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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
W.E.B. Du Bois spent many decades fighting to ensure that African Americans could claim their place as full citizens and thereby fulfill the deeply compromised ideals of American democracy. Yet he died in Africa, having apparently given up on the United States.
In this tour-de-force, Elvira Basevich examines this paradox by tracing the development of his life and thought and the relevance of his legacy to our troubled age. She adroitly analyses the main concepts that inform Du Bois’s critique of American democracy, such as the color line and double consciousness, before examining how these concepts might inform our understanding of contemporary struggles, from Black Lives Matter to the campaign for reparations for slavery. She stresses the continuity in Du Bois’s thought, from his early writings to his later embrace of self-segregation and Pan-Africanism, while not shying away from assessing the challenging implications of his later work.
This wonderful book vindicates the power of Du Bois’s thought to help transform a stubbornly unjust world. It is essential reading for racial justice activists as well as students of African American philosophy and political thought.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Du Bois Among Us: A Contemporary, A Voice from the Past
Notes
Part I Inclusion
1 Du Bois and the Black Lives Matter Movement: Thinking with Du Bois about Anti-Racist Struggle Today
The black lives lost
Trust: do you see what I see?
Lifting the veil: de-colonizing the white moral imagination
Mourning and moral faith
Notes
2 Student Days, 1885–1895: Between Nashville, Cambridge, and Berlin
Du Bois’s childhood, formative experiences, and student days
Du Bois’s early political thought
A Kantian normative scheme in Du Bois’s political thought
A different kind of ideal theory? Du Bois’s ideal of civic enfranchisement and the inclusion/ domination paradigm
Notes
3 The Emergence of a Black Public Intellectual: Du Bois’s Philosophy of Social Science and Race (1894–1910)
The unhesitating sociologist (1894–1911)
Du Bois’s philosophy of social sciences
Du Bois’s philosophy of race: reconsidering racialism
Notes
Part II Self-Assertion
4 Courting Controversy: Du Bois on Political Rule and Educated “Elites”
Washington–Du Bois debate
The role of the “talented tenth”
The politics of leadership and desegregation in Long Island, New York
Notes
5 A Broken Promise: On Hegel, Second Slavery, and the Ideal of Civic Enfranchisement (1910–1934)
Du Bois in Harlem
Second slavery and democratic theory
American Sittlichkeit, or the modern state in concreto
Public reason in the circle of citizenship: on the self-conscious development of institutional rationality
Radical Reconstruction (1865–77): on the self-conscious development of institutional rationality in the postbellum United States
Why Du Bois is neither an elitist nor an assimilationist
The contemporary implications of a “second slavery”
Notes
6 Du Bois on Sex, Gender, and Public Childcare
The Du Bois household
Du Bois and the women’s suffrage movement
Right to motherhood outside the nuclear family
The black church and women as civic leaders behind the color line
Childcare: actualizing the value of the civic equality of black women
Notes
Part III Despair
7 Du Bois on Self-Segregation and Self-Respect: A Liberalism Undone? (1934–1951)
Du Bois’s black nationalism and Marxism: economic grounds for voluntary self-segregation
A closer look at double consciousness as an effect of the color line
An orthodox liberal approach: Kant on self-respect
Double consciousness reconsidered: Du Bois’s defense of black self-segregation as black self-respect
Du Bois’s reservation about the desegregation of schools
Contemporary implications: the politics of self-segregation today
Notes
Conclusion: The Passage into Exile: The Return Home Away from Home (1951–1963)
The Passage into Exile: The Return Home Away from Home (1951–1963)
Du Bois’s life, scholarship, and activism in his last decade (1951–1963)
Between domestic justice and cosmopolitanism: the pan-African movement in the black diaspora
After exile: Du Bois’s legacy today
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Du Bois Among Us: A Contemporary, A Voice from the Past
Begin Reading
Conclusion: The Passage into Exile: The Return Home Away from Home (1951–1963)
Index
End User License Agreement
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Black Lives series
Elvira Basevich, W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois
The Lost and the Found
Elvira Basevich
polity
Copyright © Elvira Basevich 2021
The right of Elvira Basevich to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3575-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Basevich, Elvira, author.Title: W.E.B. Du Bois : the lost and the found / Elvira Basevich.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Series: Black lives | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A totally fresh account of Du Bois and why his life and legacy remain as vital as ever.”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020008754 (print) | LCCN 2020008755 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509535736 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509535743 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509535750 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. | Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963--Criticism and interpretation. | African Americans--Biography. | African American authors--Biography. | African American civil rights workers--Biography. | Civil rights workers--United States--Biography. | African Americans--Civil rights--History.Classification: LCC E185.97.D73 B367 2020 (print) | LCC E185.97.D73 (ebook) | DDC 323.092 [B]--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008754LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008755
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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for my teachers
Acknowledgments
Sections of chapters 2 and 6 have appeared in “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Critique of American Democracy in the Jim Crow Era: On the Limitations of Rawls and Honneth,” Journal of Political Philosophy 27(3) (2019): 318–40.
