"We Presume We Understand It as Long as We're Not Asked to Explain It, but It Becomes Inexplicable as Soon as We're Put to the Test"

"As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world 'will not become unracialised by assertion'. (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.) Even so, after 350 years, it remains the case, as Nell Irvin Painter argues, that whiteness 'is an idea, not a fact'. Not alone, and not without much work to repair the damage done in its name, it still must be possible to change our minds."

In a 2021 Guardian article, Robert P. Baird explores the "invention of whiteness."

"Frequently Underestimated Breadth, Complexity, and Variety of Beliefs and Perspectives"

"But that does not mean that the experience of a particular African American will necessarily determine that person's preferences. Experience affects thinking in all sorts of subtle, complex, mysterious, and surprising ways. But it does not determine thought. Hence, we ought to be skeptical about claims regarding 'the authority of experience' and efforts to make a credential of experience. That a person has suffered impoverishment and marginalization is, alas, no guarantee at all that that person will be attuned to those social vices or immune to them."

Randall Kennedy at Heterodox Academy emphasizes diversity of thought throughout African-American history.

"A Decontextualized, Ahistorical, and Inaccurate Description of Racial Antagonism, Caste, and Class"

"In Wilkerson's book, oppression and exploitation are understood through indignities that starkly remind the Black elite of their Blackness. The class perspective offered throughout Caste—shown through anecdotes such as being slighted in the first-class cabin of a flight, facing mistreatment from white workers who are beneath Wilkerson in terms of class but above her based on 'caste,' and living in an affluent neighborhood but not being treated with the dignity afforded her white neighbors—is particularly ironic given Wilkerson's failure to account for how class structures race relations in the United States." 

At Boston Review, Charisse Burden-Stelly reviews Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

"She Fooled Everyone"

"The problem is that if you adopt the view of race held by Shakespeare, Du Bois, Appiah and the geneticists, there is no such thing as an authentic Black or Latinx person because there are no 'actual' racial categories: they are all socially determined performances.                      "But that is not how race is usually discussed these days among the woke. Instead, as the uproar over Krug's impersonation shows, race is now widely considered an intrinsic category, not a social construct, and there is no crossing the boundaries. If you try to cross or 'pass,' you risk being greeted with the same horror and derision that miscegenation generated not that long ago.                                                      "Paradoxically, we have returned to a view of race not dissimilar to white supremacists: both view race in absolute terms, and both believe the races should be separate."

Peter C. Herman at Inside Higher Ed explains why the exposure of Jessica Krug upsets current-day progressive views of race

And Cathy Young at The Week writes that "White identity politics on the right and 'woke' identity politics on the left feed off each other. A Trump victory would just perpetuate this vicious cycle."

At Persuasion, John McWhorter writes that Krug was "seeking a sense of validation and group membership in noble victimhood."

"Find Ways to Interrogate"

"The critical study of whiteness has grown in recent years, and there has been a plethora of publications for people who identify as white to consult and learn their own origin story. One very notable work is The History of White People, written by Nell Irvin Painter, the Edwards professor of American history, emerita, at Princeton University. Her work, which contributes vitally to the development and expansion of what we consider 'white,' looks as far back as the Greeks and Scythians. What is especially relevant to our political climate is the way Painter's thorough investigation of whiteness reveals an intimate historical affinity with being American. Despite the consensus on the biological meaninglessness of race, it remains a relevant topic in how nonwhites are treated. Painter told me that despite the biological meaninglessness of race, '[t]he idea—the ideologies—of race may change over time, but they are not arbitrary. They relate to relations of power and concepts of class and gender and beauty,' and she pointed out the importance of recognizing the 'social and economic power of ideologies of race.'
"Yet, like the work on whiteness by Du Bois and Baldwin, these insights have generally failed to become a part of popular political and social discourse."

Jordan Lindsey at Slate calls for a whiteness-history month.

"Which Is Precisely Why It Must Be Preserved and Discussed"

"When President Trump argued that attempts by activists to remove Confederate statues was a struggle to 'take away our culture,' it was clear the 'our' excluded large numbers of Americans. It was a noted contrast to Barack Obama's remarks at the opening of the Museum of African American History and Culture: '…African American history is not somehow separate from our larger American story, it's not the underside of the American story.' President Trump’s proud ignorance of American history needs a response—but African Americans have wrestled continuously with this problem, as they remind the nation of its darkest historical moments. "

Robert Greene II at Current Affairs discusses "Black Memory in the Age of Trump."

"Often Had the United States on His Mind"

"To read Marx is to wrestle with the modern world that capitalism has made. This includes modern America—especially modern America. Because the US is the nation in world history most committed to capitalism, and because Marx is the world's most enduring theorist of capitalism, Marx is a veritable American alter ego."

