Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Intellectuals ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Intellectual ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Patricia Hill Collins ◽  
Lay Public

Black intellectualism has been misunderstood by the American public and by scholars for generations. Historically maligned by their peers and by the lay public as inauthentic or illegitimate, black intellectuals have found their work misused, ignored, or discarded. Black intellectuals have also been reductively placed into one or two main categories: they are usually deemed liberal or, less frequently, as conservative. This book explores several prominent intellectuals, from left-leaning leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois to conservative intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, from well-known black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins to Marxists like Claudia Jones, to underscore the variety of black intellectual thought in the United States. Chapters situate the development of the lines of black intellectual thought within the broader history from which these trends emerged. The result gathers chapters that offer entry into a host of rich intellectual traditions.

scholarly journals The Cult of Quality: White Eugenics and Black Responses in the United States, 1900-1934

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Aron Ginther
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Community ◽  
The United States ◽  
Biological Determinism ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Genetic Heritability ◽  
Black Intellectual

This paper focuses on the theory of eugenics and how it was adopted and subverted by black intellectual figures when institutionalized sterilizations were based upon class. The cornerstone of the eugenics theory was based in biological determinism and assumptions of genetic heritability. For black leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois in particular, the early plight for racial legitimacy rested on eugenics and, while morally questionable, strengthening the black community was an attempt to counteract white assumptions. Thus,‘black eugenics’ should not immediately be condemned as an outright failure but should be regarded as an earnest attempt for civil rights. As such, it should not be forgotten and should be recognized as part of the broader framework for African American liberation.

scholarly journals Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Myers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Universe

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Anthony Hunter ◽  
Zandria F. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Du Bois

The last of three chapters on the power of chocolate cities, this chapter centers the lives, activism, and pioneering efforts of Mos Def (a.k.a. Yasiin Bey) and W. E. B. Du Bois. Exploring their lives, legal setbacks, and push against global imperialism and racial oppression, the authors highlight their sophisticated and politically informed racial geography of the United States. Detailing the movement of black people throughout the domestic diaspora and into and throughout Africa, this chapter illustrates the how place, race, peace politics, and power collide in the lives of black people here, there, and everywhere around the globe.

Real Estate Questions

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-66
Author(s):  
Zach Sell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intergenerational Transfer ◽  
Family Stability ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

Abstract Historians of the United States have often described slavery as guided by the chattel principle. Yet in Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “No matter how degraded the factory hand, he is not real estate.” This article builds upon Du Bois’s description of slavery’s real estate basis and considers real estate as central to both slavery and territorial expansion in the nineteenth-century United States. Real estate formed the basis of slaveholder family stability and also enabled the intergenerational transfer of wealth. The article also considers the continuing influence of real estate after black emancipation. Real estate enabled post-slavery black dispossession and also facilitated the continuation of the United States as a settler empire.

The Age of Garvey

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Ewing
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unified Framework ◽  
Black Intellectuals ◽  
Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽  
Community Organizers ◽  
African Descendants ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
New Interpretation

Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917. By the early 1920s, his program of African liberation and racial uplift had attracted millions of supporters, both in the United States and abroad. This book presents an expansive global history of the movement that came to be known as Garveyism. Offering a groundbreaking new interpretation of global black politics between the First and Second World Wars, this book charts Garveyism's emergence, its remarkable global transmission, and its influence in the responses among African descendants to white supremacy and colonial rule in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Delving into the organizing work and political approach of Garvey and his followers, the book shows that Garveyism emerged from a rich tradition of pan-African politics that had established, by the First World War, lines of communication among black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. Garvey's legacy was to reengineer this tradition as a vibrant and multifaceted mass politics. The book looks at the people who enabled Garveyism's global spread, including labor activists in the Caribbean and Central America, community organizers in the urban and rural United States, millennial religious revivalists in central and southern Africa, welfare associations and independent church activists in Malawi and Zambia, and an emerging generation of Kikuyu leadership in central Kenya. Moving away from the images of quixotic business schemes and repatriation efforts, the book demonstrates the consequences of Garveyism's international presence and provides a dynamic and unified framework for understanding the movement, during the interwar years and beyond.

