Minta, Michael D. Oversight: Representing the Interests of Blacks and Latinos in Congress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), $24.95, 192 pp. ISBN: 978-0-691-14926-4 (paper)

If he has achieved nothing else, Barak Obama’s first term as president has forever changed the discussion of race and representation. Michael Minta’s book, Oversight: Representing the Interests of Blacks and Latinos in Congress, ¹ has nothing to do with Obama. Presumably, it was conceived when President Obama was still a state senator in Illinois. Nonetheless, the book’s contributions are timely. The election of a Black president forces us to look beyond roll call votes for our operationalization of substantive representation. True to its title, Oversight accelerates this search for new measures of representation by exploring how Black Members of Congress (MC) advance Black interests through their committee work.