Sections of chapter 5 have appeared in “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Critique of Radical Reconstruction (1865–77): A Hegelian Approach to American Modernity,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 45(2) (2018): 168–85.
My warmest thanks to the following individuals who, at one point or another, provided the inspiration, support, and encouragement critical to the successful completion of this project: Linda M. Alcoff, Lawrie Balfour, Nelli Basevich (1917–2017), Rosa Basevich, Eric Edmond Bayruns Garcia, Lawrence Blum, Julia Davies, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Sally Haslanger, Adam Hosein, Chike Jeffers, Serene Khader, Frank M. Kirkland, Pauline Kleingeld, José J. Mendoza, Charles W. Mills, Jennifer Morton, George Owers, Alice Pinheiro-Walla, Isaac A. Reed, Melvin L. Rogers, Maureen Ritchey, Tommie Shelby, Inés Valdez, Alex Zamalin, and the anonymous reviewers for the press, especially Review #3.
IntroductionDu Bois Among Us: A Contemporary, A Voice from the Past
In a tape-recorded conversation with Margaret Mead in 1971, James Baldwin described the problem of racism in the United States: “So that’s what makes it all so hysterical, so unwieldy and so completely irretrievable. Reason cannot reach it. It is as though some great, great, great wound is in the whole body, and no one dares to operate: to close it, to examine it, to stitch it.”1 Baldwin discerned racism as an open wound that spans “the whole body” of the republic. Poets, philosophers, and social scientists struggle to explain its stubborn bloodletting rituals; like a chant, it has no clear beginning or end, pervading the legal and social conventions of our past and reaching out to cloud our future. In Between the World and Me, a spellbinding reckoning with white Americans’ complicity in white supremacy, Ta-Nehisi Coates remarks that racism has left him wounded, unable to console his young son in the face of perpetual loss.2 “I can only say what I saw, what I felt,” writes Coates. “There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound.”3 If one were to place a stone or a flower at every tree, church basement, stairwell, or dark stretch of road where a person of color has lost their body and left there a wound still painful to touch, a cemetery could overlie the entire geography of North America. Marx had once warned of the specter of communism haunting Europe, whereas actual ghosts haunt the United States.4
In his characterization of American racism, Baldwin invoked two notions that, at first blush, appear to stand in opposition. He observed that reason “cannot reach it” and yet the “wound” remains open because “no one dares to operate: to close it, to examine it, to stitch it.” Reason is both powerless against racism and an indispensable tool to combat it. And so one is left wondering if it is possible to mend the wound using the power of reason in some broad sense, employing persuasion, imagination, and fact-based arguments. The long history of racial violence and terror might suggest that racism is too resilient to crumble under public scrutiny or government intervention, however well intentioned. And yet Baldwin maintained that one must nevertheless “dare” to “close [the wound], examine it, stitch it.” He thus asked his reader to redress the evil of racism. In doing so, we realize that racism, like all evil, as Hannah Arendt had put it, is “banal”; that is, it is a social phenomenon that, like any social phenomenon, originates in the human will and is therefore capable of being rooted from the world, however monstrous its proportions and stranglehold on institutions. What people have willed into existence, including a force as recalcitrant as white supremacy, by the same token can be willed out of existence. Racism is not a random and unstoppable event in the natural world, like an earthquake or the death of a star. To be sure, the fight against it must stretch the boundaries of the moral imagination, drawing on cultural and spiritual resources that are often overlooked as inspirations for democratic agency. The process must also support the transformation of major social and political institutions. But the prospect of a just world, nevertheless, remains viable. The question is only how and when to build it.5
The driving question in W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings as a whole – a question that also inspired Africana philosophers from Frederick Douglass to James Baldwin – was the following: Can reason close the wound of racism that spans the whole body of the republic; and if reason cannot reach it, how else might it be closed? Africana philosophers do not all share the same optimism about finding solutions to anti-black racism.6 But Du Bois had faith in reason – a kind of moral attitude of sustained hope for a better world – that the wound of racism can close and heal, even if it will leave an irremovable scar on the US republic and the world.
Though we cannot imagine that we can go back to a world untouched by racism, we have a moral obligation to figure out how to repair the world we have inherited, to put the ghosts of the dead to rest. The conviction that our profoundly nonideal world is reparable, I believe, is the conviction that inspired W. E. B. Du Bois’s life and work. In his career as an academic, writer, and activist, this conviction motivated him to experiment with a great variety of methods for stitching shut the wound that racism has left on the body of the US republic and on the world. From the scientific method to literature and the arts, Du Bois dedicated his life to theorizing new approaches to anti-racist critique. In my mind, his originality and willingness to adopt new methods sets him apart from most political theorists. His methodological experimentation is perhaps why his thought is both so exciting and so challenging to reconstruct using general philosophical principles.
