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What Counts as a Collective Gift? Culture and Value in Du Bois’ The Gift of Black Folk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2023

Chike Jeffers
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Abstract

In The Conservation of Races, Du Bois advocates that African Americans hold on to their distinctiveness as members of the black race because this enables them to participate in a cosmopolitan process of cultural exchange in which different races collectively advance human civilization by means of different contributions. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Tommie Shelby have criticized the position that Du Bois expresses in that essay as a problematic form of racial essentialism. This article investigates how Du Bois’ 1924 book The Gift of Black Folk escapes or fails to escape that criticism. It is easy to worry that the diversity of what Du Bois in this book is willing to treat as a black contribution to the development of America pushes us from the problem of essentialism to the other extreme: a lack of any conceptual constraints whatsoever on what can count as a black gift. I will argue that recognizing the cultivation of historical memory as a form of cultural activity is key to understanding the concept's unity.

Type
Paper
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 93: Expanding Horizons , May 2023 , pp. 99 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2023

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References

Appiah, Anthony, ‘The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 21–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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