'The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color-line.' Originally published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk is a classic study of race, culture, and education at the turn of the twentieth century. With its singular combination of essays, memoir, and fiction, this book vaulted W. E. B. Du Bois to the forefront of American political commentary and civil rights activism. The Souls of Black Folk is an impassioned, at times searing account of the situation (...) of African Americans in the United States. Du Bois makes a forceful case for the access of African Americans to higher education, memorably extols the achievements of black culture (above all the spirituals or 'sorrow songs'), and advances the provocative and influential argument that due to the inequalities and pressures of the 'race problem', African American identity is characterized by 'double consciousness'. This edition includes a valuable appendix of other writing by Du Bois, which sheds light on his attitudes and intentions. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, (...) innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Collected in one volume for the first time, The World and Africa and Color and Democracy are two of W E. B. Du Bois's most powerful essays on race. He explores how to tell the story of those left out of recorded history, the evils of colonialism worldwide, and Africa's and African's contributions to, and neglect from, world history. More than six decades after W. E. B. Du Bois wrote The World and Africa and Color and Democracy, they remain worthy guides for the twenty-first century. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and two introductions by top African scholars, this edition is essential for anyone interested in world history. (shrink)

This chapter presents an essay by W. E. B. Du Bois that deals with the issue of race. He raises questions such as: What is the real meaning of race. What has, in the past, been the law of race development? What lessons has the past history of race development to teach the rising Negro people? He describes the American Negro Academy, which aims at once to be the epitome and expression of the intellect of the black-blooded people of (...) America, the exponent of the race ideals of one of the world's great races. He concludes by outlining a proposed creed for the Academy. (shrink)

New foreword written by HeritageMom, Amber O'Neal Johnston. "During a time when the United States needed to be reminded of the contributions Black people have made to its democracy, freedom, music, literature, and more, W.E.B. Du Bois took on the task of enumerating the gifts that we've provided to our country. "When I began reading The Gift of Black Folk...the story that unfolded was one that I had never anticipated. We the People of the United States, all of (...) us, have left our indelible mark on America the Beautiful." -Amber O'Neal Johnston In 1924, William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868-1963) penned The Gift of Black Folk in response to systemic racism in the United States, showing that "...the American spirit is a new and interesting result of diverse threads of thought and feeling coming not only from America but from Europe and Asia and indeed from Africa." Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and later became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. In 1909 he co-founded the NAACP. Du Bois was a lifelong leader and proponent of civil rights. Amber O'Neal Johnston is a writer, speaker, and home educator who blends life-giving books with a culturally-rich environment for her four children and others. She's the author of A Place to Belong, a guide for families of all backgrounds to celebrate cultural heritage and embrace inclusivity in the home and beyond, and she's known for sharing literary "mirrors and windows" on HeritageMom.com. (shrink)

The black social gospel emerged from the trauma of Reconstruction to ask what a “new abolition” would require in American society. It became an important tradition of religious thought and resistance, helping to create an alternative public sphere of excluded voices and providing the intellectual underpinnings of the civil rights movement. This tradition has been seriously overlooked, despite its immense legacy. In this groundbreaking work, Gary Dorrien describes the early history of the black social gospel from its nineteenth-century (...) founding to its close association in the twentieth century with W. E. B. Du Bois. He offers a new perspective on modern Christianity and the civil rights era by delineating the tradition of social justice theology and activism that led to Martin Luther King Jr. (shrink)

