{"id":87434,"date":"2017-02-27T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=87434"},"modified":"2017-02-23T15:47:06","modified_gmt":"2017-02-23T15:47:06","slug":"lines-of-descent-w-e-b-du-bois-and-the-emergence-of-identity-who-was-w-e-b-du-bois","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/lines-of-descent-w-e-b-du-bois-and-the-emergence-of-identity-who-was-w-e-b-du-bois\/","title":{"rendered":"Lines of Descent: The Emergence of Identity – Who Was W.E.B. Du Bois?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity<\/a><\/em><\/strong> by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Harvard University Press<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

W.E.B. Du Bois; detail of a drawing by Winold Reiss, circa 1925. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution\/Art Resource<\/p><\/div>\n

W.E.B. Du Bois\u2019s very long life coincided almost exactly with the period in African-American history between slavery and citizenship. Du Bois was born, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and, as he liked to point out, almost exactly coincident with the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, which ushered in \u201cRadical Reconstruction,\u201d the brief experiment with civil and voting rights for former slaves in the former Confederacy.<\/p>\n

He died the day before the 1963 March on Washington\u2014the last of his copious writings was a telegram of support to the organizers of the march\u2014and he would have been surprised that the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments in the South, which ended in 1876, was just on the verge of resuming. He spent most of his life looking for some other solution to \u201cthe problem of the color-line\u201d\u2014his resonant phrase\u2014than the one the civil rights movement achieved.<\/p>\n

Du Bois was almost unbelievably prodigious. He was a, or maybe the, pioneer elite black academic, with a master\u2019s degree from Friedrich-Wilhelms Universit\u00e4t in Berlin and a Ph.D. from Harvard, and he was also one of the most influential figures in the constrained world of black higher education, and a passionate chronicler of the lives of the black rural poor. He was a founder of the NAACP and editor of its \u201crecord of the darker races,\u201d The Crisis<\/em>, which in its heyday had a larger circulation than The Nation<\/em> or The New Republic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As a writer he made pioneering and enduring contributions to sociology (with The Philadelphia Negro<\/em> in 1899, possibly the first full-dress work of urban ethnography), history (with Black Reconstruction<\/em> in 1935, which predated by decades the revision, in a positive direction, of the Reconstruction era), and the public-facing, issue-defining extended essay (with The Souls of Black Folk<\/em> in 1903, his most widely read book). He helped start the anticolonial pan-Africanist movement, and died in Ghana. At the age of ninety-three, following an extended period as a staunch Stalinist, he joined the Communist Party USA, confirming the long-held suspicions of the US government, which had denied him passports for years. He dabbled in poetry, drama, fiction, and memoir. As his major biographer, David Levering Lewis, reminds us in a new essay in The American Scholar<\/em>, besides his many published works, Du Bois left behind 357 boxes of papers, which demonstrate that there was almost no controversy he ignored and nobody he didn\u2019t know.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Because for American Negroes (always his preferred term) the main goal was elusive all through Du Bois\u2019s life, his career was centrally one of protest. His argument with Booker T. Washington, the most celebrated black American of his young manhood, over whether to accept or resist segregation was the central debate within black America in the early twentieth century. As a matter of principle, Du Bois fought constantly against all forms of imposed inferiority for blacks; personally, he fought with many of the leading figures in what was not yet called the civil rights movement, usually over what he saw as their accommodationism and excessive patience. He led a life of feuds, firings, resignations, and ruptures. He wasn\u2019t an easy man.<\/p>\n

Levering Lewis remembers meeting Du Bois as a boy\u2014Levering Lewis was the son of a dean at all-black Wilberforce University, in rural Ohio, and Du Bois once came to dinner. Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his short new book about Du Bois, notes that Du Bois met his father, Joe Appiah, a young member of the African independence movement, at a Pan-Africanist conference in Manchester, England, in 1945. Anthony Appiah is named after his father\u2019s mentor Kwame Nkruma, the first head of state of Ghana, at whose invitation Du Bois moved there in his nineties; in the 1990s, with Henry Louis Gates, Appiah coedited the Encyclopedia Africana<\/em>, a project Du Bois tried unsuccessfully to launch for decades and was working on when he died.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s so much of Du Bois that everybody gets to produce a custom- tailored version of him. Levering Lewis, who calls himself \u201ca pure member of W.E.B. Du Bois\u2019s Talented Tenth,\u201d subtitled the first volume of his life of Du Bois \u201cBiography of a Race.\u201d Appiah, younger than Lewis and the product of a different era in African-American intellectual life, finds in Du Bois a pioneering figure in working out his own distinctive preoccupation, how to square a distinct racial identity with an equally deep commitment to cosmopolitanism. Both Levering Lewis and Appiah have lived lives far less limited by law and custom than Du Bois\u2019s was. Perhaps for that reason, both write about Du Bois in a far more amiable voice than Du Bois ever used in his own writing.<\/p>\n

Appiah spends about half of his short book\u2014an extended version of the W.E.B. Du Bois lectures he gave at Harvard in 2010\u2014arguing persuasively that the way to understand Du Bois is as a product of the German academic training of his young manhood. Du Bois, who grew up in an educated but working-poor family in Great Barrington, had two undergraduate degrees, the first from Fisk and the second from Harvard. Before entering Harvard\u2019s doctoral program in political science, he spent two years in Germany, which was then the unquestioned world capital of serious, scholarly social science\u2014as Appiah puts it, \u201ca German degree was the ironclad credential\u201d in those days. It\u2019s a much-noted irony that his studies were financed by a grant from a fund controlled by Rutherford B. Hayes, the former president who was able to assume that office because of a political deal that Du Bois devoted much of his later career to condemning: the Republican Party\u2019s agreement to stop enforcing former slaves\u2019 civil and voting rights in the South, in exchange for the White House.<\/p>\n

Appiah argues that the sight of Emperor Wilhelm II riding on horseback in a parade in Berlin inspired Du Bois to copy, for life, the emperor\u2019s tidy mustache and goatee, and that his somewhat dandified manner of dress was an adoption of the German academic-bourgeois style of the moment when he was there. Germany in the early 1890s was intensely working out the meaning of what Appiah argues were the master themes of Du Bois\u2019s life: nationalism, race, folklore, culture, community, the role of intellectuals and academics in society, the contours of the modern welfare state.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know whether there\u2019s a direct line from Du Bois\u2019s The Souls of Black Folk<\/em> to the emergence of terms like \u201csoul brother\u201d and \u201csoul music\u201d late in Du Bois\u2019s life, but Du Bois certainly deserves credit for associating the word \u201csoul\u201d with African-Americans. Appiah argues that \u201csoul\u201d is a translation of Geist<\/em>, as Du Bois absorbed it specifically from the work of the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. Thus, in The Souls of Black Folk<\/em> \u201che is showing his readers the Geister<\/em> (this is the plural of Geist<\/em>) of a black Volk.\u201d Even more counterintuitively, Appiah traces the origin of Du Bois\u2019s famous formulation of \u201cdouble consciousness\u201d as the heart of the African-American mentality to Goethe\u2019s Faust<\/em>, whose main character proclaims: \u201cTwo souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea that Du Bois came of age intellectually in an atmosphere in which the fundamental concepts of modern society were in formation in European and American universities helps explain, Appiah argues persuasively, why he always thought that contradictory impulses being held in balance was a normal, desirable state of affairs. Having used Du Bois\u2019s time in Germany to establish this, Appiah spends the second half of his book describing Du Bois\u2019s views on what race meant\u2014a complicated matter, because his views changed over time and no phase he went through was simple and easy to describe.<\/p>\n

To Booker T. Washington, who was born a slave and spent his whole life in the South, the idea of a separate, self-contained, self-sustaining Negro society came naturally; to Du Bois it always grated. He was absolutely unwilling to accept legal segregation in any form, but he was never an assimilationist. Racial pride and racial identity meant everything to him. All of his major works were on racial themes. He expected the Talented Tenth of Negroes to devote itself to the welfare of the other nine tenths, as he had done, rather than melting into a nonracial national elite.<\/p>\n