With the aim of presenting some of the principal methods Du Bois developed to combat anti-black racism and to build a more just world, this book provides an account of the life, activism, and scholarship of W. E. B. Du Bois. In a storied and prolific life, Du Bois’s accomplishments were considerable and wide-ranging. He is recognized in the United States and around the world as an influential civil rights leader of the twentieth century. He co-founded in 1910 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was the editor of The Crisis (1910–34), the official magazine of the NAACP, widely circulated in the segregated black community during the Jim Crow era. What is more, as a social scientist, he pioneered empirical methods to study black neighborhoods, founding modern “scientific” sociology.7 His spellbinding The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, is a foundational text of Africana philosophy and African-American arts and letters. During his lifetime, he adopted liberal, Marxian, pan-African, and black nationalist frameworks to fight anti-black racism; and he published poems, short stories, and novels, and was involved in the Harlem Renaissance to use the arts to enhance the moral literacy of the white-controlled republic about racial matters. The characters who people his creative writings move through an uncertain world, burdened with slavery and segregation, wondering if it is still reasonable to hope for a better world in the aftermath of so much suffering.
In this book, I take the view that Du Bois is a modern political philosopher for whom the idea of basic civil and political rights for all, as well as the ideal of racial inclusion in the political, social, and economic spheres, is an indispensable basis for combating anti-black racism and for achieving racial justice. My presentation of Du Bois’s thought, in part, builds on and puts pressure on the noted philosopher Charles W. Mills’s recent argument that Du Bois is a “black radical liberal” who aimed to realize the public values of freedom and equality for all in order to welcome black and brown people, refugees, and immigrants into a reconstituted democratic polity.8 Mills maintains that, for Du Bois, the process of advancing true freedom and equality for all requires a radical reorganization of modern American society from the point of view of historically excluded groups. Mills thus offers a theoretical exposition of Du Bois’s original claim that a color line draws a “veil” over communities of color by withdrawing respect and esteem from black and brown people.9 The readiness or otherwise of the American public to dismantle the color line reflects whether or not the republic is truly “modern” – that is, free and equal for all persons regardless of race. As Du Bois put it, “the advance of all depends increasingly on the advance of each,” such that respecting and esteeming historically excluded groups is instrumental for the development of American modernity.10 I flesh out Mills’s interpretation of Du Bois by looking at the breadth of Du Bois’s writings and activism, and present Du Bois’s changing positions as broadly consistent with a “radical” political liberalism. The challenge, of course, would be to show what Du Bois packed into liberalism to make it “radical” and which liberal ideals are valuable in the first place. Christopher Lebron provides an elegant definition about what it means to be a “radical,” one that complements Mills’s view and on which this book elaborates: “Radicalism is the imagination and will to think and act outside the bounds of the normally acceptable.”11 Rethinking the bounds of the normally acceptable in social, economic, and political life is the heart of Du Bois’s political project for reconstituting the US polity.
In this book, I introduce three themes that inform Du Bois’s critique of American democracy. These themes characterize his political liberalism and map some of its radical potential: (1) inclusion, (2) self-assertion, and (3) despair. In the beginning of his professional life (late 1890s–1934), Du Bois advocated the civic enfranchisement of African Americans as American citizens, a principle that is the hallmark of his political liberalism. By the early 1930s, he continued to assert that African Americans must become equal participants in modern American life, but grew skeptical about the white public’s readiness to respect and esteem people of color. As a consequence, to the shock of the NAACP, he began to defend voluntary black self-segregation in order to shore up black civil and economic standing during the Jim Crow era. With the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s, Du Bois was prosecuted by the US Justice Department and this marked the beginning of a period of something like despair. It was not, however, a time of his intellectual decline and unproductivity. The US federal government accused him of acting as a foreign agent for the Soviet Union because of his activism for world peace. He later shared: “I have faced during my life many unpleasant experiences: the growl of a mob; the personal threat of murder; the scowling distaste of an audience. But nothing has so cowed me as that day, November 8, 1951, when I took my seat in a Washington courtroom as an indicted criminal.”12 Although he avoided jail time, he was blacklisted and slid into poverty. He had confronted – time and again – the color line and had dedicated his life to fighting against it, only to be attacked by the state and abandoned by lifelong friends and allies. Like Socrates, he was rejected by the polity for whose soul he had so passionately fought. His prosecution ultimately drove him into exile under the patronage of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah (in office 1960–66). Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963, the night before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous “I have a dream” speech.
The themes of inclusion, self-assertion, and despair that I explore here do not exhaust the range of plausible interpretations of Du Bois’s thought. Rather, on my view, they provide a helpful lens for establishing his unique place in modern political philosophy and the contemporary significance of his critique of American democracy. For example, in focusing on the ideal of civic enfranchisement, we can ask whether the US federal government could be a vehicle for racial justice in spite of its sustained attack on those who criticize it and its history of white supremacy. Though Du Bois held on to the emancipatory potential of the ideal of a racially inclusive polity, some of the questions that his political liberalism raises for us today include: Does the Trump presidency spell the decisive end of appeals to the government for racial justice? Or, on the contrary, does the ascendancy of white power movements confirm the importance of interracial grassroots movements to seize local, state, and federal power? Additionally, what role might black solidarity and self-segregation continue to play in democratic politics? Felony disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and the suppression of voter rights remain destructive vehicles for disenfranchising communities of color; and the escalating attacks on and the criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers from Central and South America and the Caribbean illustrate that racial whiteness is still taken to be a marker of Americanness. It appears as if with each step forward the republic takes two steps back. The urgency of the questions above shows why Du Bois remains relevant in the struggle for justice today. For his work showcases how and why race defines who is to be considered a legitimate member of the American social fabric and what rights and resources political membership should entail.
Some might object to a presentation of Du Bois as centrally focused on theorizing domestic justice in the United States. By foregrounding the US domestic context for most of this book, I do not mean to suggest that his political thought is exhausted by the ideal of civic enfranchisement. Neither do I believe that a focus on domestic justice bars thinking with Du Bois about cosmopolitanism and global justice or grassroots social movements in other countries. The Du Bois scholars Chike Jeffers and Inés Valdez offer rich analyses that extend the promise of Du Bois’s cosmopolitanism with respect to his philosophy of race and pan-Africanism, respectively.13 Juliet Hooker examines the influence of Latinx political theory on Du Bois, challenging assumptions about the role of the global south in his intellectual development.14 To be sure, there is much to say about the intersection between domestic and cosmopolitan justice, as well as about the influence of Latinx and indigenous liberation movements on his theorization of the African-American struggle for emancipation. That is to say, Du Bois’s political thought raises many rich avenues that I will not be able to pursue here. However, I do not take his critique of American democracy to foreclose other important lines for thinking with him about justice and democracy. Instead, I assume that his political thought consists of an interlocking system of concepts and principles that fashion a comprehensive, broadly liberal framework for theorizing global and domestic justice. To illuminate a mere element of this system is not to banish the remaining conceptual architecture to the dark.
One might also object to presenting Du Bois in the context of modern political philosophy or to my emphasis on his political liberalism. In providing a philosophical reconstruction of Du Bois’s critique of American democracy, I establish, among other notable accomplishments, his contributions to modern political philosophy. I build bridges between Du Bois and major figures in the history of philosophy, including Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. My aim is neither to canonize Du Bois in order to prove that he is a formidable political philosopher nor to chastise and chuck central philosophical figures for neglecting the problem of race and racism in general and of Du Bois in particular. Yet where racial violence abounds, and a nation still struggles to be free, it is instructive to see why more mainstream philosophical schools struggle to make sense of phenomena like the color line and double consciousness; and I believe that it is worth the effort to show their limitations. What is more, even in his so-called “late” period when Du Bois read Marx more closely, his major published works confirm that he continued to share some basic ideals with modern political philosophy, such as a commitment to civil and political rights and representational democracy; to be sure, he also experimented with political strategies and developed a critique of empire, colonialism, and global racial capitalism.15 Even if political liberalism does not exhaust the richness of the Duboisian framework, it is nevertheless indispensable to it.16 However, unlike most modern political philosophers, Du Bois concentrated on theorizing and tackling white supremacy, which he considered to be a defining obstacle to the advance of modernity.
Finally, I would like to briefly comment on my decisions regarding the structure of the book, as well as my personal motivation for writing it. The book has a rough chronological structure, though some chapters treat individual themes, such as Du Bois and the Black Lives Matter movement and his feminist thought, which incorporate different parts of his career and life. The second chapter opens with the birth of Du Bois and the conclusion of the book ends with his death. Most chapters begin with a brief biographical statement about the particular stage of Du Bois’s life where we find him, where he was living and working, and his vision of political struggle at that point in his career, drawing in particular on D. L. Lewis’s and Manning Marable’s exquisite biographies of Du Bois. As a man who described himself as “bone of the bone” and “flesh of the flesh” of the people living and striving behind the color line, Du Bois noted that the “veil” too fell over his own life and that of his family.17 His life provides some insight into his political thought, as he often reflected on his personal experiences to chart new directions in his research and activism. I therefore surmised that it would be helpful to include biographical information in an overview of his life and work. The inclusion of biographical information also meets the objective of the Black Lives series to represent the singular lives of powerful and neglected black thinkers.