Andrew Hartman at Jacobin marks Karl Marx's bicentennial

As does The Economist.

"A Successful Repulse of Enlightenment Liberalism by Romantic Reaction"

But Reconstruction has proven to be a more balky and diffuse era than either the Dunningites or the New Reconstructionists supposed. The crusaders, black and white, who hoped to build a new South out of the ashes of the old plantation order had no plans for a proletarian paradise. Quite to the contrary, they were plain and eager in their demand for a thorough-going capitalist effacement of the kingdom of the thousand-bale planters. Northern republicans had, after all, waged their war on behalf of free labor (an ideology whose greatest expositor has always been no one other than Eric Foner), and what they expected to create in the defeated Confederacy was a mirror image of small-producer manufacturing and independent family farms. The Union 'represents the principles of free labor,' declared a New York pamphlet, and only when 'the victory of the Northern society of free labor over the landed monopoly of the Southern aristocracy' was complete could the Civil War be declared over. 'Reconstruction,' added Frederick Douglass, will 'cause Northern industry, Northern capital, and Northern civilization to flow into the South, and make a man from New England as much at home in Carolina as elsewhere in the Republic.'
"No one offered a more vigorous second to that motion than the freedpeople, who wanted nothing so much as to become self-interested bourgeois owners of property."

Allen Carl Guelzo at History News Network calls Reconstruction a attempted "bourgeois revolution."

"It Might Express the Idea That All History Is Revisionist"

"And politics makes memory. So does the formal study and writing of history, of course, but the relationship between the discipline of history and memory—or broadly shared cultural assumptions—is complicated. Conventional wisdom shapes historians, who often reinforce it with their work; on the other hand, many challenge it by marshaling evidence and arguments that, on occasion, change the public mind and seep back into politics. I don't mean, then, that we need a historiography museum, but one that traces the intertwining of the popular imagination and the professional study of history. It would go beyond the question, 'What happened?' to ask 'How did we come to believe that this is what happened?' The answer to the latter can be just as important as to the first."

T. J. Stiles at History News Network calls for a "Museum of the History of American History."

"Everything I Learned as a Sociology PhD Student at the University of Chicago Is Wrong"

"The implications are far-reaching. If the Chicago school is not the originator of sociology, then why spend so much time reading, thinking about, or debating it? If Morris is right, graduate students should instead focus upon the real innovators and founders: Du Bois and his 'Atlanta School' of sociology. It only struck me after reading this book that Du Bois had barely if ever appeared on any my graduate school syllabi. Yet, this is not a question of adding more thinkers to the sociology canon. If Morris is right, there is an argument to made that Du Bois and the Atlanta School should replace the Chicago School, not just be added alongside it. For, with The Scholar Denied, Du Bois can no longer be seen as the 'first black sociologist', the originator of 'African-American sociology,' or the one who pioneered the study of African-American communities. He must instead be seen as the first scientific sociologist who is the rightful progenitor of American sociology itself."

Julian Go in the Berkeley Review of Sociology reviews Aldon Morris's The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of American Sociology.

"The Occupation Was the Consequence, Not the Cause, of Southern Resistance"

"The brilliance of Downs' argument is that he steals the central complaint of the apologists, yet reverses the conclusion: The federal government was overzealous—and that was a good thing. Congress had to impose martial law in order for blacks to gain basic freedoms. If military officers sometimes vacated racist local laws, if they removed ruthless sheriffs and judges, if they tried white supremacists in unfair military tribunals—all of which they did—they did so for necessary ends. Equality would come to the South no other way."


Eric Herschthal in Slate reviews Gregory P. Downs's After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War.


And Downs explains Reconstruction as a continuation of war in The New York Times.

"Tactics Used to Secure Material Advantages in Social Contexts Perceived as Zero-Sum"

"Engagement with Du Boisian ideas might have made 'A Dreadful Deceit' more convincing (and its practical implications less ambiguous). Still, if contemporary discussions of race could be focused on the interconnections between racial ideologies, political power and economic vulnerability, as Jones would like, that would be a dramatic improvement over the 'postracial' narratives that currently reign."


Tommie Shelby in The New York Times reviews Jacqueline Jones's A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama’s America.

