Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T17:40:05.497Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

CLAIMING HUMAN DIGNITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2010

Lawrence D. Bobo
Lawrence D. Bobo
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the concluding line of his opening note to Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience” (1934[2007], p. xliii). Doing so was an intellectually courageous step at the time Du Bois wrote. Jim Crow strictures, after all, were almost fully institutionalized across the South by that time and larger cultural motifs stressing redemption and reconciliation were steadily undoing the meager steps toward uplift and equality for African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Enormous progress notwithstanding, we know that great challenges of enduring inequality and persistent cultural racism remain in our time. The spirit of this declaration and the a priori intellectual posture it embraces have, quite fittingly then, animated this journal from our inception.

Type
Editorial Introduction
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Fall 2010 , pp. 253 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Cohen, Cathy (1999). The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawson, Michael C. (1994). Behind the Mule: Race, Class, and African American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1934[2007]). Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gurin, Patricia, Hatchett, Shirley, and Jackson, James S. (1989). Hope and Independence: Blacks' Response to Electoral and Party Politics. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Oliver, Melvin L. and Shapiro, Thomas M. (1995). Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Shelby, Tommie (2005). We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundation of Black Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tate, Kathrine (1994). From Protest to Politics: The New Black Voters in American Elections. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar