W.E.B. Du Bois

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. 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

�With the breadth of a biographer, the depth of a philosopher, and the vision of a poet, Elvira Basevich gives us a compelling elucidation of W.E.B. Du Bois� radical liberalism. This is essential reading for understanding why Du Bois still matters!�
Melvin Rogers, Brown University

�In a direct and accessible prose, linking philosophical abstraction with grassroots activism, Elvira Basevich brings us a Du Bois by no means merely a figure of historical importance but very much a thinker relevant for the social justice struggles of today.�
Charles Mills, City University of New York

Elvira Basevich is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Massachusetts, Lowell.