Celena Simpson

“Of Ghosts and Ghostwriters” strikes me as a particularly ambitious and perhaps rebellious project. In it, Dr. Magubane engages in battles both external and internal, regarding the history of sociology, its relation to critical race theory (CRT), and the recent attacks on these scholarly fields from the political right. She argues that, in addition to being conflated and attacked by the far right, sociology of race and critical race theory share some misguided base assumptions: namely, that the US system of power is primarily a racial system, wherein racial groups are the primary, enduring units. She spends most of her paper grounding these limiting assumptions in a genealogy of sociology—and therefore CRT—rooted... Read More.

For a variety of reasons, W.E.B. Du Bois is often heralded as a (pro)feminist figure, and his work is taken up accordingly. This essay is an attempt to more critically engage this assumption through The Black Flame trilogy. In this paper, I make the argument that this work of historical fiction – and the role of women therein – exposes the masculinist structure of Du Bois's vision for racial uplift, wherein black women lack sufficient public agency. From this structure, I derive the conclusion that is disadvantageous to read Du Bois as embodying an exemplary anti-racist feminism.