I take the subtitle of the book, The Lost and the Found, from the dedication that Du Bois wrote to his children in The Souls of Black Folk: “To Burghardt and Yolande, The Lost and the Found.” Du Bois’s firstborn son, Burghardt, died from diphtheria in Atlanta in 1899, “The Lost.” “I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness in its train.”18 A daughter, Yolande, was born the following year, “The Found.” The Du Bois family, however, never fully recovered from the loss of their firstborn. In chapter 11 of Souls, “On the Passing of the Firstborn,” Du Bois invites his reader to mourn the loss of his toddler with him, to join his family in its grief. Mourning is a sign of respect that is often denied to black children; and the loss of black life hardly bereaves a white-controlled world. The subtitle of the book is also a comment on the reception of Du Bois in academia and the American public. To suggest that Du Bois is the lost and the found is not just to foreground his life, work, and experience of the twentieth century. It is a call for the formation of new habits of judgment that realize his vision of a racially pluralistic democracy. In that sense, to “find” Du Bois is to learn to respect and esteem historically excluded groups and to move through the world from their perspective.
I would like to conclude my introduction with a brief note about my interest in Du Bois. As a white woman, I am often asked by well-meaning people for an “origin story,” so to speak, explaining my interest in a black philosopher. I doubt my research would inspire as many calls for an explanation if it were limited to the study of Kant, Hegel, and analytic political philosophy. I reject the suggestion that a scholarly interest in Du Bois deviates from established norms; if this remains the widespread perception, then every new book on Du Bois must make a claim to “finding” him anew. Absurdly, Du Bois’s prodigious writings would remain perpetually “lost,” in spite of a growing body of Du Bois scholarship.
Yet it would be naive to ignore the connection between identity and the development of intellectual interests, though, on my view, family background and racial identity ultimately explain little. My family arrived in the United States as asylum seekers from the former Soviet Union. I grew up in a diverse immigrant community in south Brooklyn and remember Clinton’s welfare reform of the 1990s not as a newspaper headline but through the gradual disappearance of my favorite breakfast items on the kitchen table. Because my parents did not speak English well, I was often the intermediary between public schoolteachers, welfare administrators, and census workers, translating my parents’ fears and insecurity into a moral claim before the federal government. I felt like David slinging stones at Goliath, inserting myself and my family before a state apparatus that at any moment could leave us adrift or quash us. I struggled to explain on what basis anyone had any responsibility towards us – in what way were we part of a greater whole? The question preoccupied me, especially given the radical contingency of our being here in the first place. Why was our desperate need reason enough for someone to help?
In my philosophical studies, I focused on how social identity – especially racial identity – amplifies or mitigates a community’s vulnerability to the excess of state power or the withdrawal of state resources. Whether one even has public standing to make a formal claim for rights, resources, and legal protection is often a reflection of one’s position in a racial hierarchy. In a philosophy canon dominated by whites, I was fortunate to have teachers who turned my attention to Du Bois to help me theorize the influence of race on the organization of polities and inspired me to contribute to Du Bois scholarship.
On a more personal note, Du Bois’s writing gave me a version of America that I can make my own inasmuch as it showed me a way of assuming responsibility for the white supremacist violence and racial trauma on which the republic was built. Even as my own family had experienced the vertigo of making formal claims before the federal government, so many communities of color and immigrant communities lack a formal platform to even assert their rights and to protect their needs and have existed – and continue to exist – outside the formal domains of political power. Their humanity remains invisible or, as Du Bois puts it, “veiled.” With so much at stake in adopting the United States as my newfound homeland and making myself at home as a white person in a white-supremacist polity, Du Bois’s vision of the future of American democracy gave me an opportunity to make sense of my own potential role in the country: I strive to make the future that Du Bois dreamt for America real. Only in a still-to-be-born America might I be at home. In a sense, I have accepted that to be fully committed to justice I must remain a refugee. Yet I am grateful to have been welcomed by a community of Du Bois scholars from whom
I have learned so much and will continue to learn. I am especially indebted to Du Bois scholars of color and the public alike who have placed a modicum of trust in my voice. I can only hope that my work can carry the moral faith to achieve what seems impossible in the light of the history of the irrevocable failures of white humanity: to rebuild an interracial political community in the aftermath of the sorrows of the past and the still burgeoning structural inequalities of the present.
My turn to Du Bois as a philosophy student coincided with the popular resurgence of white nationalist movements in the United States in the 2010s. With the aid of Du Bois, I aim to restore a vision of American democracy that dethrones white supremacy as the “true” meaning of our republican heritage and whiteness as the condition for being a “true” American. In turning to Du Bois, then, I would like to contribute, however little, to repairing the moral spirit of American democracy, telling a different story about how the parts relate to the whole that we are always building and rebuilding. With Du Bois, I refuse to believe that white fear and insecurity asserts complete sovereignty over the human spirit, though it will likely take uncharted moral imagination to properly mourn the black lives lost to bombs, nooses, and knives. I am grateful to the life and work of W. E. B. Du Bois and to the community of scholars and teachers who have taught me to feel the warmth and power of a new world being born and that what it means to be an American is an inversion of the inscription Dante read over the gates of the inferno: “Never abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
Notes
1.