Contrary to the dominant arguments put forth by Black feminist scholars, this essay argues that W.E.B. Du Bois’ pioneering role in establishing the principles of Black sociology, ethnological arguments and long-range development of Pan-Africanism as an ideological rival to colonial imperialism/Westernism suggests that the masculine roots informing his approach to the Black intellectual endeavor is a positive and humanistic rather than a restrictive marker of his thought. If Du Bois’ masculinization of Black agency and intellectual endeavors (...) were simply indicative of mimesis – his internalization of the very sexism against which he fought anchored to a view of freedom for Black people which materialized as a struggle among men over the control of the bodies of Black women – then there should be textual evidence demonstrating that he (like some of his Black female peers) supported the relegation of Black women to domesticity or was in favor of US imperialism against darker races abroad. But rather than an imitative aspiration towards Black nationalist patriarchy and the subordination of Black women to men’s will, the logical consequence of Du Bois’ masculinist (ethnological) thinking as it relates to the Black intellectual endeavor and the problem of race in America materialized as the formulation of Black sociology to study Black men and women as agents of history who were endowed with unique insights stemming from their experiences of marginalization, his articulation of an anti-colonial and egalitarian Black manhood, and his laying an intellectual basis for Pan-Africanism to emerge as an anti-colonial ideology. (shrink)

This book brings a new understanding to one of the great documents of American and black history. While most scholarly discussions of The Souls of Black Folk focus on the veils, the color line, double consciousness, or Booker T. Washington, this book reads Du Bois' work as a profoundly nuanced interpretation of the souls of black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Demonstrating the importance of the work as a socioh-istorical study of black life (...) in America at the turn of the twentieth century and offering new ways of thinking about many of the topics introduced in Souls, this book charts Du Bois' successful appropriation of Hegelian idealism in order to add America, the nineteenth century, and black people to the historical narrative in Hegel's philosophy of history. It adopts Du Bois' point of view to delve into the social, cultural, political, and intellectual milieus that helped to create The Souls of Black Folk. (shrink)

This chapter introduces W.E.B. Du Bois’s original political thought and his strategies for political advocacy. It is limited to explaining the pressure he puts on the liberal social contract tradition, which prioritizes the public values of freedom and equality for establishing fair and inclusive terms of political membership. However, unlike most liberal theorists, Du Bois’s political thought concentrates on the politics of race, colonialism, gender, and labor, among other themes, in order to redefine how political theorists and activists should build (...) a democratic polity that is truly free and equal for all. Additionally, this chapter defines some key concepts Du Bois developed to scrutinize a white-controlled world that does not welcome black and brown persons as moral equals. These trailblazing concepts include: the doctrine of racialism, double consciousness, and Pan-Africanism. Finally, this chapter defends Du Bois’s contributions to black feminist thought and American labor politics, which inspired major social justice movements in the twentieth century, in which he played a notable role. (shrink)

For W. E. B. Du Bois, the tragedy of Reconstruction was that its achievements were overthrown and erased from collective memory. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction corrects this, claiming enslaved people who fled plantations self-emancipated, thus enacting a “general strike against the slave system.” Yet Du Bois contravenes his general strike thesis when he quotes without rebuttal several Union officials who spoke of the formerly enslaved in degrading, nonagentic terms. I turn to Jacques Rancière’s politics of dissensus to understand why (...) Du Bois quoted such racist views without comment. In Rancière, political actors “stage a scene” of equality that is shared, even among parties in conflict. Recording conflicting perceptions of the strike, highlighting divisions that persist despite momentary advances of equality, Du Bois’s reading of the general strike is dissensual in Rancière’s sense, I argue. But Du Bois also offers a valuable corrective to Rancière, whose account of the first plebeian secession erases a different general strike from memory. Rancière reads the Aventine as an event of confrontation unconnected to the collective action that Du Bois summoned from the archive and named “general strike.”. (shrink)

This essay presents the normative foundation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s constructivist theory of justice in three steps. First, I show that for Du Bois the public sphere in Anglo-European modern states consists of a dialectical interplay between reasonable persons and illiberal rogues. Second, under these nonideal circumstances, the ideal of autonomy grounds reasonable persons’ deliberative openness, an attitude of public moral regard for others which is necessary for constructing the terms of political rule. Though deliberative openness is the essential vehicle (...) of construction, reasonable persons only have a pragmatic political obligation to forge ties of deliberative reciprocity with likeminded persons whom they trust will listen and not harm them. Finally, I present Du Bois’s defense of black suffragists’ support of the 19th Amendment to illustrate pragmatic political obligation in action. I sketch successful democratic engagement that reconstitutes a nonideal public sphere. (shrink)