“Multiplied without Number”: Lynching, Statistics, and Visualization in Ida B. Wells, Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Du Bois

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin J. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Data Visualization ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Statistical Graphics ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Life

Abstract Quantification has long played a vexed role in efforts to record and resist racial violence. Building from Ida B. Wells’s antilynching crusade, this essay examines the risks and power of calculating life and death at the close of the nineteenth century. For her part, Wells pushed mere counting past itself to a profound mode of ethical accounting. Two of her contemporaries, Mark Twain and W. E. B. Du Bois, sustained a similarly supraquantitative thrust; each attempted to harness the antilynching potential of numbers by enlisting data visualization. Twain falls short in a telling fashion, as his unpublished satire “The United States of Lyncherdom” (written in 1901) exacerbates the dehumanizing tendencies of quantification. Du Bois, however, pursues a more generative experiment, creating statistical graphics in 1900 that indict and outstrip the causal circuit that yoked scientific numbering to lynching and racial violence more broadly. This latter achievement resonates with scholarly efforts to access Black life from within a desolately tabulated archive of loss and erasure. Specifically, as triangulated with Wells and Twain, Du Bois’s graphics proffer a counterintuitive means to register life as a future-oriented, aggregate abstraction that is neither wholly conditioned by, nor separate from, a past whose violent legacies endure.

An Africana Philosophical Reading of Du Bois’s Political Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis R. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
New England ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Black People ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Status ◽  
Global Influence

Lewis R. Gordon’s essay focuses on Du Bois’s shift from New England liberalism to international radicalism and his global influence in Africana thought, despite his focus on African American politics. Though Du Bois’s expectation of equality for black people in the United States was a supremely radical idea on its own, it was his association with the black tradition of addressing social contradictions and imagining a future of grappling with them that led to the development of his radical philosophical anthropology. Du Bois, like many other Africana scholars, used his theories to express why black people could no longer wait to challenge the status quo. Therefore, Africana political theorists must assert the humanity of people of African descent, which necessitates an explanation of why they are human and how they have historically been excluded from definitions of humanity.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 357-394
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
Historical Trajectory

This concluding chapter steers a different course, reflecting on some of the ways that time and history have underpinned visions of Anglo-America. It outlines a discourse of racial union which was usually predicated on a specific account of both space and historical temporality. The chosen people — whether designated Aryan, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, or English-speaking — was imagined as superior to all others, their greatness ordained by their unique historical trajectory and extant racial characteristics. They had been, and remained, the pioneers of human progress. This historical story produced stratified global geography: the vanguard of modern humanity was concentrated in specific places, chiefly Britain and its past and present settler colonies in North America and the South Pacific. Ultimately, the chapter discusses W. E. B. Du Bois and T. E. Scholes' ideas about race and empire. While the steampunk literature renarrates the history of Anglo-modernity by erasing the primacy of the United States, Afro-modernists sought to destabilize the historical validation of racial domination, clearing the ground for imagining alternative futures.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 253-263
Author(s):  
EDWARD J. BLUM
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Black Intellectuals ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The 1960S

In the middle of the 1960s, Harold Cruse was angry with his fellow “Negro intellectuals.” “The Negro movement is at an impasse,” he wrote in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, “precisely because it lacks a real functional corps of intellectuals able to confront and deal perceptively with American realities on a level that social conditions demand.” When his book was published in 1967, American race relations seemed to be vectoring toward another nadir. Urban unrest, declining job opportunities for African Americans, the escalating war in Vietnam, and the civil rights movements’ divide over “Black Power” were only parts of the “crisis” Cruse identified. To him, black intellectuals had failed to wrestle with the particularities of racism in the United States and thus had failed to offer meaningful solutions beyond what he deemed to be the dead-end roads of integration and black nationalism.

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