Professor Gooding-Williams's paper, "Du Bois and 'The Souls of White
Folk'" is a study of W.E.B. Du Bois's moral psychology of white
supremacy. Du Bois means his moral psychology to serve two purposes.
The first is a social scientific explanation—specifically, the social
scientific explanation of the domination and exploitation of the world’s
darker peoples. The second is to articulate the Christian white
supremacist’s ideal conception of his life as a Christian, for it is in
virtue of this conception that the Christian white supremacist is
vulnerable to moral appeal.
Robert Gooding-Williams is the M. Moran Weston/Black
Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and Professor of
Philosophy and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at
Columbia University. He is the author of Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, 2001), Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (Routledge, 2005), and In The Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Harvard,
2009). Gooding-Williams was elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 2018 and was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies