  In Shelby’s view, Du Bois took African-Americans to be the bearers of a world-historical mission to perfect the ideals of American democracy. Du Bois endorsed black political solidarity, Shelby argues, as a temporary and, possibly, long-term strategy for establishing a multiracial, culturally pluralist American polity that embodied those ideals. Shelby follows Du Bois in maintaining that black political solidarity in the pursuit of a racial justice that is consonant with American democratic and liberal ideals requires a motivational foundation that unites self-interest, moral principle, and racial identification (Shelby, 2007, 6–7, 67, 87). 