History of Political Thought
American Political Thought
Democratic Theory
I am primarily interested in past political projects that aspired to remake economic relations and establish interracial equality. I am currently working on two book-length manuscripts that fit this broader goal. The first, Black Cooperative Democracy, reconstructs the thought of early twentieth century African American cooperative activists including Du Bois, George Schuyler, and Ella Baker. I revive their critique of capitalist practices as impediments to industrial democracy, tracking the collision of Black liberalism and European social democratic thought. 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.
Black Cooperative Democracy: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Making of an American Anti-Capitalist Tradition
In an unpublished article in 1946, W.E.B. Du Bois argued that thinkers had long mistaken “modern democracy as mainly political.” Against this popular error, Du Bois insisted that democracy also “must be economic” and promoted “consumers’ cooperatives”
as the surest way to realize its potential. Far from marking a marginal aspect of Du Bois’s thought, this cooperative commitment represented a topic of intense theoretical engagement for nearly five decades. Why did Du Bois promote Black cooperativism as a key strategy of liberatory politics? How does starting with his cooperative writings, transform how we understand his political vision and the political ideologies motivating Black politics in the U.S.?
Black Cooperative Democracy returns to the African American cooperative tradition in the early twentieth century by reconstructing the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois to show how a distinctive anti-capitalist political ideology emerged in Black communities. Recovering this tradition of thinking provides a theory of economic democratization that begins not with a struggle for equal political participation in the state, but instead with a reimagination of the everyday economic practices of exploited Americans. I assemble an archive of published and unpublished material produced by Black thinkers including Du Bois, George Schuyler, and Ella Baker to reconstruct the components of Black cooperative democracy. This historical exercise offers a new critique of racial capitalist ideology and a subsequent vision of democratization under conditions of political oppression.
The book shows that many African Americans in the 1920s and 30s did not assume that voting or protest were the hallmarks of an emancipatory politics. Black community members believed that their salvation could be achieved in the building and running of cooperative stores. This commitment to cooperative democracy reflected the intellectual labors of a broader social movement in the United States that harnessed Black frustration with racial capitalist development before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. I use the writings of well-known thinkers and more mundane paraphernalia like newspaper articles and pamphlets to explore the response of Black cooperative theorists to fundamental political questions of their time. Under conditions of racial segregation, how can racial minorities prevent perverse attachments to capitalism? Who constitutes the revolutionary subject? Can unionization efforts dismantle racial capitalist structures of domination? Does the end of cooperative revolution entail the sublimation of political contests? Black Cooperative Democracy argues that, in responding to each question, Black cooperative democrats refused liberal notions of the wealth accruing, profit-seeking individual all while challenging orthodox socialist ideas of revolution.
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Enacting a ‘Readjustment of Ideals’: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Cooperative Critique of Capitalism ( Political Theory 2025)
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
In my second book project, I revisit the African American demand for land during and after the Civil War. Recent scholarship in Indigenous studies has raised a question: how can marginalized groups claim the privileges of citizenship—particularly control of land—when those have been tools of domination?
My second project, Claiming Land, Remaking Citizenship, resurrects late nineteenth century African American conception of land. I reconstruct the ways that claiming land became a processes of conscripting Black claimants into ongoing structures of domination. Rather than subsume their demands into calls for national belonging, I show that an emerging African American conception of freedom figured citizenship as a practice of challenging the exclusiveness of land claims. That radical project had to be defeated to cement the liberal citizenship of the postwar period.
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.