2.1 - Gooding-Williams, Robert - Black Neo-Conservatism. a Critical Introduction (en)

7/30/2019 2.1 - Gooding-Williams, Robert - Black Neo-Conservatism. a Critical Introduction (en)

1/11

The following ad supports maintaining our C.E.E.O.L. service

Black Neo-Conservatism: A Critical Introduction

Black Neo-Conservatism: A Critical Introduction

by Robert Gooding-Williams

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 2 / 1987, pages: 133-142, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=278fdab8-6070-4d5d-8b55-8233eda499d4http://www.ceeol.com/


2/11

Praxis International 133

Praxis International 7:2 July 1987 0260-8448

BLACK NEOCONSERVATISM IN THE USA

BLACK NEOCONSERVATISM: A CRITICALINTRODUCTION

Robert Gooding-Williams

Neoconservatives have played a prominent role in recent discussions ofAmerican public policy. The contributions of black neoconservatives to thesediscussions are noteworthy for at least two reasons. First, black neoconserva-tives have received extraordinary attention from the white media. By spotlight-ing those black intellectuals who have advanced neoconservative ideas aboutracial issues (e.g., issues like affirmative action and the poverty of the blackunderclass), the media in the United States have enhanced the credibility ofneoconservatism in the eyes of the general public. As long as well known blackintellectuals espouse neoconservative views about racial equality and the prob-lems of the black poor, most white Americans will hesitate to characterizethese views as racially Insensitive.

A second reason to pay attention to black neoconservatives is their potentialimpact on the everyday lives of Afro-Americans. At the present time, black

neoconservatives are attempting to reconstitute the terms and the goals of racialadvocacy in the so-called post-civil rights era. They are thus engaged in aproject that is at once ideological and practical. If the black neoconservativesachieve their objectives, then they will define the new agenda of the old civilrights movement for the foreseeable future.

Glenn Loury and Thomas Sowell are the two most prominent black neocon-servatives writing in the United States today. Both are economists and both aredistinguished by their high visibility in contemporary policy debates regardingAmerican blacks. Most recent discussions of black neoconservatism focus onthe writings of Loury and Sowell.

Loury is a professor of political economy at Harvards John F. KennedySchool of Government and rumored to be the Reagan Administrations nextnominee for Undersecretary of Education. During the last two years, he haspublished numerous articles about civil rights, affirmative action, and the blackunderclass in The Public Interest, Commentary, The New Republic, Playboy, andelsewhere. His book, Free at Last? Racial Advocacy in the Post-Civil Rights Era,will be published by The Free Press in the fall.

Sowell, a former student of Milton Friedman, is affiliated with the HooverInstitute, a well known conservative think tank in Stanford, California. A moreprolific scholar than Loury, he has, since 1975, published Race and Economics

(1975), Knowledge and Decisions (1980), Ethnic America (1981), The Economicsand Politics of Race (1983), and Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (1984). Amongthe various topics which Sowell treats In these books are minimum wage laws,discrimination, affirmative action, and the differential distribution of humancapital among various ethnic groups.


3/11

Praxis International134

Lourys approach to race-related issues strongly echoes the mainstreamneoconservatism of Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Daniel PatrickMoynihan, and Daniel Bell.1 For example, his critique of civil rightsstrategies (such as affirmative action) and his advocacy of self-help for theblack poor constitute specific articulations of the mainstream neoconservativeclaim that Too much is being demanded from government and politicians.2

Equally familiar is Lourys interpretation of social crisis as cultural crisis, or,more precisely, his assertion that the fundamental problems now facing theblack community are morals or values problems.

Although Loury never describes black leaders and intellectuals asproponents of an adversary culture that is hostile to bourgeois values, hedoes indict them for a silent complicity in the perpetuation of thoseproblematic behaviors (e.g., crime and teenage pregnancy among the blackpoor) which he claims are inconsistent with the ethos of the black middleclass.3 Like mainstream neoconservatives (e.g., Bell and Moynihan) whoanticipate the advent of a post-liberal new Establishment that is vaccinatedagainst the contagion of the adversary culture4, Loury, thinking on a muchsmaller scale, hopes for the emergence of a post-liberal black leadership that

will look beyond civil rights and, through self-help, confront the harsh realityof values-problems in the black ghetto.5

As distinct from Loury, Sowell explicitly grounds his thought in anidealization of the free market (e.g., his conception of laissez-faire competition

accounts for his tendency to downplay the economic consequences ofdiscrimination). On the basis of this idealization, he arrives at a conclusionsimilar to Lourys, namely, that self-help, rather than governmentinterference in the market, (e.g., through the institution of racial quotas),constitutes the proper path to economic progress for American blacks.