James Baldwin and Margaret Mead,
A Rap on Race
, Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1971, p. 3.
2.
For an incisive critique of Coates, see Melvin L. Rogers, “Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Missing,”
Dissent
, July 31, 1995, online.
3.
Ta-Nehisi Coates,
Between the World and Me
, New York: Random House, 2015, p. 69.
4.
Susan Neiman notes that a major difference in the twentieth-century political history of Europe and North America is that Europe was willing to confront its atrocities and genocide – at least with respect to the Holocaust – and thus attempted to atone for the past, whereas the United States has never really tried. See her
Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil
, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019.
5.
In contrast, the “Afropessimist” intellectual movement posits that anti-black racism is almost an unstoppable, permanent, and quasi-natural force in US history. See Frank B. Wilderson III,
Afropessimism
, New York: Liveright, 2020.
6.
Africana philosophy is an umbrella term that categorizes philosophical inquiry centrally focused on the experiences of African and Afro-descendant peoples. For an overview of the subfield, see Lucius T. Outlaw, “Africana Philosophy,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2017 edn),
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/africana/
7.
See Aldon Morris,
The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology
, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.
8.
Charles W. Mills, “W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Liberal,” in Nick Bromell (ed.),
A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois
, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2018, pp. 19–56.
9.
W. E. B. Du Bois,
The Souls of Black Folk
, New York: Penguin, 1989, pp. 3–4.
10.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Development of a People,” in N. D. Chandler (ed.),
The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays
, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015, p. 244.
11.
Christopher Lebron,
The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea
, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, p. xx.
12.
W. E. B. Du Bois,
In Battle for Peace: The Story of my 83rd
Birthday
, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 82.
13.
Chike Jeffers, “Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism,”
The Southern
Journal of Philosophy
51(4) (2013): 488–510; Chike Jeffers, “The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s ‘The Conservation of Races,’”
Ethics
123(3) (2013): 403–26; Ines Valdez,
Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft
, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
14.
Juliet Hooker,
Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos
, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 113–54.
15.
In my view, it is not plausible to hold that Du Bois became an anarchist who rejected the legitimacy of the modern state or an anti-democratic who favored strong-man leaders like Stalin and Chairman Mao. He did, however, write several opinion pieces in support of the latter.
16.
Mills, “Du Bois: Black Radical Liberal,” pp. 49–50.
17.
Du Bois,
Souls
, pp. 3–4.
18.
Du Bois,
Souls
, p. 142.
Part IInclusion
1Du Bois and the Black Lives Matter Movement: Thinking with Du Bois about Anti-Racist Struggle Today
During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 28, 1963, the prominent civil rights leader, Roy Wilkins, announced that Du Bois had died the night before: “If you want to read something that applies to 1963, go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois published in 1903.”1 There are as many reasons why it is helpful to look to Du Bois today as there were in 1963 and in the early twentieth century. A voice from the past meditating on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, Du Bois wrote about a world that appears bygone and foreign – a world that is not our own. One might wonder what his political critique can add to our understanding of the world today. His writings often conjure up images of dusty country roads, shaded by poplars, carrion-eating birds, and a fragment of dusk that approaches like a threat of violence. The takeaway from Du Bois’s writings is that today – as in the past – any meaningful political analysis must underscore our racial realities. In the United States, racial matters constitute the central obstacle to the flourishing of the republic and the central contradiction between empirical reality and democratic ideals. This is why Du Bois asserted that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line.2 The problem of race and racism implicates the entire nation and stretches across historical time. To motivate sustained public scrutiny of the significance of race remains a hurdle and explains, at least in part, why Du Bois’s writings continue to spell both trouble and an opportunity to reflect on our world. In response to the Holocaust in Europe, Hannah Arendt warned that “once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”3 In his foresight, Du Bois intimated that the problem of the color line will reemerge as the problem of our century.
For those new to Du Bois, one might wonder why he focused on race and racism. Perhaps to a white reader unaccustomed to viewing the world from the perspective of race – or viewing oneself as “raced” at all – the analytic lens of race might appear to be forced or overstated. After all, we embody multiple identities and it is not clear why race should center our sense of self and approach to democratic politics. Though he had much to say about class, gender, and nationality, Du Bois reaffirmed that the institutional and social practices that signify the withdrawal of respect and esteem from people of color generally and African Americans specifically mediate the overall structure of American society, wherein racial whiteness functions as a license to assert unconstrained power. He thus posited that the fate of roughly 12 percent of the population has and will continue to determine the fate of the republic. This strong connection between the part and the whole may be true for other social groups, but he aimed to show why it is true with respect to the African-American community.
