W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept

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Thanks to Lawrie Balfour, Bruce Baum, Lisa Disch, John Medearis, and David Roediger for critiquing early versions of this article. Thanks also to Ange-Marie Hancock, Shatema Threadcraft, and the other participants of the “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Scientific Study of Race” conference.

Notes

1. For examples of this influence, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

2. Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 29. A sample of articlese ngaging Appiah's thesis includes Houston Baker, “Caliban's Triple Play,” in “Race,” Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); William J. Moses, “W.E.B. Du Bois's ‘The Conservation of Races’ and Its Context: Idealism, Conservatism, and Hero Worship,” Massachusetts Review 34, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 275–294; Lucius Outlaw, “‘Conserve’ Races? In Defense of W.E.B. Du Bois,” in W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics, ed. Bernard W. Bell, Emily Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge, 1996); John Shuford, “Four Du Boisian Contributions to Critical Race Theory,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 37, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 301–337; Paul C. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).

3. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “The Economy of Desedimentation: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Discourses of the Negro,” Callaloo 19, no. 1 (1996): 78–93.

4. Tommy L. Lott, The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 60.

5. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” The American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, No. 2 (Washington, D.C.: American Negro Academy, 1897), 7. Although how races differ precisely, he is unsure. “That there are differences between the white and Black races is certain, but just what those differences are is known to none with an approach to accuracy.” W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Study of the Negro Problems,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 9 (January 1898), 19.

6. Du Bois, “Conservation of Races,” 11.

7. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classic, 1969), 45.

8. George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race,” Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 1 (1994): 4–16; Adolph L. Reed, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford, 1997), 120–124.

9. Yet as Thomas Holt argues, even the conception of race articulated in “Conservation” already hints at the socially and historically constructed conception of race Du Bois articulates in his later works: “W.E.B. Du Bois's Archaeology of Race: Re-Reading ‘The Conservation of Races,’” in W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy, Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

10. Appiah, for example, spends seven pages discussing “Conservation” and scarcely two on Du Bois's crucial 1940 book Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995). For other analyses that overemphasize “Conservation” and slight Du Bois's mature texts, see Bernard R. Boxill, “Du Bois on Cultural Pluralism,” in Bell et al.,Du Bois on Race and Culture; Tommy L. Lott, “Du Bois on the Invention of Race,” Philosophical Forum 24, no. 1–3 (1992–93): 166–187; Reed, Du Bois and American Political Thought, chap. 7.

11. The following argument sharpens the distinctions between these periods for analytical reasons. The mature Du Bois, for example, while embarrassed by his earlier writings on race, thought them more inadequate than wrong, and one can still detect Lamarckian traces (e.g., use of the word “blood”) in mature writings such as vMiscegenation,” in Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961 Herbert Aptheker, ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). For arguments that emphasize continuity in Du Bois's thought, see William E. Cain, “From Liberalism to Communism: The Political Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois,” in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); and Anthony Monteiro, “Being an African in the World: The Du Boisian Epistemology,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March 2000): 220–234.

12. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 351–52.

13. W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 67.

14. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), 7.

15. Du Bois, The Negro, 13. His use of the term “mulatto” bears resemblance to contemporary concepts such as “hybridity” and “mestiza.” However, Du Bois does not embrace mixed race identity as preferable to Black identity nor does he argue that race is “beyond Black and white” because we are all mixed. For Du Bois, a bipolar racial order operates despite the mulatto or hybrid character of humanity. This is evident in his own autobiography, for Du Bois was of mixed African and European descent yet he never seeks to identify as mixed or multiracial, given that American society defines him unequivocally as a Negro. See Dusk of Dawn, chap. 5.

16. Du Bois, The Negro, 82.

17. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 116; Lewis, Biography of a Race, 174.

18. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 117.

19. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 141.

20. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 137–138.

21. For an extended discussion of the two worlds and the cross-class alliance in Du Bois's work, see Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, chapter one.

22. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 700–701.

23. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: Negroes in the Making of America (Boston: Stratford, 1924), 137.

24. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Folk: Then and Now (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thompson, 1975 [1939]), 382.

25. W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry Into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History (New York: Viking Press, 1947), 116.

26. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Apology,” reprinted in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, David Levering Lewis, ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 215.

27. Du Bois, “Apology,” 215.

28. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 152–53.

29. Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 230.

30. One difference between Du Bois and Marx is that, as I suggest below, the purpose of constructing a race-for-itself is not to abolish all races, as a class-for-itself would abolish all classes, but to abolish specifically the power of the white world. Du Bois never calls for the withering away of the dark world.

31. W.E.B. Du Bois, “A Negro Nation Within the Nation” (1935), in Andrew G. Paschal, ed., A W.E.B. Du Bois Reader (New York: Collier, 1971), 73.

32. Matthew Pratt Guterl makes this error in The Color of Race in America 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

33. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Negro and Social Reconstruction” (1936), in Du Bois, Against Racism, 144; “Negro Nation Within the Nation;” Dusk of Dawn, chap. 7; The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: International, 1968), chap. 17. See also Thomas C. Holt, “The Political Uses of Alienation: W.E.B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903–1940,” American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (June 1990): 301–323.

34. Du Bois,Dusk of Dawn, 149.

35. Du Bois, Black Folk, 383.

36. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 456.

37. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford, 1987); Kenneth Mostern, “Postcolonialism after W.E.B. Du Bois,” Rethinking Marxism 12, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 61–80.

38. Du Bois, “Negro and Social Reconstruction,” 150.

39. Du Bois, “Negro and Social Reconstruction,” 156; Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 311.

40. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 169.

41. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Problem of Humanity” (1944), in Paschal, W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, 370.

42. James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’… And Other Lies,” Essence April 1984, 90–92; David Roediger, Toward the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994); Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996).