The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures

Too many American families are in serious peril, and both the reality of the situation and the myths obscuring that reality call for attention and swift action. In this incisive analysis, Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children’s Defense Fund, charts what is happening, exposes myths, and sets a bold agenda to strengthen families and protect children.

A searing critique of definitions of black masculinity at work in American culture, Race Men shows how these defining images play out socially, culturally, and politically for black and white society—and how they exclude women altogether.

This book focuses on the most controversial aspect of Lincoln’s thought and politics—his attitudes and actions regarding slavery and race. Drawing attention to the limitations of Lincoln’s judgment and policies without denying his magnitude, George M. Fredrickson provides the most comprehensive and even-handed account available of Lincoln’s contradictory treatment of black Americans in matters of slavery in the South and basic civil rights in the North.

Paul Gilroy seeks to awaken a new understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois’s intellectual and political legacy. With his brilliant, provocative analysis and astonishing range of reference, Gilroy revitalizes the study of African American culture. He traces the shifting character of black intellectual and social movements, and shows how we can construct an account of moral progress that reflects today’s complex realities.

As a young anthropologist, Sidney W. Mintz undertook fieldwork in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Fifty years later, the eminent scholar of the Caribbean returns to those experiences. These reflections illuminate continuities and differences between these cultures, but even more they exemplify the power of people to reveal their own history. Mintz argues that in Jamaica and Haiti, creolization represented a tremendous creative act by enslaved peoples: that creolization was not a passive mixing of cultures, but an effort to create new hybrid institutions and cultural meanings to replace those that had been demolished by enslavement. Globalization is not the new phenomenon we take it to be.

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

Is economic equality necessary for social peace? Why do the strong oppress and impoverish the weak? How are developing nations overcoming the legacy of colonialism? These are a few of the many thought-provoking concerns addressed in this book. The first in a new series—The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures—it tackles a wide range of topics dealing with the economics of racial conflict in important areas of the world.

Rather than contest other definitions, Kenneth W. Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

According to W. J. T. Mitchell, a “color-blind” post-racial world is neither achievable nor desirable. Against claims that race is an outmoded construct, he contends that race is not simply something to be seen but is a fundamental medium through which we experience human otherness. Race also makes racism visible and is thus our best weapon against it.

When Britain abandoned its attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance as the definition and management of difference, lines of political identity were drawn between settler and native, and between natives according to tribe. Out of this colonial experience arose a language of pluralism.

The radical black left has largely disappeared from the struggle for equality and justice. Michael C. Dawson examines the causes and consequences, and argues that the conventional left has failed to take race seriously as a force in reshaping American institutions and civil society. Black politics needs to find its way back to its radical roots.

W. E. B. Du Bois never felt so at home as when he was a student in Berlin. Germany was the first place white people had treated him as an equal. But anti-Semitism was prevalent, and Du Bois’ challenge, says Kwame Anthony Appiah, was to take the best of German intellectual life without its parochialism—to steal the fire without getting burned.

After Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves largely excluded from politics, higher education, and the professions. Martin Kilson explores how a modern African American intelligentsia developed amid institutionalized racism. He argues passionately for an ongoing commitment to communitarian leadership in the tradition of Du Bois.

In this work drawn from lectures delivered in 1994 a founding figure of cultural studies reflects on the divisive, deadly consequences of our politics of identification. Stuart Hall untangles the power relations that permeate race, ethnicity, and nationhood and shows how oppressed groups broke apart old hierarchies of difference in Western culture.

Loury describes a cycle of tainted social information that has resulted in a self-replicating pattern of racial stereotypes that rationalize and sustain discrimination. His analysis shows how restrictions placed on Black development by stereotypical and stigmatizing thinking deny a segment of the population the possibility of self-actualization.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. weaves personal anecdotes and meditations to offer a positive vision for Black politics: the importance of ordinary people assuming the mantle of leaders and heroes our democracy desperately needs. To build a better world, we must cultivate our best selves, not rely on the professional politicians who purportedly represent us.