'America's racial politics have been shaped by an ongoing battle between reconstructionist and redemptionist America.' 📝 Peniel Joseph
W.E.B. Du Bois is perhaps best known for introducing the term “double consciousness” into the lexicon of the Black experience. The term described the duality of being a Black American—neither fully African nor completely American, an enduring “problem” to be fought over in times of war and wrestled with during times of peace. The duality at the heart of double-consciousness impacts the entire American project.
For Black America, Reconstruction remains a blues-inflected poem chronicling the perils and possibilities of Black humanity, democratic renewal, and the pursuit of citizenship and dignity amid the ruins of a world ravaged by racism, war, and violence. Du Bois’s work serves as a historical correction, political inspiration, and policy provocation. And the problems that gave rise to these debates, in truth, have never really ended.
When two Democrats won Georgia’s runoff elections on January 5, 2021, the party took a slim majority in the U.S. Senate. One of those victors,, became the first Black person from Georgia in American history to be elected senator. When he spoke, his words evoked the promise born from the height of the Reconstruction era, with its triumphant scenes and its hopes for Black power.
The left wing of the First Reconstruction era’s political spectrum, sometimes called Radical Republicans, believed in social equality as well as political rights. They sought economic justice and repair through the redistribution of land in hopes that this, alongside Black men’s suffrage, would provide a foundation for Black political power.
Redemptionists sought to reinscribe slavery’s power relations between Blacks and whites via racial terror, through Black Codes that disenfranchised Black voters, and by ending federal protection for Black citizenship. They sought to allow former Confederates to hold political office, while denying Black voting rights.
Redemptionists identified themselves as heroic defenders of a misunderstood South. In their telling, it was the South that was under assault, and it was their duty to keep power out of the hands of impudent Blacks, who they said were unprepared to perform the duties of citizenship in an intelligent manner, let alone serve as competent legislators. But redemptionists also prefigured contemporary racial gaslighting.