Sowells commitment to self-help is based on the belief that observedvariations in racial and ethnic economic success are a function of a differentialdistribution of values, attitudes, and other cultural attributes among differentracial and ethnic groups. In particular, he holds that the relatively highincidence of poverty among black Americans is due fundamentally to a

pathological culture of poverty that hampers blacks ability to successfullyplay the game of market capitalism. In Sowells view, Afro-Americaneconomic progress requires, above all else, that blacks overcome their culturaldeficiencies through self-help strategies. Like Loury and the mainstreamneoconservatives, he interprets social crisis as cultural crisis.6

The articles on black neoconservatism collected in this volume of PraxisInternational focus on the work of Loury and Sowell. Though none of thesepieces affords a comprehensive account of either thinkers views, theycollectively address a variety of issues. What unites these essays is the criticalbut nonpolemical perspective they all bring to Lourys and Sowells neocon-

servatism. The questions these essays raise concern Lourys and Sowellscentral theoretical assumptions, as well as their policy proposals.

In Demystifying the New Black Conservatism, Cornel West interpretsLourys and Sowells work as a reaction to recent social, political, andeconomic developments. He argues that both theorists are responding to a

aCEEOL NL Germany


4/11


crisis of purpose and direction among Afro-American political and intellectualelites. West further contends that this crisis is the result of three tendenciesthat have characterized American society and culture since 1973: the declineof U.S. economic and military power throughout the world; the structuraltransformation of the U.S. economy; and the moral breakdown of communi-ties across the country.

Rhonda Williams, in Culture as Human Capital: Methodological andPolicy Implications, analyzes black neoconservatism from the perspective ofneoclassical economic theory. In particular, she evaluates Sowells claim thatculture is a variant of human capital, giving special attention to neoclassicaleconomists longstanding commitment to falsificationism. Williams concludesher essay by examining some of the frightening policy proposals whichneoconservatives have derived from the interpretation of culture as humancapital.

In Values, Respect, and Recognition: On Race and Culture in theNeoconservative Debate, Lorenzo Simpson critically confronts Lourysbelief that affirmative action stigmatizes its beneficiaries. He also puts intoquestion Lourys account of the relationship between values and humanbehavior. Simpsons powerful alternative account of this relationship, whilevery general, philosophically illuminates some of the empirical exampleswhich Williams uses to criticize neoconservative cultural determinism.

Finally, William Darity Jr., in Equal Opportunity, Equal Results, and

Social Hierarchy, offers a critical response to the analysis of equality thatSowell offers in Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality (1984). Darrity repudiatesnotions of equal opportunity and equal results, and defends a radicalconception of equality that he invokes to justify a critique of social hierarchy.

Wests, Williams, Simpsons, and Darritys criticisms of Lourys andSowells neoconservatism are acute and convincing. In the remainder of thisintroduction I elaborate a philosophical context for evaluating thesecriticisms, by placing Sowells and Lourys work in the perspective ofAfro-American intellectual history. In particular, I interpret Sowells andLourys advocacy of self-help as reviving the turn of the century debate

between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois about the future ofblack Americans. I also argue that the characterization of social crisis ascultural crisis is a questionable and ideologically suspect attempt to renew theWashingtonian side of this debate.

The DuBois-Washington Debate

Though well known to American historians, the DuBois-Washingtondebate has received relatively scant attention from social theorists. In whatfollows I attempt to alter this pattern of reception by highlighting the

philosophical significance of what is perhaps the most famous dispute inAfro-American history. More precisely, I explore the disagreements betweenWashington and DuBois in light of their differences qua social theorists. Mypoint of departure is DuBois analysis of self-consciousness in his seminalwork, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).


5/11


DuBois characterizes self-consciousness as a quest for the reunion andreintegration of an alienated self. In other words, he views self-consciousnessas a circuitous journey of the sort that M. H. Abrams shows is typical ofromantic literature and philosophy.7

DuBois romanticism is explicitly evident in the first chapter of Souls. Heclaims that the American Negros experience is above all else an experience ofstrife. He further argues that The history of the American Negro is thehistory of this strife, this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to mergehis double self into a better and truer self.8 DuBois American Negro ishaunted by a double self, because he ever feels his twoness, anAmerican, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.9

To DuBois mind, the goal of the American Negros striving is the cessation ofself-estrangement. Consciousness of a double self is consciousness of adivision that the American Negro struggles to transcend, though he wishesneither of the old selves to be lost.10 Though forced into slavery and into theworld of the Occident, DuBois American Negro knows no nostalgia for hisprelapsarian African origins. Rather his is the typically romantic pursuit of ahigher and more encompassing self; the search for a mode of integrity thatpreserves in harmony what is American and Negro, what is Western andAfrican. Like Blake, Coleridge, Schiller, Hegel, and other romantic writers,DuBois idealizes a form of unity that includes and sustains diversity.

