush’s Faith-Based and Fatherhood Initiatives

Abstract

The state remains an important if theoretically and analytically elusive entity. As Margaret Levi has noted, study of the state waxes and wanes out of fashion, but it nevertheless remains an important element of political analysis because “‘[T]he State’ captures the combination of centralized, far-reaching coercion with the complex of staff, governmental institutions, and nongovernmental actors and agencies in a way that nothing else seems to.”¹ Although feminists have studied the gendered nature of the state and the pitfalls of feminist engagement thereof, relatively little attention has been given to the inherently racial character of the modern state, with most analyses focusing on “obvious, extreme, and so seemingly exceptional cases like Nazi Germany or South Africa or the segregationist South in the US (cf. Burleigh and Wippermann 1991; Solomos and Back 1996: 49–52).”² In the introduction to this chapter, I survey some of the primary approaches to thinking about the racial state, on the one hand, and feminists’ perspectives on Black nationalisms’ relationship to the state, on the other, noting my own point of view on analyzing Black nationalisms’ relationship to the state, recounting key terms that I will use throughout this discussion, and then providing an overview of my treatment of the BCPP and George W. Bush’s Faith-Based and Fatherhood Initiatives (FBI and FI) for the remainder of the chapter.