Politics Program and Dean of the College Present

Inegalitarian Equality: Du Bois on Social Equality and Self-Conscious Manhood

Is the idea of equality in America an inherently democratizing ideal? Or, paradoxically, does a commitment to equality produce inegalitarian political effects? I take up these questions by looking at African American political thinker W. E. B. Du Bois's understudied idea of “social equality.” Rejecting the Jim Crow bifurcation of political equality from social equality, Du Bois argues that a racially egalitarian democracy requires addressing racism in social and interpersonal relations. I argue that his solution to this problem of social equality – a solution he terms “self-conscious manhood” – is an individualist one, open to people of all races, genders, and classes. Such a self-consciously manly individual achieves socially equal recognition from others by engaging in radical truth-telling and purifying isolation, and demonstrating both a free anarchy of the spirit and a will to strive and act. However, through a close reading of Du Bois’s works of biography, editorial, and fiction, I show that self-conscious manhood is committed to an exclusionary, atomized, and gendered ethic of self-creation rather than a democratic political and social order. Building on Du Bois’s own theorizing on the nature of social equality, I argue that these anti-democratic effects inhere not in Du Bois’s particular solution of self-conscious manhood but are instead intrinsic to the pursuit of social equality itself.

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For more information, call 845-758-7693, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Hegeman 106

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