Abstract
W.E.B. Du Bois was not a liberal, Marxist, radical, or republican—he was all of these and none. The author of more than one hundred books, hundreds of published articles, and founding editor of the NAACP’s journal Crisis, Du Bois has been widely studied, both during his life and afterward, for his profound insights into the politics of race and class in America. Throughout his work, Du Bois insisted on the importance of the local—on individual and community sovereignty—to counter domination by elites. He founded a counter tradition of African American thought that provided a new perspective on “the political,” incorporating contingency, racialized embodiment, and lived experience, engaging religion as a mode of political action and exploring the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Du Bois explored different political theories and scientific avenues, changing his political positions as his understanding of events shifted. He drew on historical events, such as Reconstruction, to explain racial inequality in the present and advocate for racial justice. He challenged the African American community to strategically accept segregation at one point, at other times encouraging internal racial uplift and external political agitation. Du Bois’s expansive views provide a historical glimpse at the changing nature of Western political theory and American democracy, even as they reveal how much we still need to consider race, its workings, and its consequences. In these pages, Du Bois emerges as an intellectual provocateur who challenged tradition and whose work and life continue to stimulate lively and constructive debate about the theory and practice of democracy in America.
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