On "The Souls of Black Folk" in "Post-Racial" America

Political essays are generally written for a writer's contemporaries. First and foremost, they are meant as urgent and pressing arguments. Well, suppose a political essay is successful, and a generation later, the general population has come to accept the author's point of view as self-evident? What are future readers to make of the work? Is it meant to have an afterlife?

Reading W.E.B. DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk," more than a hundred years after it was written, and in light of the current Obama Administration, the book has a curious resonance for the modern reader. DuBois' beautifully written series of essays reads, on the surface, as an impassioned call for the higher education of blacks, a call for political participation in the American democratic process by the race, and a rebuttal of the teachings of Booker T. Washington. For today's reader, these arguments feel, at first, definitively settled; but on close examination, there are other arguments hinted at in the book that feel startlingly contemporary and urgent; and as the book progresses through autobiography, social history, logical deconstruction, observation of contemporary life, fable and finally artistic analysis, interesting philosophical questions arise: for example, what is progress? How do we define the difference between progress and regress, and do societies actually progress at all, or is progress simply defined by the more powerful of two clashing societies?

The most urgent question for DuBois is that of education; for DuBois higher education is the means by which blacks lift "the Veil" – DuBois’ term for the mental and psychological block that keeps blacks from seeing themselves as truly free independent agents in an America where they have as much to offer as they have to learn. In this he disagrees strongly with Booker T. Washington, whose philosophy is summed up by the "Atlanta Compromise:" ("In all things purely social, we can be separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.") Booker T. Washington is willing to concede three things to white America in exchange for the opportunity for economic independence and growth:

“First, political power,
Second, insistence on civil rights,
Third, higher education of Negro youth,—"

These concessions are meant to allow blacks to "concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.”

Washington’s argument is strange to the contemporary reader. In fact, it’s downright nonsensical, and DuBois easily points out why: “Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No."

Obviously, if blacks are to survive in America, they must be allowed the same political, educational and civil opportunities afforded everyone else. Separate is inherently unequal. The question for the contemporary reader, then becomes, why would a free person want to integrate into American society? Certainly, for a race to survive in America, that race must have equality, but is Western High Culture or even the American Experiment something worth integrating into? It is a system which has had a long and brutal history of exploitation, hypocrisy and crime. Why would an American black want to become a part of this whitewashed world, except that at the moment there may be no other option?

“My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.” DuBois says in the chapter titled, “The Meaning of Progess.” Because progress, as DuBois recognizes, means assimilating into a culture that is often hostile, hypocritical and given to rewarding the most cunning and deceptive individuals:

“To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situation peculiar to the Southern United States,—is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.”

But if the price of culture is a Lie, then what is gained from it? A person can’t live life behind a lie and be content; and here DuBois argues that the black soul is divided in two ways: the southern, more patient and pleasant temperament, and the angry, radical temperament found in the North:

“On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the radicalism of the Negro. Driven from his birthright in the South by a situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive nature revolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a decent living amid the harsh competition and the color discrimination. At the same time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and lectures, he is intellectually quickened and awakened. The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom. What wonder that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some sink, some rise. The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell and the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the better classes segregate themselves from the group-life of both white and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while it points out no way of escape. They despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side with its masters.”

This ultimately, is what DuBois, is attempting to do with his book, and it is his answer to the Lie of culture. DuBois wants to offer a means by which the races can live together harmoniously, honestly and with dignity, and for DuBois, that answer is through understanding and communication. When we look at how far we’ve come as a country, it’s easy to believe he was onto something. DuBois’ book has a mishmash of references to southern blues, European poetry, Greek theater, and then the lush descriptive passages of his own beautiful prose, which is so unique, personal, and born of both worlds that he could get one reviewer in 1903 from the New York Times to say: “To a Southerner who knows the negro race as it exists in the South, it is plain that this negro of Northern education is, after all, as he says, "bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh" of the African race,” whereas another reviewer says in The American Review of Reviews: “Of the literary quality of the essays too much cannot be said. No book of similar character has been printed in recent years that equals this little volume in power or grace of expression.”

So this is what the American people should aspire to; where we are already headed, in fact, according to DuBois: we have already become something of each other through our unique history, and that’s only become more obvious over the last century. The sorrow songs DuBois discusses in the last chapter later gave way to blues, to jazz, to rock, and pretty much every other manifestation of modern American music; the parable of the two Johns in the chapter "Of the Coming of John," feels distinctly American, and even reappears in different form in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, “Blood Meridian”; and of course, our common history of push and pull, of being neighbors and strangers, each other’s lovers and executioners within the same hour, has worked to make the contemporary American, here in what pundits now like to call our “post-racial” era, what he is.

With the election of President Barack Obama, half-black and half-white, a man who has been all over the world, known many cultures, and declares empathy is an important factor in deciding his supreme court nominee, haven’t we finally awakened to a world where we are no longer burdened by DuBois' “tragedy of the age: not that men are poor,—all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked,—who is good? not that men are ignorant,—what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men”?

If a country with as blemished a history of racial division as ours can elect a black man to the highest office in the land, can’t we say we now know more of each other than ever? And that although progress is indeed an ugly process, it’s a necessary one, with ultimately beautiful results? And that progress definitely exists, just as the man who’s lifted the Veil goes through a trial by fire (Hate, Despair and Doubt, as DuBois beautifully illustrates in the story of Alexander Crummel) but comes out on the other side of it enlightened? “Life begins on the other side of despair,” according to Sartre, and isn’t this as true for the individual as it is for the society?

I’m not convinced. Understanding is a high virtue, and certainly some people come out on the other side of suffering better off; but just as often, understanding demands sacrifices every bit as unreasonable as the sacrifices Booker T. Washington asks of the freed slaves; because understanding often asks us to accept things as they are and not as they should be - and as much as we think we understand each other better the more our world globalizes, we should realize that the more our world globalizes, the larger our institutions grow; and the larger our institutions grow, the more disenfranchised man becomes from his fellow man. These are trials by fire which for some have no other side. In tomorrow's post I will attempt to explore the problems I see in DuBois' philosophy in the context of our modern world.