'The souls of black folk,' a century hence

New Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2003 by Lewis, David Levering

If, as his few intimates claimed, W.E.B. Du Bois had a robust sense of humor, then he must surely be laughing - laughing his refined laugh lest he give way to tears. Prophet that he was, he can be neither surprised nor unamused that his countrywomen and men have once again validated his axiom that race would be with them until the end of days: that, as with their loss of innocence at least once every decade, his Americans are programmed for everlasting collision with the one permanent feature of their national life that some won't see and others claim has been either resolved or transcended - racism.

It surely would not seem bizarre, therefore, to the author of The Souls of Black Folk that, in the hundredth year since the publication of his great book about the permanence of race and the absence of true democracy in America, countless millions of Whites have professed utter shock to learn that the (presumably) last racial bigot left in public life was the GOP Majority Leader of the United States Senate. If history thrice repeated is farce, one may reliably guess that the founding editor of this magazine would view as the apex of fraud the spectacle of George W. Bush in the role of Abraham Lincoln solemnly invoking the liberal race relations ideals of the early GOP. In the name of the party, the presidency and all the aspirations for a color-blind 21st century America, the White House serves up the maladroit Senator Trent Lott as the GOP St. Sabastian in one week, only to deplore race as an element in access to higher education as divisive and un-American but a few weeks later.

The Souls of Black Folk contains such an abundance of political and economic relevancy to our contemporary dystopia that William Edward Burghardt Du Bois dead seems a more discerning observer than several panels of live television talking heads combined. One hundred years after its publication on April 18, 1903, his canonical volume of 14 essays remains indispensable not only to an understanding of the history of race and democracy in America, but as a worthy companion to meditations on the global prospects of racial, religious and cultural comity in this new century. In the main, Du Bois' prediction about the centennial paramountcy of race was to be sadly fulfilled in the fastening on of White supremacy in Asia, Africa and the United States by the First decade of the 1900s. Consequently, during the last third of the 20th century, one of the great social and political challenges was the repair of racial injustices and the satisfaction of color-coded aspirations in the aftermath of overthrown European empires and dismantled apartheid regimes. Above all, it was its depiction and diagnosis of the condition of Blackness in a democracy distorted by White skin privilege that inscribed Du Bois' text with an incomparable analytical strength.

The once tragic tension of the African American's sense of two-ness - of "unreconciled strivings" - of being "an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts ...two warring ideals in one dark body" - is captured in The Souls of Black Folk with such plaintive truth that it has served as catechism for generations of dark-skinned Americans. But we would disserve the message were we to overlook its full meaning, for that good Hegelian Du Bois also outlined a higher synthesis in which the divided self merges with other racial selves. "In this merging," Du Bois writes, the African American "wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. 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." Here was the concept of multi-culturalism in embryo 100 years ago.

Du Bois foretold a racializing of poverty in America - the putting of an indelible Black face to failure - that not only would preclude broad-based commitment to economic remediation for people of color, but vastly complicate the possibility of any national politics that seriously addresses the maldistribution of wealth. Yet it was not at all apparent in the beginning how far Du Bois would travel down a road of dissent and admonition leading ultimately to an economic and political apostasy that caused him to be purged for a time from the memory of most of his countrywomen and men. He had, after all, made his debut as an academic social reformer.

As Du Bois confidently explained in 1897 to the American Academy of Political and Social Science, "the world was thinking wrong about race because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation." It was as simple as that. To be sure, Du Bois was never so naive as to suppose that racial discrimination could be abolished solely through cutting-edge scholarship. But he remained convinced for a considerable time that profound social changes could be accomplished by appealing to American values of decency, equality of opportunity and the permanent possibility of renewal and progress, and to the explicit or implicit protections under the federal constitution. For him, civil rights and race relations continued to be largely questions of education, individual and group character, intellectual remonstrance, and a resilient optimism that law and politics would eventually shift in favor of his cause.