[4] In June 2022, he was elected as the Board's 2022-2024 co-chair, serving alongside Poynter Institute President Neil Brown.

Orlando Patterson described the book as "contest[ing] the movement's central claims at a level of sociophilosophical sophistication that one rarely encounters.

He continued, "Professor Shelby has done a great service to both philosophical and historical academic studies... What makes this book worth reading beyond the scholarship and its scholarly insights is Professor Shelby's attempt to move Black Nationalism into the post-civil rights era.

[1][2] In his review of the book, Tommy J. Curry said that it is "...a great work that inhabits the tension between the sterile thought of the academy and the rich lives of many young urban Americans.

"[9] Shelby also co-edited Transition 99 with Henry Louis Gates Jr., K. Anthony Appiah and F. Abiola Irele, and is the author of the entry on Black Nationalism in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online.