W.E.B. Du Bois spent many decades fighting to ensure that African Americans could claim their place as full citizens and thereby fulfill the deeply compromised ideals of American democracy. Yet he died in Africa, having apparently given up on the United States.
In this tour-de-force, Elvira Basevich examines this paradox by tracing the development of his life and thought and the relevance of his legacy to our troubled age. She adroitly analyses the main concepts that inform Du Bois’s critique of American democracy, such as the color line and double consciousness, before examining how these concepts might inform our understanding of contemporary struggles, from Black Lives Matter to the campaign for reparations for slavery. She stresses the continuity in Du Bois’s thought, from his early writings to his later embrace of self-segregation and Pan-Africanism, while not shying away from assessing the challenging implications of his later work.
This wonderful book vindicates the power of Du Bois’s thought to help transform a stubbornly unjust world. It is essential reading for racial justice activists as well as students of African American philosophy and political thought.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Du Bois Among Us: A Contemporary, A Voice from the Past Notes
Part I Inclusion
1 Du Bois and the Black Lives Matter Movement: Thinking with Du Bois about Anti-Racist Struggle Today
The black lives lost
Trust: do you see what I see?
Lifting the veil: de-colonizing the white moral imagination
Mourning and moral faith
Notes
2 Student Days, 1885–1895: Between Nashville, Cambridge, and Berlin
Du Bois’s childhood, formative experiences, and student days
Du Bois’s early political thought
A Kantian normative scheme in Du Bois’s political thought
A different kind of ideal theory? Du Bois’s ideal of civic enfranchisement and the inclusion/ domination paradigm
Notes
3 The Emergence of a Black Public Intellectual: Du Bois’s Philosophy of Social Science and Race (1894–1910)
The unhesitating sociologist (1894–1911)
Du Bois’s philosophy of social sciences
Du Bois’s philosophy of race: reconsidering racialism
Notes
Part II Self-Assertion
4 Courting Controversy: Du Bois on Political Rule and Educated “Elites”
Washington–Du Bois debate
The role of the “talented tenth”
The politics of leadership and desegregation in Long Island, New York
Notes
5 A Broken Promise: On Hegel, Second Slavery, and the Ideal of Civic Enfranchisement (1910–1934) Du Bois in Harlem
Second slavery and democratic theory
American Sittlichkeit, or the modern state in concreto
Public reason in the circle of citizenship: on the self-conscious development of institutional rationality
Radical Reconstruction (1865–77): on the self-conscious development of institutional rationality in the postbellum United States
Why Du Bois is neither an elitist nor an assimilationist
The contemporary implications of a “second slavery”
Notes
6 Du Bois on Sex, Gender, and Public Childcare
The Du Bois household
Du Bois and the women’s suffrage movement
Right to motherhood outside the nuclear family
The black church and women as civic leaders behind the color line
Childcare: actualizing the value of the civic equality of black women
Notes
Part III Despair
7 Du Bois on Self-Segregation and Self-Respect: A Liberalism Undone? (1934–1951)
Du Bois’s black nationalism and Marxism: economic grounds for voluntary self-segregation
A closer look at double consciousness as an effect of the color line
An orthodox liberal approach: Kant on self-respect
Double consciousness reconsidered: Du Bois’s defense of black self-segregation as black self-respect
Du Bois’s reservation about the desegregation of schools
Contemporary implications: the politics of self-segregation today
Notes
Conclusion: The Passage into Exile: The Return Home Away from Home (1951–1963)
The Passage into Exile: The Return Home Away from Home (1951–1963)
Du Bois’s life, scholarship, and activism in his last decade (1951–1963)
Between domestic justice and cosmopolitanism: the pan-African movement in the black iaspora
After exile: Du Bois’s legacy today
Notes
Index
