I thought this was going to be a case where my notes were wiped out, but actually, I began using an old notebook to coordinate my notes for this project and get organized. Then I switched to a new notebook for notes, since I sometimes do those in my travels, and the old notebook is a spiral with a jagged end, though my master list of what I’ve read is still in the old notebook. I even started writing ‘it looks like I didn’t cite too much out of this book,’ before flipping through the old spiral notebook and finding some notes I had taken.
This is good, even though it means this writeup will take a lot longer, because this was a great work that is worth spending some time on revisiting.
In school, mainly survey classes in high school and college, DuBois is often contrasted with Booker T Washington, to whom a chapter of this book is addressed. What’s generally taught is that Washington’s basic premise was that the black man should keep his head down and go along to get along, DuBois instead insisted on basic humanity and self-respect requiring political (and indeed economic) equality with whites. That’s a drastic oversimplification, but that sentence would have gotten at least 8 of 10 on my high school American History exam.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for American 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 to the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (9)
It doesn’t take long for DuBois to note the hollow aspect of a freedom for former slaves that denied them their chance at material wealth, even the fair share of the material wealth they themselves had created with generations of unpaid labor:
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships (13)
Part of DuBois argument, contrary to the high school history narrative above, is that for America’s own sake it ought to do right by its African citizens:
There are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes. (16)
Call me jaded, but I’m not sanguine about any attempt to compel Americans who believe in exceptionalism, especially those with political power, to live up to their own rhetoric. DuBois obviously thought it worthwhile (and it’s part of what makes his work so convincing,) as it’s the basis for a lot of his discussions:
The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white, would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. (35)
I know that DuBois later embraced socialism and communism, because that was portrayed as his greatest sin in the textbooks, but this book did not strike me as particularly virulently Marxist or socialist. DuBois certainly understood the economic aspects of being at the bottom of the heap, though it’s hard to see how one could make a serious critique of racism without also addressing the impetus behind imperialism and slavery.
The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race-prejudices, which keep brown and black men in their “places,” we are coming to regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. (77-8)
He consistently harps on the material conditions:
Above all, the cabins are crowded. We have come to associate crowding with homes in cities almost exclusively. This is primarily because we have so little accurate knowledge of country life. Here in Dougherty County one may find families of eight and ten occupying one or two rooms, and for every ten rooms of house accommodation for the Negroes there are twenty-five persons. (112)
And has a sophisticated understanding of the real nature of modern capitalism and its relations with economically backward areas:
For we must never forget that the economic system of the South to-day which has succeeded the old régime is not the same system as that of the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their trades-unions, their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather, a copy of that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory acts – the England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of Carlyle…Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of the worst and most unscrupulous men in each community. The crop-lien system which is depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result of shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but it is also the result of cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which can be made by conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime (134-5)
Finally, in spite of all of the above, he still returns to a pluralistic definition of America. I love this point because I always want to resist the notion that the ‘real’ America somehow belongs to the ‘official’ version to which all others must strive and conform.
Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people? (207)
ianuaditis 