W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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