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Ella Myers looks at W.E.B. Du Bois's conceptualization of American whiteness to argue that his writings offer powerful insights into the rewards that white identity has offered to Americans, both in the past and present. Focusing on three key motifs found in his work - wage, pleasure, dominion - Myers shows that to Du Bois, whiteness is not one thing, but many. Highlighting how Du Bois can help us recognize contemporary whiteness as a multifaceted formation, this book explores the pressing contemporary issue of what it means to be white through the lens developed by a major Black thinker.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction Tracing the Ethical Turn -- Chapter one Crafting a Democratic Subject? -- Chapter two Levinasian Ethics, Charity, and Democracy -- Chapter three The Democratic Ethics of Care for Worldly Things -- Chapter Four Partisanship for the World -- Epilogue Self/Other/World -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

W.E.B. Du Bois's reading of whiteness as a "public and psychological wage" is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois's account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, "modern" whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward "darker peoples" in particular. This "title to the universe" is part of chattel slavery's uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of "propertized human life" endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this "title" is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent "colonial aggrandizement" worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the "wage" but is not reducible to it.

AbstractThe relationship between pluralism and liberalism has been at the center of recent considerations of Isaiah Berlin's thought. In particular, liberal theorists have asked whether the value pluralism Berlin endorses actually undermines his liberalism. A common interpretive approach resolves this problem by presenting Berlin's pluralism as "limited" rather than "radical," and therefore capable of serving as a moral foundation authorizing liberalism. I challenge this re-construction of Berlin's work, arguing that such readings are premised on a conception of judgment Berlin does not share. While many of his readers believe that a judgment on behalf of liberalism requires the identification of a transcontextual ground, Berlin invites us to see human judgment as a meaningful practice that occurs in the absence of absolutes yet does not simply mirror local norms. Berlin's defense of liberalism models this kind of judgment—a judgment that is neither mandated, nor ruled out, by pluralism.