Reconstructing the future: Du Bois, racial pedagogy and the post-civil rights era

Abstract

This essay addresses the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois, as both scholar and activist, at a time when the university's civic mission is imperiled by corporatisation and racial backlash, access to its resources are increasingly predicated on whiteness and wealth, and the greater public good is financially and spiritually starved with every advance of American empire abroad. Focusing on Black Reconstruction, it elaborates in particular on the pedagogical implications of Du Bois's reading of the post-Reconstruction era for progressives caught in the contradictions of the current post-Civil Rights era. Drawing on Du Bois's insistence that education (both formal and informal) is central to the functioning of a nonrepressive and inclusive polity, the essay reflects on the current crisis of black educational access to quality schooling at all levels, as well as the relentless attacks on more public sites of pedagogy, within the context of neoliberal social and economic policies as well as the racist backlash against the civil rights gains of the 1960s. It addresses the degree to which engaged dialogue about the history and politics of racialised exclusion in the US and globally in the university have been derailed by the dictates of a particularly limp version of liberal multiculturalism and its allegiance to the privatised discourses of identity and difference. In so doing, it explores the role that educators might play in linking rigorous scholarship and critical pedagogy to progressive struggles for securing the very conditions for racial justice and political democracy.