Culture and Value in Du Bois’ The Gift of Black Folk with Chike Jeffers

In his famous 1897 essay, “The Conservation of Races”, Du Bois advocated that African Americans hold on to their distinctiveness as members of the black race because this enables them to participate in a cosmopolitan process of cultural exchange in which different races collectively advance human civilization by means of different contributions. Philosophers like Kwame Anthony Appiah and Tommie Shelby have criticised the position that Du Bois expresses in that essay as a problematic form of racial essentialism. Chike Jeffers explores how Du Bois' 1924 book "The Gift of Black Folk" escapes or fails to escape that criticism. He argues that recognising the cultivation of historical memory as a form of cultural activity is key to understanding the concept's unity. 

Chike Jeffers is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie university. He is the co-presenter of the Africana philosophy editions of the "History of Philosophy without Any Gaps" podcast and two forthcoming books based on it. He is also the co-author of "What is Race? Four Philosophical Views", and editor of "Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy".