W.E.B. DuBois\u27s The Comet and Contributions to Critical Race Theory: An Essay on Black Radical Politics and Anti-Racist Social Ethics

No longer considered the exclusive domain of legal studies scholars and radical civil rights lawyers and law professors, critical race theory has blossomed and currently encompasses and includes a wide range of theory and theorists from diverse academic disciplines. Its most prominent practitioners, initially law professors and left scholars, most of them scholars of color employing the work of the breathtakingly brilliant African American lawyer, scholar, and activist Derrick Bell (2005) as their primary point of departure, borrowed from many of the political and theoretical breakthroughs of black nationalism, anti-racist feminism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. They also employed and experimented with new cutting-edge literary techniques and social science methodologies that shaped and shaded their work and burgeoning socio-legal discourse, ultimately giving it a fierceness and flair unheard of in the history of legal studies. Early critical race theorists\u27 work acutely accented the vexed bond between law and racial power (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller & Thomas, 1995, p. xiii). The emphasis on race and power quickly led them to the critique of white supremacy and the subordination of people of color, not simply in the legal system, but in society as a whole (p. xiii)

The Souls of White Folk: W.E.B. DuBois\u27s Critique of White Supremacy and the Contributions to Critical White Studies

Traditionally white supremacy has been treated in race and racism discourse as white domination of and white discrimination against non-whites, and especially blacks. It is a term that often carries a primarily legal and political connotation, which has been claimed time and time again to be best exemplified by the historic events and contemporary effects of: African holocaust, enslavement and colonization; the failure of reconstruction, the ritual of lynching and the rise of Jim Crow segregation in the United States; and, white colonial and racial rule throughout Africa, and especially apartheid in South Africa (Cell, 1982; Fredrickson, 1981; Marx, 1998; Shapiro, 1988). Considering the fact that state-sanctioned segregation and black political disenfranchisement have seemed to come to an end, white supremacy is now seen as classical nomenclature which no longer refers to contemporary racial and social conditions. However, instead of being a relic of the past that refers to an odd or embarrassing moment in the United States and South Africa\u27s (among many other racist nations and empires\u27) march toward multicultural democracy, it remains one of the most appropriate ways to characterize current racial national and international conditions. Which, in other words, is to say that white supremacy has been and remains central to modernity (and postmodernity ) because modernity (especially in the sense that this term is being used in European and American academic and aesthetic discourse) reeks of racial domination and discrimination (Goldberg, 1990, 1993; Mills, 1998, 2003; Outlaw, 1996, 2005). It is an epoch (or aggregate of eras) which symbolizes not simply the invention of race, but the perfection of a particular species of global racism: white supremacy. Hence, modernity is not merely the moment of the invention of race, but more, as Theodore Allen (1994, 1997) argues in The Invention of the White Race, it served as an incubator for the invention of the white race and a peculiar pan-Europeanism predicated on the racial ruling, cultural degradation and, at times, physical decimation of the life-worlds of people of color

W.E.B. DU BOIS E A INAUGURAÇÃO DE UMA SOCIOLOGIA INTERSECCIONAL

Como um breve exerc&iacute;cio dentro da sociologia cr&iacute;tica da sociologia, esse artigo demonstra as ineg&aacute;veis contribui&ccedil;&otilde;es de W.E.B. Du Bois para a hist&oacute;ria, discurso e desenvolvimento da sociologia americana, em particular, e para o campo mais amplo da sociologia, em geral. Essa abordagem dial&eacute;tica para com o discurso sociol&oacute;gico de Du Bois possibilitar&aacute; interpretes de seus trabalhos a verem que quando comparados e contrastados com as obras monumentais de Karl Marx, Max Weber e Emile Durkheim, o que ficou e o que permanece verdadeiramente caracter&iacute;stico e distinto sobre a sociologia de Du Bois &eacute; precisamente sua despretensiosa preocupa&ccedil;&atilde;o, unicamente e inequivocamente, com as quest&otilde;es sociais, pol&iacute;ticas e culturais americanas, como por exemplo: ra&ccedil;a e o racismo anti-negro no contexto da escravid&atilde;o, linchamentos, Black Codes, as leis do Jim Crow, segrega&ccedil;&atilde;o, e outras formas de opress&atilde;o racial nos Estados Unidos; capitalismo racial e a coloniza&ccedil;&atilde;o racial de classes sociais nos EUA; a coloniza&ccedil;&atilde;o racial de g&ecirc;nero e sexualidade nos EUA; a coloniza&ccedil;&atilde;o racial da religi&atilde;o nos EUA; a coloniza&ccedil;&atilde;o racial da educa&ccedil;&atilde;o nos EUA; e finalmente, a criminaliza&ccedil;&atilde;o racial da popula&ccedil;&atilde;o negra, dentre outras popula&ccedil;&otilde;es racialmente colonizadas e muito pobres nos EUA. &nbsp; As a brief exercise in the critical sociology of sociology, this article demonstrates W.E.B. Du Bois&rsquo;s undeniable contributions to the history, discourse, and development of American sociology in particular, and the wider world of sociology in general. This dialectical approach to Du Bois&rsquo;s sociological discourse will enable objective interpreters of his work to see that when compared and contrasted with the monumental work of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, what was and what remains really and truly distinctive about Du Bois&rsquo;s sociology is precisely his unpretentious preoccupation with uniquely and unequivocally American social, political, and cultural issues, such as, for example: race and anti-black racism in the context of slavery, lynching, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression in the United States; racial capitalism and the racial colonization of social classes in the United States; the racial colonization of gender and sexuality in the United States; the racial colonization of religion in the United States; the racial colonization of education in the United States; and, finally, the racial criminalization of blacks, among other racially colonized and poverty-stricken people, in the United States. </div