Although Appiah doesn\u2019t discuss it, Du Bois\u2019s relationship with Marcus Garvey, the founder of the first mass black nationalist movement and an advocate of a return to Africa for the Negro diaspora, wound up being as hostile as his relationship with Washington, and for some of the same reasons. Du Bois simply couldn\u2019t accept the idea of blacks inhabiting their own realm. He believed, as Appiah puts it, in \u201cmoral universalism with special devotion to a group.\u201d In the \u201cdouble consciousness\u201d passage in The Souls of Black Folk<\/em>, Du Bois wrote:<\/p>\n

One ever feels his two-ness\u2014an 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.<\/p>\n

Appiah presents this sentiment as being far less unbearable than it may sound on first encounter.<\/p>\n

To spend a lifetime exploring the meaning of being a Negro and an American of course entails defining \u201cNegro.\u201d Appiah reminds us that Du Bois\u2019s education, in Berlin and at Harvard, took place when race science was coming into vogue. In 1897, in \u201cThe Conservation of Races,\u201d Du Bois himself enumerated a scheme of eight \u201cdistinctly differentiated races,\u201d although even then, Appiah says, he was \u201cresisting the biological model\u201d by insisting on a definition of race that encompassed a shared history and culture. In 1906, Du Bois invited Franz Boas to Atlanta University, where he was teaching, to give a speech. Boas argued against the then-ubiquitous view of Negroes as biologically distinct and mentally inferior, and this had the immediate effect of moving Du Bois one notch further away from conceiving of race biologically. By 1920 he was writing, \u201cThere are no races, in the sense of great, separate, pure breeds of men, differing in attainment, development, and capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saying this, for Du Bois, meant redefining, not renouncing, the concept of race that was central to his life. He initially settled on the idea of what Appiah calls \u201crace as an effect of social practices,\u201d as in a passage, from a 1923 essay (in The Smart Set<\/em>, of all places), that Appiah quotes: \u201cThe black man is a person who must ride \u2018Jim Crow\u2019 in Georgia.\u201d Du Bois declared that his deeply mourned only son, Burghardt, who died at age two of diphtheria, had been essentially raceless\u2014\u201che knew no color-line\u201d\u2014because he was too young to have felt the effects of racial categorization by others. Of course that defines race negatively, even if not genetically. The way Du Bois found to a more affirmative way of thinking about what it means to be a Negro was through studying Africa\u2014\u201chis second front in his struggle to define the Negro.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>

A long-exposure photograph of protesters marching in Ferguson, Missouri, August 20, 2014
Jeff Roberson\/AP Images<\/p><\/div>\n

The supposedly scientific way of thinking about race predictably went along with the idea that Negroes were genetically inferior; and another part of this package of received wisdom a century ago was the idea that Africa had no history or culture. That helped make Europeans comfortable with colonizing Africa, as they were then doing. Du Bois was brought up short by Franz Boas\u2019s assertion, in his speech in Atlanta, that Negroes should study African history, since he had been educated to believe that Africa had no history worth studying. He began writing sympathetically about Africa, and finally, in 1923, he traveled there. Appiah quotes Du Bois declaring after that visit: \u201cThe spell of Africa is upon me. The ancient witchery of her medicine is burning in my drowsy, dreamy blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

An important reason for the power of the spell, Appiah argues, is that, as well traveled as he was, Du Bois had never been in a place where what it meant to be black wasn\u2019t defined by whites. If nearly everybody is black, then nobody is black, if that means being part of a highly visible minority relegated by the majority to an inferior position. As Appiah puts it, for Du Bois Africa was \u201cthe land of no Negroes.\u201d And if race wasn\u2019t biologically determinative, then the way to understand Africa\u2019s colonization was as a form of economic exploitation\u2014hence, to Appiah, encountering Africa helped start Du Bois on his journey to communism.<\/p>\n