The relevance of DuBois romanticism to his social thought resides in his

conception of the social conditions of a reintegrated existence. DuBoispresents the Negros striving to attain self-consciousness manhood as astruggle for recognition.11 He holds that the telos of this striving is to be aco-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation.12

Following Hegel, and Royces interpretation of Hegel, DuBois avers thatself-conscious human beings can achieve genuine satisfaction and integrity, if,and only if, they have their worth and dignity acknowledged by others.13 Inparticular, DuBois believes that the American Negro can transcend his stateof self-estrangement, if, and only if, white America recognizes in him thecommon humanity of a co-worker.

DuBois implies that recognition is a necessary and sufficient condition forthe elimination of the American Negros self-estrangement. His name for thefailure to recognize and respect the Negros human worth and dignity isprejudice. Prejudice, in other words, is a failure to acknowledge or possessthe moral insight that Negroes are due the same respect as all human beings.This moral failure has, in DuBois view, an explanatory significance. To beprecise, he believes that prejudice is the paramount cause of Jim Crow, thepervasive system of segregation and discrimination which characterized thepost-Reconstruction south.14

By explaining Jim Crow as a product of white Americas failure to grant the

Negro the recognition which is the goal of his striving and the very essence ofhis liberation from self-estrangement, DuBois lays the foundation for hiscritique of Booker T. Washingtons theory of social progress.

Washingtons account of the conditions of black social progress in Up FromSlavery (published just two years before Souls) is straightforward. The first


6/11


part of his account consists of the claim that Negroes should produce and bringto market commodities that the market demands. Washington believes thatsupplying the market with what it demands will earn the Negro respect. Hedoes not claim that this respect will derive from a recognition of the Negrosbasic human dignity. On the contrary, Washington maintains that the respectearned in the market place will reflect a universal law of nature, according towhich merit, which he equates with usefulness, will always be rewarded. Inother words, Negroes will win respect, inasmuch as they satisfy the wants ofothers and thus prove their utility. Respect, for Washington, means recogni-tion of instrumental value. In his view, the consequences of earning respectinclude the full acquisition of political rights and the abolition of JimCrow.15

In the second part of his theory of social progress, Washington attempts toshow how the Negro can acquire the ability to produce and supply what themarket demands. In Washingtons view, the attainment of this ability presup-poses the knowledge of a trade, a cultivation of the virtues of thrift, spirit ofindustry, and economy, and the subjection of the body to the discipline ofcivilization. Furthermore, suggests Washington, if one does obtain the knowl-edge of a trade, cultivate the proper virtues, and successfully discipline onesbody, then one will have everything one needs to succeed in the market.16

The essence of Washingtons theory of social progress is the belief that ifNegroes help and assert themselves, they will attain the technical knowledge,

the ethical dispositions, and the civilization which together make for progress.In other words, he suggests that self-help is a sufficient and not simply anecessary condition of market success, the abolition of Jim Crow, and theacquisition of political rights. He further suggests that if Negroes do notachieve these goals, they are to blame for not achieving them.

DuBois devotes the entire third chapter of Souls to a critique of Washington.The gist of his criticism can be gleaned from the following passage.

. . . He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for

workingmen and property owners to defend their rights and exist without

suffrage.. . . He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a silentsubmission to civil inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race inthe long run.17

The strategy of DuBois critique is to exhibit the conflict or contradictionbetween Washingtons values and the policies he advocates. First, DuBois arguesthat success in the market, which Washington values, is impossible, so long as theNegros political right to vote is not respected. DuBois thus rejects Washingtonsbelief that the Negro, rather than agitating directly for his political rights, shouldwait for these rights to be acknowledged as a consequence of his success in the

market. Second, DuBois argues that the cultivation of thrift and self-respect,which Washington also values, is incompatible with the existence of Jim Crow(civic inferiority). DuBois thus suggests that Jim Crow cannot be eliminated bycultivating the virtues which Washington applauds, since the very existence of JimCrow subverts the development of these virtues.


