After the overthrow of Jim Crow and the reelection of our first Black president, how should we conceptualize the tasks of a racially progressive politics in the United States? I address this question through (1) the lens of recent philosophical work on the relation between narrative and the justification of political hope and (2) a comparison of two autobiographies, Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn. In light of this comparison, the paper also evaluates some recent contributions to the American Political Science subfield of American Political Development.

In the remarks that follow, I attempt to clarify and further to develop some of the key concepts and arguments that I set forth in In the Shadow of Du Bois (2009). Specifically, I respond to issues that Rogers Smith and Tommie Shelby address with regard to the relationship between elite and democratic politics; to questions that Smith and Cristina Beltrán pose with regard to my “no-foundations” analysis of Black politics; and to a worry Smith presents with regard to my effort to reorient the critique of Black poverty from social theories framed by a technical interest in normalizing the behavior of the ghetto poor to an emancipatory interest in fostering the radical reform of an oppressive social order. I begin with Smith's criticisms and then turn to Shelby's and Beltrán's essays.

This is a timely, engaging, and illuminating study of Black Nationalism. The book's “fundamental project,” Melanye T. Price writes, “is to systematically understand individual Black Nationalism adherence among African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era” (p. 60). Black Nationalism has a long history in African American politics, but with the demise of Jim Crow and the election of our first black president, we may reasonably wonder whether ordinary African American citizens are disposed to endorse it. Price's book is important because it addresses this question head-on, defending the thesis that a renewal of Black Nationalism remains a viable possibility in post-Obama America.

In In the Shadow of Du Bois, I argue that Du Bois' early political thought, as mainly expressed in The Souls of Black Folk, turns on three critical claims: 1) that African American politics is a practice of group leadership—thus, a practice of group rule, or governance, for Du Bois interprets leadership as a form of rule, or governance; 2) that African American politics should take the form of political expressivism, such that it expresses the spiritual identity of the black folk; and 3) that African American struggles to counter white supremacy are best understood as struggles against social exclusion. In her review of In the Shadow, Melanye Price notes that the “book emphasizes” claims 1 and 2, yet neglects to discuss its treatment of 3, which is no less critical to the book's argument and to which I will return.

Iris' written work has been very widely admired; she has obviously helped shape the field of democratic political theory; she has deeply influenced students. The discussion of this work will go on in books and articles until her ideas have been fully absorbed. Here I will say a little about my particular experience of her collegiality. I was Iris' junior colleague at Chicago for six years. I met Iris eight years ago this week, under a portico outside a large hotel like the one in which you are all gathered, not too long after I had first read Democracy and Difference and shortly before my first APSA paper presentation on, as it happened, deliberative democracy. I had no way of knowing then how directly and deeply she would affect my intellectual life. She was already for me a standard, even before I met her. But how that fact deepened over time is what I want to render here.