Fever dreams: W. E. B. Du Bois and the racial trauma of COVID-19 and lynching

ABSTRACT

In 1899, diphtheria claimed the life of W. E. B. Du Bois’s son, Burghardt. How can Burghardt’s death help us to understand the racialized consequences of the present coronavirus pandemic? This article considers what Du Bois described as the “phantasmagoria” that ensnares racial structures. I examine COVID as the latest iteration of a distinctly racialized American trauma narrated in the grammar of Du Bois’s reflections on disease, extrajudicial killings, and kinship. This fever dream of conflagration and asphyxiation has haunted Black lives since slavery. Du Bois gave meaning to this racial spectre in religious terms as a story of perpetual death but eventual emancipation. By situating Du Bois in relation to the work of Christina Sharpe (2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), this essay ruminates on the orthography of slavery’s inheritances with regard to disease and its symbiotic relationship with lynching. I conclude by considering Du Bois’s invocation to darkwater as a demand for Black healing.

KEYWORDS:

• Trauma
• disease
• lynching
• terrorism
• religion
• W. E. B. Du Bois

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for generous comments from James M. Thomas, Jeffrey Guhin, and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, as well as from the anonymous reviewers. This article also benefited from feedback I received from audience members and other panelists at the Center for Humanities at Tufts University, the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All figures in this paragraph as of 20 October 2020.

2 In Souls ([1903] 2017), Du Bois famously calls Black Americans “the seventh son”.

3 Johns’s publications indicate his Philadelphia office was located a short distance from the Seventh Ward, the location of Du Bois’s study.

4 There is a danger in using the language of biology and pathology to explain race (Thomas and Byrd 2016). Biological metaphors therefore should be viewed as the persuasive language of speech acts which articulate collective injury and seek “reparation and reconstitution” (Alexander 2004, 11). At the same time, “dysgraphia” (Sharpe 2016) places limits on language for telling coherent stories about suffering in slavery’s wake.

5 The subtitle of Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic is or, The Modern Prometheus. The Prometheus myth has inspired many anti-slavery writings.

6 See Hawkins (2019), figure 1.

7 Menzel (2019) has rightfully critiqued the paternalism in Du Bois’s lynching narratives. They indeed reflected a desire to protect a violated Black manhood. Lynching victims were castrated for the alleged charge of making sexual advances toward white women.

8 Data from the APM Research Lab (2020) shows the over-representation of Black deaths relative to their state population size.