Guy Mount in Black Perspectives:
Slaves freed themselves. With this majestic assertion in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois all but cemented Black Reconstruction as one of the most influential American history books of the twentieth century. At the time of its publication, it was widely denounced. Writing from the depths of the Great Depression, and amidst a burgeoning black communist internationalism, Black Reconstruction was Du Bois at his finest. By deftly applying classical Marxist analysis to a population so often overlooked by its orthodoxies, Du Bois’s general strike thesis emerged not only as a historical corrective, but as a stark critique of Western philosophy and modern academic inquiry itself. It brought together the study of class with the study of race and foreshadowed what we now call intersectionality. Yet, it also sat on the shelf for decades until, like so many great masterpieces, it was dusted off well after its creator’s death and celebrated only in Du Bois’s absence. As the great American poet/sometimes performance artist Kanye West reminds us: “people never get the flowers when they can still smell them.”
More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025 theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)
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In December 1999, around her 65th birthday, 
Coates’s The Message grapples with the question of whose stories get told, and how that forges our reality. As he writes halfway through: “Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.” Known for his searing critiques of racial injustice, he came to wider attention with a 2014 essay 
In early February 2020, China 
Self-expression is good, we tell ourselves, and it’s good to hear what others have to say. The more we’re able to converse, to share our thoughts, opinions, and experiences, the better we’ll understand one another and the more harmonious society will become. If communication is good, more communication must be better.
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Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955)
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With its emphasis on media’s formative role in a society’s development, “Minerva’s Owl” would come to be seen as a founding document — maybe the founding document — of the academic discipline of media studies that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1964, the celebrated media savant Marshall McLuhan, who like Innis was a professor at the University of Toronto, wrote that he saw his own recent book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, as “a footnote to the observations of Innis.” The distinguished American educator and media theorist James Carey called Innis’s work “the great achievement in communications on this continent.”
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Eric Kaufmann: Obviously you in your book, The Identity Trap, give a pretty good account of one route, I think, towards this, which is sort of the whole idea of strategic essentialism that came out of left-wing intellectual thought. I know yourself and Francis Fukuyama and Chris Rufo and others have sketched out its development out of essentially the post-Marxist left. What I try to do in my book, The Third Awokening, is to look at the more liberal humanitarian, if you like, prong of this, which runs through psychotherapy and gets us towards a kind of humanitarian extremism. And so I put a lot of emphasis on this idea of cranking the dial of humanitarianism.