Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man From His Native Land.

Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man From His Native Land by Randall Robinson Dutton, February 2004 $23.95, ISBN 0-525-94758-2

Randall Robinson's place in the pantheon of 20th-century black thinkers is indisputable. From the time he founded the TransAfrica Forum in the late 1970s, he has unapologetically pushed our community to see itself as part of a nation that stretches beyond geographic boundaries.

Keeping with a long tradition of fed-up black progressives, Robinson packed his bags and left the United States a couple of years ago, retiring to his wife's Caribbean home of St. Kitts. Quitting is his missive from abroad. From this new vantage point, Robinson sees an altogether repulsive society. Compared to the idyllic St. Kitts, Americans appear to be money grubbing, psychopathically violent thieves who, ultimately, are just plain rude. All of this, of course, is wholly accurate. In his crisp yet chatty prose, Robinson unrelentingly makes the case that the supposed greatest nation in history may well be time's most irresponsibly shortsighted player.

Yet the arguments here are hardly fresh. Robinson stomps down a well-trod road of black intellectual anger over America's hypocrisy. To dramatize its evil, he romanticizes Caribbean life, nearly invoking images of noble savages. Much has been said about black America's leadership crisis, but reading Quitting brings to mind a far more troubling vacuum: the absence of new ideas.