Berkley Center

In this book, Terrence Johnson uses the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois to examine the moral problem of blackness as it continues to reverberate in America today. Johnson uses the deep and spiritual writings of Du Bois to critique John Rawls's political liberalism, a dominant approach to politics that emphasizes legal rights and protections while attempting to bracket deeper questions of religious and spiritual importance. Johnson argues that this approach fails to account for the history of anti-black racism in the United States, and he uses Du Bois's writings and a searching analysis of history to examine how religion has traditionally played a core supporting role in the formation of anti-black bigotry.