Title: The study of black politics and the practice of black politics: their historical relation and evolution
Abstract: The study of black politics as an academic enterprise evolved within the terms of the segregation era regime, which was congealing around a principle of elite-brokerage as the common sense form of black political activity roughly by the 1920s. (Alain Locke's 1925 anthology, The New Negro, reflected the sensibility of this evolving politics and trumpeted it, and its ideological underpinnings, as a new consensus within the black opinion-leading strata.) I argue here that the academic subfield's formation in the context of that political common sense has been consequential because the discourses shaping academic inquiry have naturalized the premises and worldview of the Jim Crow era black political regime. To that extent, the study of black politics has been an agent in legitimizing and reproducing the regime's presumptions and the politics flowing from them, even into the present, when whatever efficacy it may have had, as explanation or as practice, is exhausted.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-09-09
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 8
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