ABSTRACT
Empowerment evaluation is the use of evaluation concepts and techniques to foster self-determination. Barbara Solomon provides little systematic support for black empowerment practice. Empowerment practice that insists on the centrality of self-help among American blacks denies centuries of prejudicial discrimination as well as the problems of class in America. Even the most comprehensive reviews of the field and its attempts to develop theories of practice largely ignore the problem of effectiveness and the quality of information. Attempts to test black empowerment practice are sparse, weak, and, in the end, distorted to underwrite an improbable and ineffective reliance on self-help within the black community. An Afrocentric empowerment practice insists on black identity when the crushing need for it has given way to an open society whose injustices are related more to inequality than to political and social oppression.
