It is fitting that in the same issue that we present a previously unpublished article by W. E. B. Du Bois and host a symposium reviewing new major works on his political philosophy, we also present major essays debating the contours of the color line in the twenty-first century. Immigration and a strong rightward movement in American society are rapidly remaking the demographic and political configuration of the color line in the United States. Several essays in this issue debate critical aspects of this reconfiguration such as the relative importance of cultural versus structural causes of continued racial disparities; the role, if any, that racialization plays in shaping the modern immigrant incorporation into U.S. society; and, the legacy of the Moynihan report. Complementing these essays is a symposium on two major new books that provide fresh takes on the philosophical and theoretical relevance of Du Bois's thought for our times. We are also proud, for the first time anywhere, to publish Du Bois's essay, “The Social Significance of Booker T. Washington,” with an accompanying analytical introduction by Robert Brown.

The Moynihan Report of 1965 will soon be fifty years old, and some social scientists now venerate it as a sterling application of social science data and analysis by the federal government. This author, who was directly involved in events connected with the release of the Report, does not agree; this article examines the shortcomings of the Report. I argue that Moynihan's analysis, which intended to investigate the ties between Black male unemployment and the Black family, actually devoted most of its attention to the high proportion of single-parent families in the poor Black population, treating it as one symptom of a “tangle of pathology” that stood in the way of this population's escape from joblessness and poverty. Today, the Report is being hailed as having predicted the current and still worsening state of the poor Black family. Moynihan's work is also being reinterpreted as an early application of cultural analysis, thereby further drawing attention away from the job-related issues which led Moynihan to undertake his study. Moynihan himself made significant contributions to antipoverty policy later in his career, but his Report does not deserve the worship it continues to receive.

This article argues that Americans operate with a concept and practice of political autonomy centered on a notion of “mastery,” which is inextricably linked to race, gender, and class hierarchy. I adopt Max Weber's concept of mastery and use it to broaden the construct of a Herrenvolk democracy beyond its traditional association with White supremacy. I then use this theoretical framework to illuminate the emergence of segregation in Atlanta between 1880 and 1910. This period marks a crucial transformation in the concept of race in the United States, as the paternalism of Southern agricultural relations is transposed by Southern Progressives into more urban and industrial settings. I conclude by raising the possibility that the concept of political autonomy currently operative in the United States shares important common ground with the ideological achievements of the Southern Progressives, confounding institutional attempts to foster citizen autonomy.

The Du Bois Review is pleased to publish, for the first time, this significant reflection on “the meaning of Booker T. Washington to America,” and in so doing highlight Du Bois's desire to see courage, rather than sacrifice, prevail in the face of injustice. This previously unpublished essay is among the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers housed in the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It was brought to our attention by Robert Brown, who provides an introductory essay including an analysis of the likely date the essay was penned. We present it to our readers with the permission of The David Graham Du Bois Trust.

The late Booker T. Washington may be considered in four aspects. First there can be no doubt that his chief significance lies in the fact that he cannot be considered simply as an individual but that he is so inextricably woven into the national and even world movements of his day that his death becomes historic. Again, most Colored men in America are simply “Colored.” They are submerged in a great undifferentiated group; they are not considered as individuals but are lumped together as a “race.” Mr. Washington was more than “Colored.” He was an American, and the comments upon his career tend continually to emphasize the fact that such a struggle upward against terrific odds, such indomitable persistence and versatility of expedient was peculiarly American. After Frederick Douglass, Mr. Washington was the next great exemplification and revelation of problems of race and labor in America, so significant as to go to the very core of our democracy; and finally, there is to consider Mr. Washington's own personality: the silent, watchful, cautious man, rugged, nervous, popular but unsocial, slow but tireless.

Political theory is catching up to Du Bois. More than a century after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1997), political theorists have begun to realize that “the problem of the color-line” (pp. 45, 61) is constitutive of modernity. That it has taken this long for political theorists to recognize what Du Bois saw so clearly more than a century ago reflects the field's all-too-frequent parochialism. At the same time, the field is home to dissenting voices which insist that we cannot understand modern politics without confronting the White supremacist character of the modern West.

Lawrie Balfour and Robert Gooding-Williams have given us powerful new works of scholarship on the political thought of W. E. B. Du Bois. Not only do these publications enrich the field of Du Bois scholarship, they exemplify the exciting possibilities at the intersection of political theory and race politics.

The two books that have occasioned this symposium represent efforts to research thoroughly, think rigorously, and argue honestly about complex and significant issues of race and ethnicity in America. There is much to be learned from them on many topics. I read them chiefly for insights about whether and how a defensibly democratic politics of egalitarian change can be achieved by, for, and with racial minorities in a country whose majorities, like most majorities, have long been reluctant to pursue policies that did not predominantly benefit themselves. I raise some challenges to the perspectives offered in these books, but only as an effort, kindred in aim if not achievement, to carry forward the work they have thus far so nobly advanced.

Lawrie Balfour and Robert Gooding-Williams have written superb books. Reading Du Bois's texts creatively and carefully, both treat Du Bois as a living political thinker, someone we can learn from and profitably argue with and whose thought is relevant to contemporary political theory. There is more in these books that I could praise and much in them that I agree with, but I will focus my remarks on areas of disagreement.

