Portside

Du Bois’s mode of analysis in "Black Reconstruction" can help us look past so much of the ephemera of our politics to focus on the roles of power, privilege and, most important, capital in shaping our political order and structuring our conflicts.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America is one of the greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution. It’s also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class analysis of race under capitalism.

What distinguished DuBois' close study of slavery and Reconstruction (and does so even today) was its Marxism. Black Reconstruction was his first extended effort to shine Marxism’s sweeping floodlight on the tortured history of his homeland.

Freedomways, the African American journal of politics and culture chronicled the civil rights and Black freedom movements starting in the early 1960s.

Mainstream culture denied Black children their humanity—so W. E. B. Du Bois created The Brownies’ Book to assert it.

Du Bois’ time as editor of The Crisis was just as much about critically embracing careful, systematic, empirical science as it was about skewering the popular view that Blacks (and other nonwhites) were naturally inferior.

Loot the labor and very being of people of African descent. When they rise in response, resist, and give as little as possible. Then wait for things to “calm down” and take back as much as possible.

At the Jefferson School students were expected to study Marxism and to take that education into the street in mass actions including protests, and political organizing. This mission resonated with Du Bois’ goal to create inter-racial solidarity.

Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis delivered a speech during the Du Bois 150th Birthday Celebration. Du Bois at age 95 was more radically unorthodox than virtually any other engaged intellectual of the 20th century. The real problem was really the manipulation of race in the service of wealth.

History warns us to be very, very careful when using the phrase "white working class." The reason has nothing to do with political correctness. Rather, it concerns the changing historical definitions of who is "white." The conclusion that white working class flocked to Trump as a way to protest their economic decline is flawed. And Trump supporters in the Wisconsin legislature are threatening to withhold funding from the University of Wisconsin for teaching - about race.