Democracy Deferred: W.E.B. Du Bois

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Democracy DeferredW.E.B. Du Bois

• The problem of the the 20th century is the
  problem of the color-line.
• (Political Science 565)

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Essay 3

• Due 12/5
• 1. In what ways is the oppression of women
  described as being akin to the oppression of
  African Americans? What are the similarities, and
  what are the differences? Respond with reference
  to Rose, Stanton, Du Bois and Douglass.
• 2. Agree, disagree, or modify the following
  statement
• While Abraham Lincoln argues that the historical
  experience of Americans is one compatible with
  Union, the course readings by advocates of
  slavery prove him wrong.

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Essay 3

• 3. In his piece, A Plea for Captain John Brown,
  Thoreau describes Brown as the most American of
  us all. To what extent, if any, would Lincoln
  agree? Why? How does describing Brown in this way
  position the defenders of slavery?
• 4. What is the relationship between the political
  ideal of equality and American identity? Respond
  with reference to Lincoln, at least one of the
  readings on womens suffrage, and at least one
  each from each side of the slavery debate.

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Essay 3

• 5. The argument has been made in class that the
  ostensibly politically-neutral category of the
  natural is often a vehicle for assertions of
  political power. Evaluate this claim with
  reference to Rose, Du Bois, and (at least) two
  more authors.
• 6. W.E.B. Du Bois primarily considers black men,
  while Ernestine P. Rose and Elizabeth Cady
  Stanton largely address the problems of white
  women. How does Sojourner Truths speech reveal
  the limits of these theorists of race and of
  gender? Respond with reference to Du Bois, Rose,
  and Stanton. (For the purposes of this essay, you
  may refer to either or both versions of Truths
  speech)

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Essay 3

• Best essays take counter-arguments into account
• Editing, proofing, revision
• Not only what is true, but how it is true. Why is
  it significant
• Direct responses to prompts
• Each paragraph should be clearly related to thesis

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W.E.B. Du Bois

• 1868-1963
• First black PhD at Harvard
• Pan-Africanist
• Radical (equality)
• Publisher of NAACPs The Crisis
• Communist
• MLK It is time to cease muting the fact that
  Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a
  Communist.

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Du Bois gets radicalized

• Sam Hose (1899)
• Accused of murdering employer raping his wife
• Admits murder (over debt, possibly in
  self-defense), denies rape
• Lynched w/2,000 witnesses outside of Atlanta
• Emasculated, face skinned, tied to a tree and
  burned alive. Knuckles displayed for sale in
  shop window.
• Lynching a communal activity
• Du Bois comes to believe that one could not be a
  calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes
  were lynched, murdered, and starved.

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Major Themes

• The Veil
• Double-consciousness
• Race consciousness
• Racial essentialism

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Race Consciousness

• How does it feel to be a problem? (7)
• American society consistently and irresistibly
  forces awareness of ones own blackness
• Blackness is not a quality of appearance, but of
  identity
• Not just what the individual looks like, but who
  the individual is
• Blackness is a problem
• page s refer to Oxford edition

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The Problem of the Color Line

• The problem of the twentieth century is the
  problem of the color-line,--the relation of the
  darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and
  Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.
  (15)
• Not geographical, but a line nonetheless.
• A notably American (and to a lesser extent,
  European) way of looking at the world.
• Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness
  that I was different from the others or like,
  mayhap, in heart and longing, but shut out from
  their world by a vast veil. (8)
• Parallel worlds
• Restrictive only to blacks, who cannot move
  beyond the veil, while whites can move back and
  forth.
• Privilege.

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The color line

• The American world yields him no true
  self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself
  through the revelation of the other world. It is
  a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
  this sense of always looking at ones self
  through the eyes of others
• One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a
  Negro two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
  strivings two warring ideals in one dark body,
  whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
  torn asunder. (8)
• Internal division on the color line
• Partly self, partly not-self
• Constant internal conflict

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The color line

• Blacks exist in some sense on both sides of the
  color line
• He would not Africanize America, for America has
  too much to teach the world and Africa. He would
  not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white
  Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a
  message for the world.
• Essentialism
• Partly inherent, partly historical
• He simply wishes to make it possible for a man
  to be both a Negro and an American, without being
  cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without
  having the doors of Opportunity closed in his
  face.
• to merge his double self into a better and truer
  self. (9)

