This work employs the essays of James Baldwin to interrogate the politics of race in American democracy. The author reveals Baldwin to be a powerful political thinker whose work deserves full consideration by political theorists. Baldwin's essays challenge appeals to race-blindness and formal but empty guarantees of equality and freedom. They undermine white presumptions of racial innocence and simultaneously refute theories of persecution that define African-Americans solely as innocent victims. Unsettling fixed categories, Baldwin's essays construct a theory of race consciousness that captures the effects of racial identity in everyday experience. Balfour reads Baldwin's work alongside that of W.E.B. Du Bois to accentuate how double consciousness works differently on either side of the colour line. She contends that the allusiveness and incompleteness of Baldwin's essays sustains the tension between general claims about American racial history and the singularity of individual experiences. The book establishes Baldwin's contributions to democratic theory and situates him as an indispensable voice in contemporary debates about racial injustice.