Using an image that Du Bois used himself, and that Martin Luther King used on the last night of his life, Appiah compares Du Bois to Moses: the leader of a people who died in view of, but not resident in, the promised land. What Appiah means by this is that Du Bois, in his opinion, was never finally able to figure out just the right definition of race: \u201cHe could not quite gain the upper hand\u201d on it. The reason, Appiah says, was that for him, race was too deeply grounded in oppression. It served as a kind of identity placeholder \u201cuntil freedom and justice reigns on earth\u201d; \u201cit strives, ultimately, for its own disappearance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Appiah himself has a well-worked-out schema for how race should be conceived in people\u2019s minds, and he presents this as the solution that Du Bois was not able to find. It has three aspects. Race is a social identity, a way of defining oneself; this gives it a life that doesn\u2019t require the ongoing presence of racial oppression. Appiah admits that racial identities are imprecise and \u201coften contested at the boundaries,\u201d but<\/p>\n

to say that the boundaries are contestable isn\u2019t to say there are no clear cases. If, once the evidence is in, you judge that Barack Obama isn\u2019t a man and Denzel Washington isn\u2019t an African-American, we will have lost our semantic bearings altogether: there can be clear answers to questions about the ascription of concepts with fuzzy edges. This acknowledged contestability, built into our use of the terms, is suggestively like the essential contestability of many normative concepts.<\/p>\n

Identity is normative in the sense that a racial identity implies signing on to a set of beliefs and practices. Appiah gives these examples of what he means, while stipulating that these norms are only expectations, not inviolable orders, and that he could not give \u201cfull-hearted assent to any\u201d of them:<\/p>\n

Negatively: blacks ought not to embarrass their race; Jews and Muslims ought not to eat pork. Positively: gay people ought to come out; blacks ought to support affirmative action.<\/p>\n

And identity is \u201csubjective,\u201d in the sense that the core of its meaning sits inside one\u2019s own head, as a form of consciousness, not in rules set by society. One might say to oneself, Appiah says, \u201cI\u2019ve a reason to do A<\/em> because I am an X<\/em>,\u201d but in that case, if one actually does A<\/em>, it was a personal choice, though one connected to a voluntary group identity.<\/p>\n

In Appiah\u2019s definition, there is not a bright-line difference between race and other forms of identity\u2014African, for example\u2014that operate similarly; conversely, the idea that the hoped-for social end-state is renouncing all forms of identity and participating in a \u201ccolor-blind\u201d society is pallid and unrealistic. In that sense, one might say that we are all Negroes now. And identity is in no way personally limiting; it doesn\u2019t work against Appiah\u2019s ideal of cosmopolitanism, which, by way of describing Johann Gottfried Herder\u2019s influence on the young Du Bois, he explains, in a dualistic way that typifies his own and Du Bois\u2019s way of thinking. It is, he writes, both a requirement \u201cthat we must recognize how different the inner life of different people is,\u201d and also \u201cthe idea that all human beings are, in some sense, fellow citizens of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

One can use one\u2019s identity as an anchor in a fluid, globalized world. Appiah himself, having spent his early career as a professor of Afro-American studies, has just joined the faculty of NYU because, he has said, it is redefining itself as a \u201cglobal network university.\u201d No doubt this will not entail his ceasing to think of himself as African.<\/p>\n

Appiah is claiming Du Bois as a forebear, but in a careful way: he\u2019s saying there is a clearly marked road, though one with a lot of twists and turns, leading from Du Bois\u2019s idea of race to his own idea of identity as a concept that will succeed Du Bois. He argues with so much charm, and musters so much evidence from the cornucopia that Du Bois left behind, that while reading Lines of Descent<\/em> one can forget how dominated Du Bois\u2019s own life and consciousness were by a distinctively American racial order.<\/p>\n

The idea that during his own early childhood African-Americans had briefly had civil rights, voting rights, and a measure of political power, only to see them snatched away after 1876, never ceased to gall Du Bois. The tendency of national mainstream thinking and politics to efface, ignore, and excuse this appalling history, or even to glorify it, was always present in his sense of what it meant to be an American. He thought about all the parts of black America\u2014the leadership, the agrarian peasantry in the South, the educational system, the city ghettos\u2014against the background of a persistent denial of full citizenship. Socialism and communism\u2019s appeal to him were intertwined with his sense of the intractability of the Jim Crow system. In this sense he was a Moses who had an idea of what the promised land might look like but never got to go up to the mountaintop and have a look at it.<\/p>\n