7/11


Both of Dubois criticisms of Washington suggest that individual attemptsat self-help, while perhaps necessary, do not suffice to produce socialprogress. Furthermore, these critics imply that the effort to cultivate thevirtue of thrift, or to do whatever is necessary to enable him to produce whatthe market demands, may very well be stymied by factors beyond theindividuals control (e.g the existence of Jim Crow and the denial of politicalrights). In DuBois view, Washington puts the cart before the horse, byinterpreting the eradication of Jim Crow and the recognition of political rightsas consequences rather than as preconditions of thriftyness, useful produc-tion, and, in general, market success.

In opposition to Washington, DuBois means to return the horse to the frontof the cart. He claims that the moral recognition of Negroes human dignitymust result from a struggle for recognition18, cannot be the product ofWashingtonian self-help initiatives, and is a necessary condition of socialprogress. According to DuBois, moral recognition must precede the dissol-ution of Jim Crow and the acknowledgment of political rights. DuBois alsobelieves that such recognition is an indispensable prerequisite to the cultiv-ation of thrift, useful production, and market success.

DuBois criticism of Washington has general significance for social theory,because it questions the notion that the immediately given characteristics of anindividual or a group can be accounted for in terms that suspend reference tothe overall social environment within which that individual or group thrives

and functions. Washington conceives self-help to be a necessary and sufficientcondition of social progress. He also suggests that the failure to make progressis the fault of the individual, and not a result of the way in which the overallsocial milieu, independently of what the individual does or does not do,conditions the individuals chances to succeed.

DuBois, on the other hand, insists that the overall social environment, in virtueof being dominated by prejudice, does indeed make a difference. The argument ofSoulsis that if prejudice exists, then recognition is absent, and that the absence ofrecognition is given independently of the presence or absence of self-help efforts.That is why DuBois can claim that though . . . it is a great truth . . . that the

Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unlesshis striving be not simply seconded, but aroused and encouraged, by the initiativeof the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope for success.19 InDuBois view, the initiative of the richer and wiser group would begin with adecision to disavow prejudice and grant recognition.

What DuBois ultimately rejects in Washingtons position is what WilliamRyan has appropriately called blaming the victim.20 Social theory thatblames the victim tends, in the manner of Washingtons theory of socialprogress, to explain the characteristics of an agent(s) or agents circumstancesin ways that treat the causes of these characteristics as being given indepen-

dently of what I have called the overall social environment. Examples ofwhat I am talking include the culture of poverty thesis informing theMoynihan report and, more recently, the black neoconservative elaboration ofthis thesis in the writings of Loury and Sowell. In both cases, culturalattitudes, which are understood to be given independently of general


8/11


economic circumstances, are introduced to explain the problematicbehaviors, lack of achievement, or high incidence of poverty among certainethnic minorities. Not surprisingly, critics of Moynihan and the black

neoconservatives, like William Ryan, Stephen Steinberg, George Frederick-son, and William Julius Wilson, reject the views of their opponents ongrounds not dissimilar to the reasons for which DuBois criticized Wash-ington. Briefly, they claim that poverty, lack of achievement, etc. must beseen, not as the products of isolated cultural deficiencies, but as theconsequences of more general economic conditions.21 Just as DuBois wasloath to reduce lack of progress to lack of initiative, so too do thesecontemporary social theorists refuse to reduce poverty and lack of achieve-ment to lack of a healthy culture.

Notwithstanding the affinities between DuBois views and those of Ryan,Steinberg, Frederickson, and Wilson, the former differ from the latter in atleast one important way. DuBois, unlike the others, does not conceive theoverall social environment in terms that privilege economic considerations.For DuBois, the social environment is first of all a moral environment. Shouldlife not offer black people the successes and opportunities it affords others, itis because prejudice has overtaken mens moral capacities. Writing as aHegelian, DuBois understands black peoples suffering to be the product of amoral failure which Hegel might have characterized as a rupture in the fabricof ethical life (Sittlichkeit). The world thus becomes for him a place where the

possibility of moral community has always to be pursued. When thispossibility is left unfulfilled, DuBois concludes that a veil of moral blindnesshas rent humanity asunder.22