Du Bois’s abiding relevance for anti-racist struggle today offers insight into how the color line works today and how grassroots organizing might counteract it. The color line functions both to cause racial realities and to obscure their existence in a white-controlled polity. For Du Bois, to value black life across the color line is the central task of the republic, and successful grassroots movements illuminate disrespectful and derogating practices. In spite of the gains of the civil rights movement and the election of the first black president, the disrespect and derogation of the African-American community continues to undermine the legitimacy of the republic and test the commitment to democratic ideals for both vulnerable and privileged racial groups. A little more than a century after Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, the Black Lives Matter movement emerged to condemn the killing with impunity of African Americans by officers and vigilantes. Because structural inequalities bolster police violence, as the movement grew, it expanded its focus to show the intersection of police violence with mass incarceration, poverty, de facto segregation, the devaluation of labor, and the loss of housing and education opportunities in black and brown communities. The call to disrupt police and vigilante violence against African Americans is the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement; yet the call also serves to bring greater awareness of black vulnerability in social, economic, and political life.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was sparked by the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2012. Zimmerman fatally shot a black 17-year-old high-school student Trayvon Martin in a gated community in central Florida. After a police dispatcher had instructed him to step down, Zimmerman pursued Martin, claiming, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something.” He continued, “These ***holes always get away.”4 Martin was unarmed and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt; he had stepped out to buy snacks and it cost him his life. Zimmerman would later capitalize on his notoriety by selling online the gun he used to shoot Martin for US$139,000 and his amateur paintings of the Confederate and the American flags for as much as US$100,000.5
After Zimmerman’s acquittal, the co-founders of the BLM movement, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, demanded accountability for anti-black violence. In bringing the rash of legal lynchings into the national spotlight, the movement challenged public perceptions about the value of black life. For Du Bois, to counteract the phenomenon of the color line, the American public must be compelled to witness the black experience of America and to recognize that it stands in stark contradiction to democratic ideals. Not only do democratic institutions continue to fail to protect the most vulnerable members of the polity. The American public casts doubt about whether black lives are really in harm’s way. Many resent the call to even pay attention to the possible racial dimension of policing practices; the color line thus obscures racial realities. As a consequence, the basic right to life – to have one’s fair shot at being-in-the-world – is denied to African Americans; and it is extremely difficult to build more nuanced claims to justice when one’s basic right to exist is insecure. Hence the radical power of the assertion that black lives matter.
In chapter 13 of Souls, Du Bois depicted the fictional tale of a young black man, John Jones, who has returned to his hometown of Altamaha, Georgia after receiving a college degree in the North. A white mob lynches Jones for defending his sister against a white rapist. Du Bois narrated Jones’s last thoughts:
Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their shadows dancing and heard their horses thundering towards him, until at last they came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front [a] haggard white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh, how he pitied him, – pitied him, – and wondered if he had the coiling twisted rope. Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes towards the Sea.
And the world whistled in his ears.6
Though fictional, Du Bois’s account of the last moments of Jones’s life represents a moral truth about what it means to be a victim of racist violence. Jones was “swept like a storm” by the mob and, even as they asserted their gross claim to his physical body, he “pitied” his executioners; Jones saw their souls distorted by fury and fear in a way that they could not see themselves. In pitying his executioners, Jones asserted his spiritual sovereignty over them – that a vital portion of his self will not bend to their will. Of course, spiritual sovereignty can seem wanting against the destruction of the physical body. Du Bois’s insight here, I submit, illuminates black insight into white souls disfigured by bigotry and asserts the right to black hope for liberation. “But not even this was able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk.”7 In his stark rendering of the white soul, for Du Bois, their “pitiful” deeds cannot be the final judgment about, and summation of, what it means to be a human being; instead, he cemented the victims of lynch mobs as the rightful judges of America, as those whose souls must live on in our collective consciousness. So too the Black Lives Matter movement upholds the value of the black lives lost and elevates their experience of violence as the true reflection of American racial realities. “We must exalt,” implored Du Bois, “the Lynched above the Lyncher, and the Worker above the Owner, and the Crucified above Imperial Rome.”8
After Reconstruction, lynching mobs exploded across the United States. Between 1882 and 1968, historians estimate 3,500 African Americans were killed. The destruction of the black body was a public festival, complete with the sale of photographs and souvenirs of the cut-up bits of the victims’ bodies. In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois recounted that when he found Sam Hose’s knuckles on display in a shop window in Atlanta in 1899, a recent victim of a lynch mob, his faith in science as a tool for racial justice reform wavered.9 Fact-based arguments alone could not stop anti-black violence or the family picnics around the burnt and mutilated remains of black people. He began to search for a more expansive way to combat the celebration of and complicity in racial terror. This history of violence has left a psychological imprint on the collective consciousness of the republic and today motivates, if not the celebration, then indifference and resentment against a movement to end police brutality. White nationalist groups have turned into an increasingly well-organized social force that seeks to reclaim the republic as a de jure racial caste system, reaffirming it as a white ethno-state. Today, as in the past, the claim that black lives matter is, in Baldwin’s words, a spiritual “cross” that the republic bears: the recognition, or the lack thereof, of black lives continues to define its character and shapes the history of its future.10 According to Du Bois, whenever the republic comes to value black life just a little more, it ushers in the radical reconstruction of modern American society.