"A Commitment to Democracy as Process"

"O’Brien is right that Obama represents an American political tradition, though there’s no need to go back to seventeenth-century Rotterdam to find it. The focus on democratic process, reform, and an ideal of deliberative democracy has been shared by many of the less successful Democratic candidates (and a few Republicans, like Representative John Anderson in 1980) since the 1950s. It’s the tradition of what historian Sean Wilentz called the 'beautiful losers,' beginning with Adlai Stevenson, and journalist Ron Brownstein called 'wine track' candidates (people who talk about 'new politics') as opposed to the more electable 'beer track' candidates like Bill Clinton (who focus more on basic economics than on the nature of politics). Obama’s passion has always seemed to be more for a richer and more collaborative form of politics than for any particular vision of economic justice.
"Obama’s presidency has been the first real test of a politics focused on reform and democratic participation rather than traditional bipartisan bargaining—and it has failed. Over the last four years, American politics split sharply into the two primary traditions: the first a sort of hyper-Lockeanism represented not just by the Tea Party but even by Mitt Romney’s division of the country into 'makers and takers,' the second a demand—driven by circumstances and crisis—for a much more active, expansive government role in the economy. Economic issues, once a natural zone of compromise, began to seem more like social issues, matters of irreconcilable absolutes. There wasn’t much room in the middle, and for a period, Obama’s discursive strategy seemed wholly irrelevant."

Mark Schmitt in the Washington Monthly reviews Ruth O’Brien's Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition.

"The Radical Ideas of One Generation Are Often the Common Sense of the Next"

"Unfortunately, most Americans know little of this progressive history. It isn't taught in most high schools. You can't find it on the major television networks or even on the History Channel. Indeed, our history is under siege."

Peter Dreier in The Nation presents a list of "The Fifty Most Influential [Activist] Progressives of the Twentieth Century."

Crisis Management

"'Some people would like to see us be an alternative government infrastructure for black people,' Jealous says. 'I understand where that comes from; the reality is that's what we've been fighting against for 100 years. What we've been fighting for is for the government that we already have to respond to the needs of all people. Our focus is on the needs of black America; that's what we do best; that's where we're known best. But our goal is a fully functioning democracy.'"

In The American Prospect, Adam Serwer profiles Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP (which marked its 100th anniversary this month).

Here's Where the Story Ends

"I’ve gone into great detail about the Kelley-Hawkins story because it is a cautionary tale for scholars and an example of how our theories, our explanatory models, and the stories we tell ourselves can blind us to the obvious, leading us to see in matters of race only what we want to see based on our desires and political agendas. When we confront phenomena of any kind, we are wise if we assume the position phenomenologist Herbert Spiegelberg called epistemological humility, which is a healthy skepticism about what we think we already know. When constructing our narratives, it would also help if we remember a famous and often-quoted statement by C. S. Lewis on the characteristics of the human mind: 'Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them—never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?'"

Charles Johnson in The American Scholar calls for the end of the "black American narrative."

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

"'We were the first Fascists.... When we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown, [and] Mussolini copied our Fascism.' Garvey’s 'we' was his Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.), an organization that spread like brush fire from Harlem to black communities across the United States, the Caribbean and Central America, acquiring hundreds of thousands of members. The quotation about Fascism, in the context of Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, sheds light on the befuddlement of both Du Bois and J. Edgar Hoover, neither of whom knew quite what to make of the anti-union, non-Socialist, non-Bolshevik, non-Democrat, non-Republican organizer and orator with (in Grant’s words) a 'haunting and melodious voice.'"

In The New York Times, Paul Devlin reviews Colin Grant's Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey.

Democracy's Discontent

"A century ago, a generation of progressive men and women balked at the narrow self-interest and rapacious greed that had characterized the Gilded Age. Disgusted by the outright corruption that pervaded late-nineteenth-century politics, progressives organized to miminize the pernicious influence of money in politics and to wrest control of the government from the powerful corporate 'Trusts.' They set up new political systems and institutions to regulate Big Capital and to make government more responsive to the will of the people. Recognizing for the first time the importance of the social environment in individual development, they struggled to improve living and working conditions for all Americans, and began to reemphasize the civic fabric that binds us--farmer and worker, rich and poor, laborer and capitalist, black and white, native and immigrant--all together."

Kevin C. Murphy of Ghost in the Machine has created a new site as a clearinghouse for civic progressivism: Small-R Republic.

Du Bois (not) vs. Washington

"Yet they sometimes acted as allies, with Washington treating Du Bois as a potential follower, and Du Bois treating Washington as a discreet patron. Every few months, letters were posted and projects deliberated. It was a relationship of enticements, negotiations, tactical respect—and rising suspicion. Washington tempted Du Bois with job offers and solicited his counsel. Du Bois asked Washington for recommendations. They corresponded on legal strategies, planned conferences together, and saluted each other’s work."

In The Wilson Quarterly, Mark Bauerlein depicts the early connections between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington and how their relationship eventually broke down.