Du Bois located America’s revolutionary failures in its founding contradictions.

Evidence

Du Bois, however, was concerned for why these things had become true for American society in the 1930s. He was interested in determining how it was possible that American culture and its institutions had become so estranged from the democratic ideal with which they had so long been structurally and ideologically identified. Moreover, how was it possible that American socialists could be so ill-equipped to deal with the Black worker, the Black community, and the social relations of Black people? How had the Black elite become wedded ideologically to capitalism and grown alienated and contemptuous of the Black masses? Why was twentieth-century American revolutionary theory so ill-conceived, the revolutionary movement unrecognizable, and revolutionary change and transformation a matter of contingency rather than praxis? He believed the answers to these questions resided in the history of the Republic. More specifically, he pursued them in the contradictions of that history. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 926

Categorization

• XREF: Du Bois’s quest for answers in the Republic’s contradictions mirrors Robinson’s own method in Black Marxism of grounding the tradition in origin history.