DuBois emphasis on the overall social environment typifies the tendency ofsocial philosophers writing in the tradition of Hegel and Marx to expressskepticism towards explanations of social phenomena that account for thosephenomena without analyzing sufficiently their connections to complex andcomprehensive systems of social relations. In its strongest version, thistendency is expressed by Lukcs claim that Concrete totality is the categorythat governs reality.23 A weaker version of the same tendency can be found

in Marcuses critique of a study of labor relations at the Hawthorne Works ofthe Western Electric Company.24 More recently, Habermas has criticizedneoconservative explanations of social crisis that ignore the generalbackground of economic and administrative imperatives impinging on the lifeworld of advanced industrial nations.25

Of course, mainstream neoconservatives reject Habermas criticism of theirideas, no less than black neoconservatives reject the neo-DuBoisian criticism(as represented by Frederickson, Wilson, et. al.) of their beliefs. In the lattercase, the accounts of crime, teenage pregnancy, and other problematicbehaviors expounded by proponents of a culture of poverty lead to a

neo-Washingtonian advocacy of self-help that parallels the mainstreamneoconservative desire to tame the adversary culture.26 Loury, for example,envisions self-help as a way of suppressing a pathological ghetto culturewhich, he believes, is the most pernicious malaise now facing the blackcommunity. Like other neoconservatives, he invokes traditional middle class


9/11


values as an antidote to those cultural tendencies he abhors. He reactsdismissively to the neo-DuBoisian critique of his position, because he believesthat this critique flies in the face of facts that are staggeringly evident toanyone with eyes to see.27

In what follows, I will raise some critical questions regarding Lourysdefence of self-help. My purpose is to bracket the neo-DuBoisian critique ofLourys views, which I find compelling, in order to consider Lourys analysisof values-problems on its own terms.

Lourys Defence of Self-Help

Loury conceives black self-help as an activity of moral leadership.28 Hebelieves that the black middle-class has a special role to play in this activity,because it is in a unique position to exert effective moral leadership, i.e., toinstill in poor blacks middle-class values and attitudes that are incompatiblewith problematic behaviors. Thus, Loury suggests the need for institutionsthrough which middle class blacks can be of service to poor blacks. Poorblacks, he assumes, suffer from widespread value-deficiency. Middle classblacks, on the other hand, being rich in the proper values, can function in atherapeutic role to encourage attitudes that are inconsistent with crime,teenage pregnancy, irresponsible parenting, etc. . . Loury believes that theself-help he advocates would reduce the incidence of problematic behaviors

among poor blacks, precisely because self-help would inculcate values thatpreclude these behaviors.Does any of this make sense? The answer can be yes, only on the

supposition that poor blacks do indeed suffer from value-deficiency. For ifpoor blacks are not value-deficient in the first place, then there is no obviousreason to believe that middle class blacks emphasis on proper values willhelp poor blacks to eliminate problematic behaviors from their lives. Hencewe must ask: Is the incidence of value-deficiency especially high among poorblacks? Loury assumes that it is, but says little to justify his assumption. Thetruth of his assumption seems obvious to him, I suspect, because he cannot

imagine people with proper values performing improper actions, e.g.,committing crimes, getting pregnant while still an unwed teenager, etc. . . Thisfailure of imagination is fatal to Lourys position, since the belief it engenders,viz., that an adherence to proper middle class values is inconsistent withand thus precludes problematic behaviors, is plainly false.

The falseness of Lourys belief can be shown in a number of differentways.29 One especially relevant and useful approach is to evaluate this beliefagainst the background of those hermeneutically inspired social scientificstudies which explicitly investigate the self-understanding and the life-worldof the poor. Consider, for example, Elliot Liebows study of Negro street-

corner men, Tallys Corner, a classic in the field of urban anthropology. In thiswork, written in 1968, Liebow explicitly attacks the value deficiency thesisthat Loury defends. He writes: . . . the streetcorner man does not appear as acarrier of an independent cultural tradition. His behavior appears not so muchas a way of realizing the distinctive goals and values of his own subculture, or


10/11


of conforming to its models, but rather as his way of trying to achieve many ofthe goals and values of the larger society, of failing to do this, and of concealinghis failure from others and from himself as best he can.30 What Liebow claimshere is that the kinds of problematic behaviors which Loury wants toeliminate can be plausibly explained on the assumption that the perpetrators ofthese behaviors adhere to the middle class values which Loury embraces.Liebows justification for this claim is his complex, nuanced, and convincingreading of black ghetto life, which reading indicates that middle-class valuesare not inconsistent with problematic behaviors.

