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AUTOBIOGRAPHY, POLITICAL HOPE, RACIAL JUSTICE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2014

Robert Gooding-Williams
Robert Gooding-Williams*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Columbia University
*
Corresponding author: Professor Robert Gooding-Williams, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, 701 Philosophy Hall, 1150 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027. E-mail: rg2944@columbia.edu
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Abstract

After the overthrow of Jim Crow and the reelection of our first Black president, how should we conceptualize the tasks of a racially progressive politics in the United States? I address this question through (1) the lens of recent philosophical work on the relation between narrative and the justification of political hope and (2) a comparison of two autobiographies, Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn. In light of this comparison, the paper also evaluates some recent contributions to the American Political Science subfield of American Political Development.

Keywords

Barack ObamaW. E. B. Du BoisNarrativePolitical HopeReconciliationGenealogyPostracialRacial HierarchyRacial Inequality
Type
Race in a “Postracial” Epoch
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Spring 2014 , pp. 159 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2014 

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