History of Political Thought
American Politics
Political Economy
I am primarily interested in past political projects that aspired to remake economic relations and establish racial equality. I return to the political theory of failed projects for racial equality like the African American cooperative movements of the 20th century to recover their often-overlooked criticisms and to better understand the political dilemmas of speaking and acting otherwise within a given historical context. Clarifying these historical problem-spaces, I contend, enables us to gain critical traction on the questions that animate contemporary democratic debates. I am currently working on two book-length manuscripts that fit this broader goal. The first, A Real Revolution Within, reconstructs the thought of early twentieth century African American cooperative activists and their critique of capitalist practices as impediments to industrial democracy. The second project, Claiming Land, Remaking Citizenship, draws from my dissertation research to reinterpret the ‘40 acres and a mule’ demand of the Reconstruction period. Parts of both projects have been published in article form.
A Real Revolution Within: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Lost Promise of African American Cooperation
My first book project, A Real Revolution Within: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Lost Promise of African American Cooperation, grapples with the political dilemmas of economic domination by returning to the African American cooperative movements of the early twentieth century. Such an argument begins with an act of historical reinterpretation. African American organizers, I show, were not merely concerned with unequal material distributions; they also sought to transform the values of a community from profit-seeking and private wealth accumulation to those of public service and no-profit.
Weaving together published writings and unpublished archival material, I reconstruct W.E.B. Du Bois’s novel articulation of the “readjustment of ideals” program and his attempts to imagine the kinds of action that could muster such a transformation. In his writings, Du Bois often returned to the idea of a charismatic organizer with a nearly magical power to inspire others to change their way of doing things. Du Bois’s cooperative vision informs contemporary debates by reminding us that disagreements in values are bound up with differences in our material lives.
I expand my study of this “revaluation of values,” to quote Friedrich Nietzsche, by turning to newspaper articles, speeches, and community meeting notes. Articles from the national circular, Pittsburgh Courier, demonstrate the rhetorical and aesthetic forms that cooperative organizers employed to tie cooperation to other popular ideas such as the “universal race.” And the organizing efforts of Ella Baker, who began her public career in the Young Negro Cooperative League of the 1930s, reveal the novel strategies of engaging Black women to change the consumption practices at the level of the household.
The manuscript doesn’t conclude with a story of triumph, however. These African American cooperators never brought about a mass cooperative movement. I track the eclipse of the “readjustment of ideals” goal and the rise of economic overtures to self-help and wealth creation in the writings of cooperative journalist George Schuyler. Economically-oriented arguments affirmed the values of capitalist culture and chained cooperative ventures to its standards. Unlike contemporary refrains to differences in values, the African American thinkers understood that readjusting values and ideals required complex political work. Their failure underscores the difficulty of persuading or inspiring audiences to act otherwise and the allure of more coercive methods.
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Enacting a ‘Readjustment of Ideals’: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Cooperative Critique of Capitalism (forthcoming in Political Theory)
This article assembles an archive of published and unpublished material to reconstruct Du Bois’s cooperative critique of capitalism. For most of his life, Du Bois supported efforts to organize consumers’ cooperatives in African American communities and championed cooperation as a key practice of industrial democracy. I leverage these cooperative investments to illuminate Du Bois’s critique of the psycho-social regime of capitalism, taking us beyond the well-studied problem of the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness. African American communities needed a mass cooperative movement, Du Bois maintained, because the practice of cooperation could enact a “readjustment of ideals” away from individualized concerns with wealth accumulation toward an embrace of the ideals of public welfare and no-profit service. Such psycho-social renewal would produce empowered collectives, freed from the narrow thinking promoted by capitalist cultures and eager to find “new ways of doing things.” While this cooperative critique makes visible Du Bois’s insightful concern that dominated peoples can come to desire their own “exploiting set-up,” translating it into practice proved difficult work. The difficulty of organizing a mass cooperative movement raised a practical question: how do you attract new cooperative participants in a world already saturated with the depleting psychologies of late modern capitalism?
Claiming Land, Remaking Citizenship: Reparations in a Settler Republic
While my first book project focuses on the lost aims of the African American cooperative movement, my second book project revisits the meaning of the African American demand for land after the Civil War. Recent scholarship in Indigenous studies has raised a question: how can marginalized groups claim the rights and privileges of citizenship—particularly control of land—when those have been tools of settler exclusion and domination? Claiming Land, Remaking Citizenship, resurrects late nineteenth century African American and indigenous imaginaries about control over land. I uncover the ways that claiming land threatened to conscript claimants into ongoing structures of domination. Rather than subsume their demands into calls for national belonging or reduce them to a narrow demand for more individual material power, I show that African American conceptions of freedom figured citizenship as a practice of challenging the exclusiveness of land claims. Reinterpreting the past, I contend, challenges reparative projects in the present to think beyond private ownership and wealth-creation in their bids to make amends with the violence of the past. This project reframes the question of reparations to ask: How can the struggle against racial inequality foster new institutions and social arrangements?
To ‘Break the Slave Power’: Thaddeus Stevens, Land Confiscation, and the Politics of Reparations (American Political Thought 2021).
This article returns to the post–Civil War period to reconstruct Congressman Thaddeus Stevens’s political thought. Stevens argued that incorporating former slaves into republican society required a federal policy of land confiscation and redistribution in the South. According to the Republican congressman, taking land from the planter class, not just granting land to freed slaves, was a necessary component of any plan intended to break the slave power and inaugurate an interracial republic. My recovery of Stevens’s defense of land confiscation offers us critical purchase on contemporary demands for slave reparations. I compare the tenets of contemporary reparations discourse and Stevens’s efforts to form a true republic. Recovering Stevens’s bid orients us toward the potential uses and dangers of resurrecting a politics of Reconstruction premised on the active taking of material power from those who disproportionately wield it.