This book is both extraordinarily useful and wonderfully beautiful. It provides a sympathetic and articulate account of the basic philosophical and religious theory of Hindu polytheism, an analysis of some of its fundamental concepts, a systematic ordering and explanation of the major deities with their various names and symbols, and a clear picture of the structure and development of Hindu thought. The Sanskrit texts are printed separately, and there is a set of fine black-and-white plates. I can't imagine a (...) more delightful, or more useful, basic reference work on the subject. The earlier French edition, published in 1960, differs in minor points and does not contain the very valuable index.—W. G. E. (shrink)

My dissertation defends W.E.B. Du Bois’s philosophy of modern freedom, which he grounds in the historical reconstruction of the American civic community on the moral basis of free and equal citizenship. Rather than ascribe to him an elitist politics of racial ‘uplift’ and assimilation to Anglo- American folkways, I instead argue that he defends black moral and political autonomy for securing state power and civic equality. Additionally, he challenges both historical and the contemporary political philosophers, including John Rawls, Axel (...) Honneth, and Philip Pettit, to articulate the racial dimension of the development of a social order that actualizes the moral meaning of free and equal citizenship. In establishing his novel philosophy of freedom, I adduce three critical components: (1) Contra standard interpretations of Du Bois that claim he espouses a controversial racialist doctrine, I argue that his racialism is best understood as conceptualizing the ethical salience of racial difference in the context of a democratic plurality. In the light of dominant accounts of plurality that do not foreground race, pace Margaret Gilbert and John Rawls, Du Bois deemphasizes individuals’ free choice in social group formation. In accepting the importance of free choice, he stresses collective historical experience as furnishing the normative salience of racial identity, which prefigures individuals’ free choice. A racialist model of racial difference in a democratic plurality exacts the civic obligation to confront the historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. (2) In advancing the moral value of citizenship, Du Bois affirms the moral obligation of the modern American state to represent black interests from Reconstruction onwards. Drawing on G.W.F. Hegel’s normative theory of the modern state, I justify Du Bois’s analysis of postbellum federal policies concerning black freedmen and refugees of the Civil War. Du Bois observes that the Freedmen’s Bureau – established with the passage of the 1865 Radical Reconstruction Amendments – democratically facilitated a ‘social revolution’ by promoting the integration of black freedmen on the moral basis of free and equal citizenship under the aegis of the federal government. Implicit in his analysis is a normative commitment to representational government that in attending to the needs of the postbellum black community incorporates black political will in the public adjudication of the common good – a historically unprecedented phenomenon. (3) With the rise of Jim Crow, when the U.S. federal government skirted its moral obligation to defend black interests, Du Bois argues that the black church and college assumed a civic function. Habits of citizenship flourished there, affirming the moral agency of African Americans as American citizens. Inasmuch as these institutions groomed disenfranchised black citizens for the assumption of political power, I articulate the challenge they present to John Rawls, Axel Honneth, and Philip Pettit to chart the civic dimension of ‘private’ social institutions. Because they neglect to theorize the historical experience of racial subordination, their views of freedom omit a formulation of social cooperation guided by the notion of the civic within the institutional context of civil society. Specifically, their accounts of the interrelation between citizens, social institutions, and the modern state fail to capture the civic function of the black church and college during Jim Crow. Thus, Du Bois’s dynamic, institution-based account of freedom highlights the racial dimension in the historical contestation of the legitimate scope and ends of the American civic community. (shrink)

While psychoanalysis credits the entrenchment of systems of subordination to the necessity of socialization and the transmission of dominant values from parent to child, by claiming social symbolics independent of the dominant hegemony, W.E.B. Du Bois calls for resistant forms of identification. Psychoanalyticaccounts of social power relations often assume that the dominant social group produces the only operative social symbolic and that this symbolic is also identical with the nation, but Du Bois’s attention to the slave song allows him to (...) trace the burial of a black American symbolic rather than a traumatic inculcation of the dominant white symbolic. (shrink)

