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This essay argues that black Americans writing from outside or at the margins of the democratic polity shed important light on the nature of human dignity and on the political emotion that offers—to oneself and to others—the surest proof of the existence of such dignity: indignation. I focus in particular on four insights of this body of black American political thought: that the presumption of dignity is the basis on which citizenship is conferred, while its denial is the justification by which citizenship is withheld; that dignity’s existence within a person is vouchsafed most effectively by indignation, a flash of emotion that arises in response to the insult of its denial; that even though dignity feels woven into one’s innermost being, it is always vulnerable to social denial and therefore stands in need of social confirmation; that indignation can and should be transformed into a self-opposing disposition that resists complacency and seeks continual reconfiguration, or enlargement, of the demos and of its democratic theory.

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W. E. B. Du Bois was not in any obvious sense a political theorist and could be sharply critical of theories and theorizing. However, because his writings do not fit plainly within the canonical tradition of political thought, they can enrich, enlarge, and fundamentally transform the field. Over the course of his long career, Du Bois frequently changed his methods of analysis and his political positions, although he returned again and again to the question of race. For Du Bois, race was an intrinsic component of the social, historical, and political issues faced by the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereas other political theorists of the time were reluctant to treat race and racial injustice as fundamental components of the study of modern democratic life. Today, race is recognized as a pivotal element of both Western modernity as well as in the principles and practice of American democracy. As such, much of Du Bois’s work remains topical a century after it was written.

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