The attractiveness of replacing race with identity and nationalism with cosmopolitanism\u2014personal identity not necessarily dependent on ethnic group\u2014is obvious. As Appiah says, it permits a more positive, more flexible, less oppression-dependent version of what it means to embrace whatever identity or identities call to you. But it has disadvantages too. The killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent demonstrations, provided a vivid example of the continuing need for a politics of racial protest, of the kind that Du Bois engaged in for his whole life. Appiah is right that protest against oppression is unnecessarily constricting if it\u2019s the only available form of racial identity, but it has to remain available as one of the forms.<\/p>\n

The situation in Ferguson is an illustration of something broader. At the level of law and policy rather than incident, there\u2019s a similar point to be made. Most people in the world still live under the rules of national governments, and the number of nations where racial and ethnic matters have become the subject of public policy debates seems to be increasing, not decreasing. If one were to assert\u2014shifting Du Bois\u2019s famous formulation forward in time\u2014that the color line is the problem of the twenty-first century, one would not be obviously wrong. \u201cMoral universalism with special devotion to a group\u201d\u2014the legacy that Appiah finds in Du Bois\u2014isn\u2019t an ideal basis for asking for something from a particular state, if asking for something is called for.<\/p>\n

The recent writings of black intellectuals like Randall Kennedy (in defending explicitly race-based affirmative action) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (in calling for government reparations for African-Americans) are also in a direct line of descent from Du Bois\u2014Kennedy published a book recently with the Du Boisian title The Persistence of the Color Line<\/em>2<\/a><\/sup>\u2014but they are much less clearly connected to the argument about Du Bois that Appiah is making.<\/p>\n

African-Americans have voted for Barack Obama for president pretty close to unanimously. Very few developments in American politics made W. E. B. Du Bois happy, but Obama\u2019s election probably would have. Obama himself, however, illustrates the limits of post-racialism. The major theme of his autobiography is that, as the son of a black father of the African nationalist generation and a white mother, raised by a white family in a mainly white community, he still had to find his way to a black (specifically, African-American) identity as an essential part of coming to adulthood. And his silence, most of the time, about race as president looks like a sign that race is on his mind a lot, rather than that he has somehow transcended it\u2014he seems very careful, and the passion on the occasions when he does discuss race is obvious.<\/p>\n

When he was making the brief public remarks that were his official personal reaction to the events in Ferguson, however, he was almost robotic\u2014expressionless, distanced, and pointedly noncommittal about how we should think about Michael Brown\u2019s death and the unrest that followed it. It looked as if he were making a great effort to keep the lid on. And the few times he has let us see how he might really feel about the persistence of racial oppression, he has been supremely cautious, or (in the case of the \u201cbeer summit\u201d with Henry Louis Gates and a Cambridge police officer) has found a way to demonstrate that he isn\u2019t really angry.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s being president demonstrates how far the country has come since Du Bois\u2019s long heyday, but his conduct as president demonstrates that, at least if you\u2019re a politician heading a national government, racial-identity-plus-cosmopolitanism isn\u2019t yet a completely comfortable mantle to assume. It seems to require some considerable degree of self-suppression of feelings that one senses many whites just don\u2019t want to be exposed to. Two-ness, as Du Bois conceived it, may now apply to more than just black folks, but at least in the United States it still applies to black folks most intensely, and entails the most difficulty.<\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. See David Levering Lewis, \u201cThe Autobiography of Biography,\u201d The American Scholar<\/em>, Summer 2014.\u00a0\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Pantheon, 2012; see the review in these pages by Anthony Lewis, January 12, 2012.\u00a0\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    ___________________________________________<\/p>\n

    Nicholas Lemann is a Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a staff writer at <\/em>The New Yorker. His books include <\/em>The Big Test: The Secret History of the American \u00adMeritocracy and <\/em>The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. (November 2016)<\/em><\/p>\n

    Go to Original \u2013 nybooks.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The supposedly scientific way of thinking about race predictably went along with the idea that Negroes were genetically inferior; and
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