Texts like Tallys Comer cannot easily be dismissed. Alternative interpret-ations of black ghetto life are important to the evaluation of Lourys work,because they imply that Loury cannot soundly defend his value-deficiencythesis by assuming that middle class values preclude certain kinds of behavior.In other words, studies like Liebows provide strong reasons to reject Lourysmethodological tendency to infer statements attributing value-deficiency fromstatistics regarding crime, teenage-pregnancy, etc.. Of course, this does not ruleout the possibility that Loury couldmount a serious challenge to interpretationsof the kind Liebow gives of life among poor blacks. In order to do so, however,he would have to produce a comparably complex and nuanced account of blackghetto life something Loury has never done.

In the absence of such an account, Lourys post-civil rights and neo-Washingtonian defence of self-help has to be viewed with suspicion. Indeed,

one cannot but wonder, in the spirit of DuBois critique of Washington,whether the commitment to self-help has regressive implications opposite tothose Loury intends. If, for example, poor blacks do not suffer from wide-spread value-deficiency, then Lourys discourse is an ideology that mis-represents poor blacks, while rationalizing the coercive and perhaps self-interested intervention of the black middle-class in ghetto life. Understood asideology, Lourys invitation to self-help may be little more than an invitation toexploitation, disguised as a call for value-therapy. A progressive critique ofLourys discourse must focus on the potentially ideological nature of hisdefence of self-help, in order to resist the oppressive institution of social

domination in the name of post-liberal sobriety.31

NOTES

1. For the by now standard account of mainstream neoconservatism, see Peter Steinfels, The Neocon-servatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).

2. Steinfels, p. 59.3. See Glenn Loury, Internally Directed Action for Black Community Development: The Next Frontier

for the Movement, The Review of Black Political Economy(Summer/Fall 1984), pp. 31-46 and TheMoral Quandary of the Black Community, The Public Interest 79 (Spring 1985), pp. 9-22.

4. Steinfels, p. 67.5. See, for example, Lourys Who Speaks for American Blacks, CommentaryVol. 83, No. 1 (January

1987), pp. 34-38.6. See, for example, Thomas Sowell, The Economics and Politics of Race(New York: William Morrow and

Co., Inc. 1983).7. See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalim, (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1971), pp.

141-325.

8. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1969), p. 45.


11/11


Redigitized 2004 by Central and Eastern European Online Library C.E.E.O.L.(www.ceeol.com )

9. Ibid,

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. DuBois, p. 46.13. For the impact of Hegel and Royce on DuBois see the authors Philosophy of History and Social

Critique in The Souls of Black Folk, Social Science Information 26, 1 (1987), pp. 99-114. For an

equally useful discussion of DuBois Hegelianism, see Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 399-413.

14. See DuBois, pp. 90, 209.

15. See Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (New York: Doubleday, 1963), pp. 29, 110-111, 146,

169-170, 203, 228.

16. See Washington, pp. 52-53, 90-91, 126-127.

17. DuBois, pp. 88-89.

18. This, I take it, is the idea behind Dubois advocacy of peaceful political agitation. See DuBois, pp.

94-95.19. DuBois, pp. 93-94.

20. See William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Vintage, 1971).

21. See Ryan, pp. 63-89, Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), pp.

106-127; George Fredrickson, Groups that Get Ahead: The Economics and Politics of Race, by

Thomas Sowell, New York Times Book Review, October 16, 1983, and the account of William J.

Wilsons recent presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chronicle

of Higher Education, March 11, 1987.

22. DuBois employs the figure of the veil throughout Souls,

23. Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge: MIT Press,

1971), p. 10.

24. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 108-120.25. See Jrgen Habermas, Neoconservative Cultural Criticism in the United States and West Germany:

An Intellectual Movement in Two Political Cultures, in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard

Bernstein (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 93 and Modernism vs. Postmodernity, New German

Critique 22 (Winter 1981), pp. 4-8.

26. Cf. Steinfels, p. 65.

27. Glenn Loury, The Family, The Nation, and Senator Moynihan, CommentaryVol. 81, No. 6 (June

1986), p. 23.

28. The discussion which follows is based primarily on Lourys Internally Directed Action. . . and

Moral Quandary. . . articles.

29. Cf. the articles by Rhonda Williams and Lorenzo Simpson in this issue.

30. Elliot Liebow, Tallys Corner (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1967), p. 222.31. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Texas at Austin, Vassar College, and

the Inter-University Centre for Postgraduate Studies, Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. I want to thank Seyla

Benhabib, Lorenzo Simpson, Larry Vogel, and Sara Gooding-Williams for their comments on earlier

drafts.

Documents

2.1 - Gooding-Williams, Robert - Black Neo-Conservatism. a Critical Introduction (en)