This channel called The Read-In Series has decided to do a read-along of W. E. B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America on YouTube. To call such a project ambitious is an understatement, but since it is happening I have decided to follow it along with them and re-visit this massive work (I rarely reread any books these day--certainly not books of this length). I am a big fan of this book. The first episode was read by Phylicia Rashad for chapter 1 & Yvette Nicole Brown for chapter 2. Rashad did a masterful job as expected, but poor Ms. Brown was so nervous and rushing through the chapter that I had to put the playback speed on 0.75x to follow along with her. In any case, I like being able to revisit the work and I will give some thoughts on chapters here as I am able to follow-along.
Chapters 1 & 2 serve to set the scene of what is to come and what this book is partially about. That Du Bois begins this book before Reconstruction is a formality, but serves as his way to offer the fullest rebuking of the Dunning School that he was able to do. These two chapters--The Black Worker & The White Worker, respectively--also introduces us to the framework that Du Bois is analyzing this history. He is not using any sort of mythological sentimentality here, but he is relying on straight historical materialism to analyze this. I call this book Marxist-adjacent rather than simply Marxist, because as Du Bois shows in the chapter on white workers, the white labor movement in the USA never seriously contemplated working with black workers or fighting for the abolition of slavery--even when such abolition would be favorable to conditions of the white laborers themselves. White workers, regardless of class or geographic location, felt that they could either own slaves themselves or go west and keep black labor out of that territory. As we'll find out, even attempts by Karl Marx and the First International to get white workers to unionize with black workers after the Civil War fail and lead to whites-only anti-socialist groups like the AFL coming to power. Chapter 2 pretty-much tells you why Bernie Sanders can't win the Black Belt today: black people know that white Socialists have never truly had their backs when all was said and done. Black labor was trying at all manner to resist there fate, but it was hopeless in the South. Only as emigration of black people to the North started to stir the conscience of a small group of white people called Abolitionist, than some started to really consider the impossible idea of the ending of Slavery. I think the recasting this as a labor struggle that has race as the fundamental agent (i.e. the hardened belief by a majority of whites of an inherent inhumanity of black people) really expands the scope of this period and enables a vaster and much more profound story to be told. It restores the agency of black people in this story about black people and makes the actions taken by the different actors in this book more honest to the truth. Anyone who reads this will discover quite soon why W. E. B. Du Bois is America's greatest scholar: his merging of scholarship and poetics into prefect harmony is something to behold. Returning to this book after the 2020 American Athletic Strikes and their aftermath, the lessons of this book are critically present.
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