The subject of race and citizenship is unfortunately a very contentious one in our society today, what with the passage of Proposition 187 in California in 1994, debates right now about whether immigrants-people who are not citizens but are here-are entitled to Welfare benefits, and questions about who really is a "normal American," to use a phrase which Newt Gingrich has popularized. But this is nothing new in American history.
We have all enjoyed an excellent dinner, and my job, as keynote speaker, is to leave you with some food for thought. This is not the same as dessert, which is supposed to be sweet and pleasing to the palate. Food for thought is rather intended to provoke, to challenge assumptions that may be comforting precisely because they shield us from unpalatable truths.
This special issue of Socialism and Democracy marks the centennial of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic, The Souls of Black Folk. At the same time, going beyond our coverage of the Reparations movement in S&D #31, it deepens our commitment to implementing a thoroughly multiracial vision of the goals evoked by the name of this journal. The close link that exists in principle between the struggle against racism and the struggle for socialism was well articulated by Du Bois himself.
Sam Anderson, Education Director at the Center for Law & Social Justice of Medgar Evers College (CUNY), is the author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners. He co-edited In Defense of Mumia and the forthcoming Reparations Reader. He is active in the Black Radical Congress, the Reparations Mobilization Coalition, and the Global Afrikan Congress.