In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) graded the mortgage security of urban US neighborhoods. In doing so, the HOLC engaged in the practice, imbued with racism and xenophobia, of “redlining” neighborhoods deemed “hazardous” for lenders. Redlining has caused persistent social, political and economic problems for communities of color. Linkages between redlining and contemporary food access remain unexamined, even though food access is essential to well-being. To investigate this, we used a census tract-level measure of low-income and low (...) grocery store food access from the US Department of Agriculture Food Access Research Atlas, redlining data from Mapping Inequality Project, and demographic data from the American Community Survey. We employed generalized estimating equations with robust covariance estimates to analyze data pertaining to 10,459 census tracts in 202 US cities. Tracts that the HOLC graded as “C” (“decline in desirability”) and “D” (“hazardous”) had reduced contemporary food access compared to those graded “A” (“best”). Increases in contemporary census tract proportions of Black, Hispanic, or other racial/ethnic minority residents, as well as disabled residents, were associated with reduced food access. Increases in contemporary proportions of residents age 75 years and older or those without a car were associated with better food access. Tracts that underwent housing redevelopment since being graded had better food access, while those undergoing gentrification had reduced food access. Results suggest that issues of redlining, housing discrimination, racism, ableism, displacement, and food inaccessibility are deeply intertwined. (shrink)

This paper will explore the aesthetic experience that can occur with music, and the potentially transformative existential education that can unfold from that experience. First and foremost, the paper explores the ways W.E.B Du Bois engages with music in _The Souls of Black Folk_. Drawing on the African-American tradition of the spirituals, but also European symphonic music, Du Bois shows the different ways music can captivate a listener. But Du Bois also complicates what is meant by “listening” to music. (...) This can happen when music is used as a literary device, symbolically as a way of setting the mood for the reader, but also when it is “heard” as arriving from the future. Secondly, this paper turns to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose writing on listening, music and philosophy has captured the attention of musicologists, literary theorists, educators, and, of course, philosophers. For Nancy, listening includes both the embodied experience of hearing and processing sound, as well as the hermeneutics of listening to the sound of ideas. Thinking is musical, music is philosophical, and the distinction between the two is not always entirely clear. Together, Du Bois and Nancy help us to gain a deeper appreciation and understanding for the diverse ways that “music” and “listening” can be experienced. (shrink)

Fact checking has become a prominent facet of political news coverage, but it employs a variety of objectionable methodological practices, such as treating a statement containing multiple facts as if it were a single fact and categorizing as accurate or inaccurate predictions of events yet to occur. These practices share the tacit presupposition that there cannot be genuine political debate about facts, because facts are unambiguous and not subject to interpretation. Therefore, when the black-and-white facts—as they appear to the (...) fact checkers—conflict with the claims produced by politicians, the fact checkers are able to see only (to one degree or another) “lies.” The examples of dubious fact-checking practices that we discuss show the untenability of the naïve political epistemology at work in the fact-checking branch of journalism. They may also call into question the same epistemology in journalism at large, and in politics. (shrink)

Between 1957 and 1961, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a lengthy work of historical fiction, a trilogy collectively titled The Black Flame. Through the lenses of four American families, the narrative offers an illuminating glimpse into the American, political drama of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the degree to which “the negro problem” featured in important decisions and events. Reiterating ideas found in his other works—like Black Reconstruction —the narrative foregrounds the gravity of (...) the “Negro Problem” in the formation and constitution of American culture and political institutions.While this paper will examine a few of the specific arguments that emerge from The Black... (shrink)

In this tour-de-force, Elvira Basevich examines this paradox by tracing the development of W.E.B. Du Bois's life and thought and the relevance of his legacy to our troubled age. She adroitly analyzes 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. (shrink)