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The Color Line

• Three parties in Civil War North, South, Blacks
• Freedmans Bureau constitutes a separate
  government for liberated slaves
• Du Bois on Imperial Japan vs. China
• The blighted, ruined form of the post-War white
  with hate in his eyes vs. the form hovering
  dark and mother-like, her awful face black with
  the mists of centuries who had raised his
  children, buried his wives, and slaked his lust
  (25)
• Metaphor male female
• The South believed an educated Negro to be a
  dangerous Negro

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What is to be done

• From birth till death enslaved in word, in deed
  unmanned!
• . . . .
• Hereditary bondsman! Know ye not
• Who would be free themselves must strike the
  blow?
• -Byron (33)

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Booker T. Washington

• 1856-1915
• Support from white establishment in North South
• Some support from black leaders
• Leader not of one race but of two (38)
• Advocated assimilation (as does Du Bois),
  recognition of political social realities of
  the South, modus vivendi w/Southern whites
• After the War, North South looked to re-join as
  a single nation, diminishing patience for the
  question fate of blacks in both Sections

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Booker T. Washington

• Washington insists that to advance, blacks must
  give up hopes for
• Political power
• Insistence on civil rights
• Higher education
• In return for
• Peace
• Industrial schooling
• An issue of practicality believed blacks would
  benefit most from trade school rather than
  liberal education
• Example disapproval of poor black boy trying to
  learn French
• Long-term assimilation advancement

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Booker T. Washington

• In short order, he gets
• Black disenfranchisement
• Jim Crow laws
• Legal inferiority
• Example, OK literacy requirement, unless you
  were eligible to vote before 1866
• Abandonment of blacks by institutions of higher
  learning

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Du Bois Criticisms

• Washington wants to advance black business, but
  how can this be done without the right to vote in
  your own interests?
• Insists on thrift self-respect, but also on
  unmanly submission to whites
• Advocates elementary industrial school, but who
  will teach at black schools if blacks cant get
  higher education?
• Imagining a different world

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3 bad consequences

• 1. South is justified in despising blacks because
  of blacks current degradation
• They are in Washingtons depiction ignorant and
  slothful, not quite up to par with whites have
  to catch up
• 2. Cause of this degradation is the wrong
  education in the past
• 3. Idea that the future of blacks in America
  depends primarily on their own efforts

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• These are Dangerous half-truths for Du Bois
• 1. What about slavery and systematic exclusion
  from politics, economy, society?
• 2. black schooling lagged because it had to wait
  for first generation of black teachers
• 3.While blacks must work for their own
  improvement, Du Bois argues that they must be
  assisted and encouraged by the initiative of the
  richer and wiser environing group (whites) (43)
• Is this problematic?

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• Du Bois NAACP insist on more militant, though
  still peaceful, position, demanding
• Right to vote
• Civic equality
• Education of youth according not to race, but
  ability
• In essence, Du Bois accuses Washington of
  apologizing and covering over for systematic
  racism, making it appear as if the disadvantaged
  position of American blacks has nothing to do
  with whites and everything to do with blacks.

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• By every civilized and peaceful method, we must
  strive for the rights which the world accords to
  men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words
  which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget
  We hold these truths to be self-evident (44)

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Education

• Can blacks be educated?
• Most Americans answer all queries regarding the
  Negro a priori, and that the least that human
  courtesy can do is listen to evidence. (70)
• Note not most white Americans
• Basic assumptions as part of the Veil

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Why is education necessary?

• This segregation is reinforced the places that
  blacks whites live
• Either they live in proximity, encountering one
  another at their worst, or whites own black homes
  but never encounter their tenants
• the family of the former master has dwindled
  to two lone women, who live in Macon and feed
  hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. (86)
• Relatedly, uneducated blacks are often victimized
  in business by outsiders. They can own nothing
  themselves.
• Debt repossession and exploitation
• Deeper and deeper year by year
• Whites, Yankees, Jews
• Antisemitism

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Permanent Alienation

• Thus, two attitudes come to the forefront
• Disengagement Happy?Well, yes he laughed and
  flipped pebbles, and thought the world was as it
  was. He had worked here twelve years and has
  nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes,
  seven but they hadnt been to school this
  year,--couldnt afford books and clothes, and
  couldnt spare their work. (89)

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Permanent Alienation

• Resentment Let a white man touch me, and he
  dies I dont boast this,--I dont say it around
  loud, or before the children,--but I mean it.
  Ive seen them whip my father and my old mother
  in them cotton-rows till the blood ran
• Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce
  hate vindictiveness there--these are the
  extremes of the Negro problem which we met that
  day, and we scarce knew which we preferred. (89)