The black lives lost
Recall that the color line withdraws respect and esteem from people of color in general and from African Americans in particular. Though it cultivates a broad focus on racial realities, the Black Lives Matter movement highlights the racist violence perpetuated and condoned by the state. To be sure, the federal government had enabled the scourge of lynching of the Jim Crow era, passing an anti-lynching bill in 2018, a century after the bill was first introduced in the Senate. Legal inaction fueled white mobs. This meant that local law enforcement assured impunity for murderers, and police officials often played a role in lynchings, handing over victims to mobs, standing idle, or lighting the match themselves. The passage of the anti-lynching bill is a symbol of the ongoing fight for accountability for racist police violence as much as it is a symbol of the complicity of the state and law enforcement, then as now.
Du Bois believed that bearing witness to anti-black violence and the resultant trauma shapes the historical legacy of black liberation struggles against white supremacy. In his fictional and journalistic portrayals of the black lives lost to racial violence, Du Bois wanted to stir in his reader a sense of compassion and shared grief with the segregated black community. He endeavored to portray the singular and irreplaceable lives lost; and sometimes leaned on poetic depictions of a person’s subjective consciousness that is snuffed out in death. Given the sheer number of deaths and the lack of quality investigative journalism, with the exception of the efforts of Ida B. Wells and black-owned presses, it is difficult to track all the victims of anti-black violence over the centuries and to tell the story of their lives. Even today, the few names reported by the press represent a fraction of the many lives lost; and headlines often exclude black women and members of the trans community whose lives are notably at risk. For Du Bois, the task of political critique is to defend the humanity of the vulnerable, while also capturing the vast scale of anti-black violence and disenfranchisement without reifying the lost lives into a statistic or an abstract status of “victimhood.” His intuition was that empathizing with the individual behind the statistic would help the public resist the passive acceptance of white supremacist ideology and violence as a customary feature of modern American life.
The Black Lives Matter movement captures the black lives lost in routine policing practices across the country. By bringing attention to each individual victim with his or her diverse family background, gender, and class, the movement showcases how racial blackness mediates the public’s perception of threat and exposes black lives to police violence.
Consider the brief life of Tamir Rice. In 2014, 12-year-old Rice was playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park and a white man waiting for a bus called 911 to report him as an armed belligerent. Within seconds of arriving on the scene, a white officer fatally shot Tamir in the chest. On the day he died, his mother, Samaria, had packed him a turkey sandwich for lunch and had given him a few dollars to buy chips and juice from the corner store. Tamir still enjoyed playing with Lego and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle video game; he was inseparable from his 14-year-old sister, Tajai. The Rice family had moved to the neighborhood in part to be close to the park in which Tamir was eventually killed. His older sister was the first to rush to her dying brother before the officer who had shot him tackled and arrested her as Tamir lay dying.
Consider, too, the brief life of Freddie Carlos Gray, Jr. He was 25 years old when he was “nickel dimed” by the Baltimore Police Department after being randomly targeted in his neighborhood. As he had done before, Gray ran at the approaching police vehicles and was then arrested. To “nickel dime” detainees is to bind their hands and feet without fastening their seatbelts, leaving them unable to protect their heads. Officers proceed to make sudden stops and sharp turns to fling their detainee inside the metal cage of the police van. Within an hour of his arrest, Gray’s spinal cord was nearly 80 percent severed; essentially, he had suffered internal decapitation. A lifelong Baltimore resident, friends and neighbors called Gray “Pepper.” He had a twin sister Fredericka; they grew up in crushing poverty, just a few blocks from where he was arrested. He had dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. Before being killed, he had suffered food insecurity and childhood lead poisoning so severe that a local attorney had filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Gray children; medical reports confirmed that they had permanent brain damage.
Although the deaths of black men and boys often dominate headlines, black women are extremely vulnerable to police violence. In Fort Worth, Texas, Atatiana Jefferson was killed during a wellness check in 2019; a neighbor had reported that her front door was ajar and was worried about the Jefferson household. Fearing an intruder, Jefferson approached her window to inspect the commotion outside. As she appeared in the window, an officer shot her through