In an article on ‘The Name of the Euxine Pontus’ in C.Q.xxxiv , pp. 123 ff., A. C. Moorhouse rejects the suggestion made by M. Vasmer and supported by Boisacq that the original Greek title ξενος was a popular rendering of the Avestan adjective αχṦαệνα, ‘of dark colour’. Moorhouse raises the following objections to this theory: i. There is no direct evidence of the Avestan adjective ever being applied to the Black Sea. ii. In historical times ‘Avestan is a (...) long way from Greek’ and in prehistorical times it is doubtful whether the speakers of Avestan had any close connexion with the Black Sea. iii. Assuming πόντος to denote ‘way’, ‘the dark way’ would be a fantastic name for any sea. iv. The early Greek form is ξενος, and only metri gratia ξεινος, whereas if the word is a loan from αχṧαēνα we should expect the phonetically closer form ξενος. (shrink)

This essay situates the major works of W.E.B. Du Bois and some of his minor work between the 1880s and 1940 in the historical context of black people's writing about race since the eighteenth century. In offering examples of the evolution of black thinking and writing on this topic, it views Du Bois's work in the context of Moral and Ethical Philosophy (rather than the more obvious History, Sociology, and Political Economics) in order to reveal his efforts as (...) a disruption, deliberately designed to shift the discussions of race and race relations from defense to offense, which he did most explicitly and profoundly in Dusk of Dawn (1940) but had been doing much more subtly throughout his scholarly career. (shrink)

In the post-Trump era, the Black lived experience continues to come under assault. Emerging from the suffering imposed on Black bodies comes Black Existential Philosophy, an umbrella term encompassing the multiple depictions of Black life under White subjugation. Whether taking the form of first hand narratives of the lives of enslaved Blacks, the racialized theological discourse of the Nation of Islam, or the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, the works comprising Black Existentialism (...) offer a look into both the world of the racialized Black "Other" as well as the never-ending quest to recapture and reassert Black humanity. In Discovering Black Existentialism, E. Anthony Muhammad documents his personal and academic journey to Black Existentialism. In doing so, the book illuminates the power of curriculum as a shaping agent in the life of an educator and researcher. As a combination of autobiography, theory, and pedagogy, this work gives the reader an intimate view into the developmental arc of a Black Existentialist scholar. This book offers valuable insights to students searching for direction, to researchers attempting to find meaning in their work, and to educators striving to make their pedagogy relevant to the lives of their students. (shrink)