In the remarks that follow, I attempt to clarify and further to develop some of the key concepts and arguments that I set forth in In the Shadow of Du Bois (2009). Specifically, I respond to issues that Rogers Smith and Tommie Shelby address with regard to the relationship between elite and democratic politics; to questions that Smith and Cristina Beltrán pose with regard to my “no-foundations” analysis of Black politics; and to a worry Smith presents with regard to my effort to reorient the critique of Black poverty from social theories framed by a technical interest in normalizing the behavior of the ghetto poor to an emancipatory interest in fostering the radical reform of an oppressive social order. I begin with Smith's criticisms and then turn to Shelby's and Beltrán's essays.

What would it mean to treat W. E. B. Du Bois as a “living political thinker,” Tommie Shelby asks. The formulation of the question indicates one answer: acknowledging Du Bois's twofold legacy for political theory and philosophy. On the one hand, his body of work as a political theorist is rich and provocative enough that it ought to be, as Robert Gooding-Williams (2009) urges, the subject of serious inquiry in its own right. On the other hand, engaging Du Bois as a political theorist enables contemporary scholars to reflect on the political challenges of our own time, even when Du Bois offers answers we would not own for ourselves. Perhaps most crucially, taking Du Bois's work seriously requires a rigorous engagement with the past and an active refutation of declarations of a “postracial” age that belie yawning racial inequalities, the continuing devaluation of non-White lives, and the unredressed injuries—to American citizens, to the polity itself, and to women and men well beyond U.S. borders—of White supremacy. All of the participants in this symposium would, I think, endorse this view in its broadest strokes. But to inherit Du Bois as a political thinker is also to participate in an ongoing and often contentious conversation about race, democracy, and Du Bois himself. Accordingly, my comments will focus on two clusters of issues. The first is raised by Rogers Smith's and Tommie Shelby's vigorous disagreement with the idea of Black reparations that I explore in the second chapter of Democracy's Reconstruction. The second involves a set of unresolved tensions bequeathed by Du Bois and addressed in Gooding-Williams' extraordinary book and Cristina Beltrán's meditations on the Afro-modern political tradition and Latino politics today.

This article argues that African American hair is a political matter by examining the little-known role of state occupational licensing of African American hair care. By focusing on recent legal challenges and legislative battles over state regulation of hair-care provision for African Americans, the article traces state authorities' responses to struggles over market share between licensed, and often native-born, African American beauticians, and typically unlicensed, and often recent African immigrant, hair braiders. Hair braiders challenged state regulatory oversight by invoking racial deference claims, in which they argued that braiding was a “cultural practice” that should be exempt from state regulation. A statistical analysis of state regulatory decision making revealed that states varied widely in addressing the issue of African American hair care. While racial deference claims, in the form of legal cases, put pressure on states to exempt hair braiders from regulatory oversight, by and large, most states did not choose this path. For states that did choose to address the demands for market protection or market relief, the choices were mostly in the direction of enacting new regulations or actively incorporating hair braiders under existing regulations. Despite the invocation of racial deference claims, African American hair care was not freed from state oversight—state regulators became more flexible in their oversight of Black hair care rooted in their concerns over public safety as well as the demands from a variety of interest groups. The analysis reveals that when race/gender and state regulation intersect, traditional economic theories of occupational licensing are not sufficient; an intersectional approach can better explain policy outcomes.

Racial segregation has been a persistent feature of the American social landscape and a longstanding contributor to racial inequality, particularly between Blacks and Whites. Affirmative action policies have been used to address the systemic discrimination and attendant socioeconomic consequences to which African Americans have been subjected. Yet affirmative action has not been widely used in all domains in which segregation and systemic discrimination occurred. Although such policies have been adopted in the domains of employment and postsecondary education, few federal affirmative action programs have been used in housing. This is surprising given high levels of segregation across the metropolitan United States, as well as the stated integrative objectives of the U.S. Congress when it passed the Fair Housing Act of1968. To understand this puzzle, we use the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, a housing mobility effort of the Federal government and the Chicago Housing Authority that used explicit racial criteria, as a surrogate for affirmative action in housing more broadly. We conduct a comparative analysis of Gautreaux and affirmative action in college admissions using insights from applied political philosophy and sociology. By confronting Gautreaux with a more traditional affirmative action program, we are able to identify and compare the judicial, moral, and instrumental justifications for each, enabling us to draw conclusions about whether and how affirmative action can justifiably be used on a large scale to reduce neighborhood segregation, the possible forms it could take, and the difficulties it would face. We close with a discussion of the recent shift toward integration taken by the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration, its relationship to affirmative action, and its implications for declines in residential segregation in the United States.

In 2004, the United States elaborately “celebrated” the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The country's mass media acclaimed May 17 as the date of a great national achievement while paying scant attention to the present racial scene in education. Yet those who believed in and fought for the racial desegregation of the nation's public schools found the widespread “celebration” grossly overstated and at best premature. With effective opposition to school desegregation unrelenting during the entire past half century, with the U.S. Supreme Court continually narrowing Brown's scope, and with African American and Hispanic American children still largely attending segregated schools, the nation's unmitigated self-congratulatory stance seemed unwarranted.