Moffet Lecture: Du Bois and "The Souls of White Folk"

Robert Gooding-Williams (Columbia University) will present the lecture: “Du Bois and ‘The Souls of White Folk’” 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.