This book contains three essays: "The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and Art" by Gombrich, the renowned art historian and critic; "The Representation of Things and People" by psychologist, Julian Hochberg; and "How Do Pictures Represent" by philosopher, Max Black. The book is based upon lectures delivered in the Johns Hopkins 1970 Thalheimer Lectures, where, taking off from the question "how there can be an underlying identity in the manifold and changing facial expression (...) of a single individual," there is an interdisciplinary attempt at clarifying the problem of representation. Gombrich’s central thesis is that the key to artistic representation is empathy and projection, which is guided by the interlocking display of the permanent and mobile features of the object represented. Perceptual activity and empathy rely more on the muscular imitation than on passive visual reception. He holds that what is singled out as the likeness-factor uniting the permanent and mobile features in, for example, the photograph of the four-year old Lord Russell and such factors in the ninety-year old Russell is the "general tonus, the melody of transition from given ranges of relaxations to forms of tenseness." Hochberg’s essay spells out the position that perception is purposive behavior, wherein the purpose is the information sought and behavior is the "succession of glances in different directions." Holding that perceptual activity is grounded in expectations, he lays aside Gombrich’s muscularity-thesis in favor of a learned expectation of feature characteristics. Black’s essay is a conceptual analysis of "depiction," or more precisely, of "P displays a subject S if and only if R, where R ‘will constitute the necessary and sufficient condition for P displaying S'." The essay, which proceeds in a Wittgensteinian Investigations-type fashion ends where the reader would hope it begin. He concludes that the problem can only be adequately answered by moving from logical investigation to the world of the artisan and art lover. To arrive at this conclusion he debunks six candidates that claim to meet the depiction conditions: causal history, selective information, intention, mimesis, resemblance, and "looking-like." At best, depiction may be considered a "cluster" concept of all six. Further determination, he holds, requires knowledge of the purpose of a particular depiction, and this takes us out of logic and into art; and so Black stops, unfortunately.—W. A. F. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 363-381 [Access article in PDF] Imre Lakatos and Literary Tradition Suzanne Black ALTHOUGH THE CANON DEBATES have largely subsided, the categories of tradition and canon remain problematic and unhelpfully contentious. Some authors view tradition as weighty and oppressive, while cultural studies scholars criticize the concept itself as elitist and exclusionary. Yet literature, like other creative pursuits, cannot avoid its past; nor should it (...) seek to do so. Progressive ideas have a history and a logical development; to argue otherwise leaves them vulnerable to accusations of faddish trendiness. Artists learn from the work of other artists, and critics rely on older examples to describe and understand what they study. Thus activist critics, writers, and moderate scholars all need some way to react to and to conceive of literary history.E. Dean Kolbas has argued that shared assumptions such as a preoccupation with educational institutions limit the arguments of conservative humanists and canon openers alike. 1 If the perspective of literary critics is indeed narrow, they may benefit from broader and more interdisciplinary studies of tradition. For example, historicist philosophy of science devoted considerable energy to understanding how major accomplishments influence the work of scientists. This scholarship offers several complex accounts of the ways science is shaped by its past, and so can offer literary critics another, more structured, more rational, and even more flexible, view of tradition. In addition, some of its preoccupations, like the emergence of consensus or criteria for the selection of representative examples, are relevant to the canon debates. Finally, because writers and scientists understand the past differently and because their ideas develop in distinct social contexts, literary theory and philosophy of science have potentially complementary strengths and weaknesses. [End Page 363]In this article I first summarize Imre Lakatos's conception of the research program and explain some of its potential benefits for an understanding of literary tradition. Then, to show that the concept of a "literary research program" makes sense, I use the category to examine the ideas of Ricardo Reis, a neo-classical persona created by the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa. Finally, I turn to a discussion of W. H. Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron" to identify some difficulties in applying Lakatos's model to literature. To view Auden as working within a Byronic program directs attention to his interpretation of the older poet, but the poem's formal innovation and its irony suggest some important differences between artistic and scientific approaches to the past, as well as some limitations of Lakatos's analytical framework.During the 1960s and 1970s, partly in response to Thomas Kuhn, but also in reaction against other approaches to their field, several important philosophers of science sought to incorporate the history of science into their work. David J. Hess terms this tendency a historicist "period and style" 2 within philosophy of science. As the Hungarian philosopher Imre Lakatos (echoing Kant) contended, "Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind." 3 Generalizing about how scientists think (or ought to think) while still bearing in mind actual science led some philosophers of science to devise subtle and provocative ways of viewing the past. Kuhn's notion of paradigms as "models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research" 4 is the best known and influenced Stanley Fish and Frank Kermode. Generally, however, literary critics are unaware of philosophers' responses to Kuhn and of their attempts to refine his category of paradigm. Larry Laudan, for example, sought to delineate the role of "research traditions" in the natural sciences. As his terminology suggests, these formulations overlap to some extent with literary understandings of past practice.But how much overlap is there, and is it significant? While Kuhn and Laudan both mention the arts, they disagree about the relevance of their work to the humanities. In 1969, noting that "topics" such as "competing schools," "changing standards of value" and "altered modes of perception" "have long been basic for the art historian," Kuhn argued that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions "makes them central to... (shrink)

Nothing was more important for W. E. B. Du Bois than to promote the upward mobility of African Americans. This essay revisits his “The Conversation of Races” to demonstrate its general philosophical importance. Ultimately, Du Bois’s three motivations for giving the address reveal his view of the nature of philosophical inquiry: to critique earlier phenotypic conceptions of race, to show the essentiality of history, and to promote a reflexive practice. Commentators have been unduly invested in the hermeneutic readings and as (...) a result have misunderstood it as a philosophical text. Du Bois did more than introduce the concept of race into the purview of philosophy, he provided a method for philosophical inquiry into a concept that is notoriously difficult to approach with precision. My goal here is to show why no introduction to philosophy and no discussion about the nature of philosophical inquiry is complete without consideration of “Conservation.” Certainly, it is a text about race, but it is also an important philosophical text in general. (shrink)

In this book, Mocombe illustrates ways that Barack Obama is the embodiment of the social identity as the liberal black Protestant heterosexual male. This is an identity best represented in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois.

In this essay, I argue that Hegel’s model of ethical life is normatively gripping for Du Bois’s critique of Radical Reconstruction. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I use Du Bois’s insights to explain the nature of progressive political change in historical time, an account Hegel lacks. I reconstruct the normative basis of Du Bois's political critique by articulating the three essential features of public reasoning qua citizenship. Second, I defend the promise of black civic enfranchisement with respect (...) to the institutional conditions of love and labour in the wake of the Civil War. Third, I establish the central role black freedmen played in realizing the ideals of democratic self-governance affirmed in principle but seldom realized in practice in the United States. (shrink)

Drawing on the recent recognition of Du Bois by contemporary anthropologists, this article highlights the anthropological work that Du Bois conducted on Black people and communities in Philadelphia and Atlanta. It also argues that when reading Du Bois with an eye for his anthropological pragmatism, contemporary scholars should not stop at reading Du Bois’ work on Black people. We also should read his analyses of whiteness and white people as components of a critical anthropology of race. Those components (...) include participant observation of white people, interviews of white people, and historical research about white people. Finally, Du Bois’ anthropological pragmatism underscores the centrality of unconscious habits in the operation of racial prejudice, especially unconscious beliefs and practices that assume that whiteness is the rightful measure of humanity. (shrink)

This essay conducts a diachronic examination of the thought of W.E.B. Du Bois. In so doing, it reveals a corpus that is marked by a tradition of thinking rarely acknowledged by scholars today: Black nationalism. Du Bois’s early focus on the relationship between racism and imperialism and ideological conflicts with Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey laid the basis for his intellectual maturation around the concept of self-determination. After synthesizing the insights of his former ideological rivals, this essay will (...) show that Du Bois affected a revolution in Black nationalist (and human) thought by making the common humanity and autonomy of African/African-descended peoples (and all colonized people) thinkable through the ideology of Pan-Africanism: a truly universal idea of freedom which was antagonistic to Westernism (Liberal Capitalist and Marxist thought). (shrink)

I address an interesting puzzle of how marginalized groups gain self-representation and influence firms’ strategies. Accordingly, I examine the case of access to low-cost HIV/AIDS drugs in South Africa by integrating W. E. B. Du Bois’s work into stakeholder theory. Du Bois’s scholarly work, most notably his founding contribution to Black scholarship, has profound significance in the humanities and social sciences disciplines and vast potential to inspire a new way of thinking and doing research in the management and organization (...) fields, including business ethics research. By drawing on Du Bois’s works, I argue that through reconstruction of their selves—knowing their souls—marginalized groups know their capabilities better, enabling them to overcome their political and strategic limitations and ensure their true self-representation. They are also empowered to use political imagination and strategies of resistance against more powerful opponents. This influences powerful actors to accept the demands of marginalized groups. (shrink)

Since my article in C.Q. xli, pp. 86 ff., a further discussion of the problem has come to my notice. H. Jacobsohn, in an article entitled Σκνθικ in Zeitschr. f. vergleichende Sprachforschung, liv, pp. 254 ff., anticipates my point that the Greek ᾊξενƿς is borrowed not from Avestan but from some other Iranian language, probably Scythian. He also makes outan attractive case, based on the word παφδεισ¿ς, for considering the Iranian pronunciation at the period when the loan occurred to have (...) been αχšēna, with ē from original ai. It is unfortunate that he should have supported his case with the argument that a form αχšaina is too remote from Greek ξειν¿ς for the identification to have taken place: this insistence on complete homonymy in folk-etymology I have already criticized in discussing Moorhouse's article; and in any case it is by no means certain that ξεινႿς is the earliest form of the name in Greek. (shrink)