In In the Shadow of Du Bois, I argue that Du Bois' early political thought, as mainly expressed in The Souls of Black Folk, turns on three critical claims: 1) that African American politics is a practice of group leadership—thus, a practice of group rule, or governance, for Du Bois interprets leadership as a form of rule, or governance; 2) that African American politics should take the form of political expressivism, such that it expresses the spiritual identity of the black folk; and 3) that African American struggles to counter white supremacy are best understood as struggles against social exclusion. In her review of In the Shadow, Melanye Price notes that the “book emphasizes” claims 1 and 2, yet neglects to discuss its treatment of 3, which is no less critical to the book's argument and to which I will return.

Price reasonably relates my analysis of the first claim to Du Bois's idea of a talented tenth, but the innovative and perhaps controversial thesis I defend is that Du Bois conceptualizes black politics as black leadership and black leadership as a practice of rule, regardless of whether black leaders belong to the talented tenth. And she rightly ties the second claim to the question of accountability, for Du Bois' embrace of the expressivist thesis that black political leadership must manifest the collective, spiritual identity of the black folk to be effective and legitimate reflects his rejection of a democratic model of political legitimacy, according to which leaders ought to take their bearings from the criticism of the led. Because Du Bois holds that a central aim of black political leaders should be to counter white supremacy by combating the backwardness that helps to exclude the masses they lead from the normative order that is modern civilization (claim 3), it would be self-defeating for these leaders to determine their actions on the basis of the masses' criticism, for that criticism would reflect the very backwardness the leaders sought to combat. I have not the space here to address the thoughtful questions Price raises regarding the bearing of my discussions of expressivism and accountability on contemporary black electoral politics, except to say that my thinking about these matters broadly resonates with much of what Adolph Reed writes about them in Stirrings in the Jug (1999).

A critical part of the argument of Shadow that Price fails to mention is its detailed discussion of Frederick Douglass' My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Specifically, Chapter 5 of Shadow “steps back” from Souls in order to challenge the received view that Du Bois' early political thought follows in Douglass' path, and to bring to light some possibilities for theorizing contemporary black politics that the long shadow of Du Bois' influence has tended to obscure. Douglass, I argue, offers us a model of black politics that highlights action-in-concert rather than rule; that is nonexpressivist while remaining race conscious; and that interprets the fight against white supremacy less as a struggle for inclusion and assimilation than as aiming radically to reconstruct the polity as a whole. And, indeed, it is precisely by way of Douglass' insights that I engage the contemporary scholars Price mentions (e.g., Joy James, Adolph Reed, Paul Gilroy, Tommie Shelby, Cathy Cohen, Eddie Glaude, and William Julius Wilson). Price wonders whether I would place today's black academics in the talented tenth. A crucial Douglass-inspired aim of Shadow is to suggest an approach to black politics that is less concerned with identifying talented academics who could satisfy Du Bois' expectations than with foregrounding a range of questions regarding the possibility of strengthening and renewing black publics and counterpublics.