Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T11:40:31.579Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

TOWARD A PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATIC POLITICS OF RACE

Reflections on Du Bois's Legacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2011

Rogers M. Smith*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
*
Professor Rogers M. Smith, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, 3440 Market Street, Philadelphia PA 19104-3363. E-mail: [email protected]

Extract

The two books that have occasioned this symposium represent efforts to research thoroughly, think rigorously, and argue honestly about complex and significant issues of race and ethnicity in America. There is much to be learned from them on many topics. I read them chiefly for insights about whether and how a defensibly democratic politics of egalitarian change can be achieved by, for, and with racial minorities in a country whose majorities, like most majorities, have long been reluctant to pursue policies that did not predominantly benefit themselves. I raise some challenges to the perspectives offered in these books, but only as an effort, kindred in aim if not achievement, to carry forward the work they have thus far so nobly advanced.

Type
Special Feature
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2011

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

Balfour, Lawrie (2011). Democracy's Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beltrán, Cristina (2010). The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. ([1903] 1997). The Souls of Black Folk. Edited with an introduction by Blight, David W. and Gooding-Williams, Robert. Boston: Bedford Books.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. ([1909] 2001). John Brown. Edited with an introduction by Roediger, David R.. New York: The Modern Library.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. ([1935] 1992). Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Atheneum.Google Scholar
Faust, Drew Gilpin (2008). This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Gooding-Williams, Robert (2009). In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira (2005). When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in America. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
King, Desmond S. and Smith, Rogers M. (2011). Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama's America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
McCormick, John P. (2011). Machiavellian Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McFeely, William S. (1995). Frederick Douglass. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
McPherson, James M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Roe, John (2004). Shakespeare and Machiavelli. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer.Google Scholar
Smith, Rogers M. (2003). Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sullivan, Vickie (1996). Princes to Act: Henry V as the Machiavellian Prince of Appearance. In Alulis, Joseph and Sullivan, Vickie B. (Eds.), Shakespeare's Political Pageant: Essays in Politics and Literature, pp. 125152. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Press.Google Scholar
Wolin, Sheldon S. (1996). Fugitive Democracy. In Benhabib, Seyla (Ed.), Democracy and Difference, pp. 3145. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar