The Souls of White Folk

African American Writers Theorize Whiteness

Veronica T. Watson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781496801487
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts that says African American writers retreated from issues of "race" when they wrote about whiteness, Veronica T. Watson instead identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names "the literature of white estrangement." In chapters that theorize white double consciousness (W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt), white womanhood and class identity (Zora Neale Hurston and Frank Yerby), and the socio-spatial subjectivity of southern whites during the civil rights era (Melba Patillo Beals), Watson explores the historically situated theories and analyses of whiteness provided by the literature of white estrangement from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. She argues that these texts are best understood as part of a multipronged approach by African American writers to challenge and dismantle white supremacy in the United States and demonstrates that these texts have an important place in the growing field of critical whiteness studies.

Chapter One
“A FORM OF INSANITY WHICH OVERTAKES WHITE MEN”

W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt,
and the Specter of White Double Consciousness

What is most terrible is that American white men are not prepared to
believe my version of the story, to believe that it happened. In order to
avoid believing that, they have to set up in themselves a fantastic system
of evasions, denials, and justifications, which system is about to destroy
their grasp of reality, which is another way of saying their moral sense.
—James Baldwin, “The White Problem”

The issue at stake is to find a way by which fear is abandoned and men
are free to act responsibly as citizens in the first instance and as citizens
committed to values that are moral and ethical in the second instance.
—Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois published the now classic The Souls of Black Folk. In the Forethought, he explains that he wrote the book to explore the “problem of the Twentieth Century … the color-line” by “outlin[ing] the two worlds within and without the Veil” (359). In these profound words that begin his treatise, Du Bois signals his primary concern with race—which he understood more as a sociocultural or sociohistorical divide than a biologically based difference between people—in the United States. It was a conversation both timely and daring at the turn of the twentieth century, for in the early 1900s the country was still struggling to understand and constitute its post–Civil War identity. Citizens black and white were struggling to come to terms with the meaning of the sociopolitical revolution that had ended slavery and, however briefly, enabled African American political power, while leaving the mantra of White supremacy intact.

The Souls of Black Folk is a meditation on the social and psychological impact of racial inequality on African Americans. Du Bois writes,

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (364–365)

Double consciousness is one result, perhaps the most pernicious effect, of the color line. It is the two-ness that is born when one’s self-understanding collides with social constructions of race that limit one’s ability to actualize one’s vision of the self. Double consciousness leads to the wasting of talents and energies: talents that are underutilized or ignored because of the social designation and/or skin color of people of African descent; energies that are expended in anger, frustration, or despair or in attempts to excel in a system designed to prevent the advancement of a particular group based solely on racial classification. The racial caste system of the United States has “wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds” of African Americans (366). Du Bois argues that, for Black Americans, the lack of full acceptance and valuing of all aspects of their identity is the catalyst for a psychic rupture that is a source of enduring and often debilitating pain.

Yet, when Du Bois relates the anecdote of exchanging visiting cards with girls at his school as a child, he also acknowledges the possibility for double consciousness to be a source of protection for the black subject. As “one girl, a tall newcomer” refuses his card “peremptorily, with a glance,” the young Du Bois understands himself as different, understands that he is not accepted, not recognized by the White world (364). He sees “the veil” that separates White and Black America and knows that he is not considered a human equal by many on the other side of the divide. It is a realization that initially fills him with the desire to out-achieve his white peers rather than tear down the veil. For a precious short while he holds the White world “in common contempt,” living “above it in a region of blue sky” (364). Although he has been initiated into an awareness of a racialized world, double consciousness protects his fragile ego and allows him to be secure in his own humanity and to believe in his own worth. Soon enough, however, his desire for all that Whiteness offers overshadows his disdain, and he is left with full knowledge of his marginalization and the limitations many would place upon him due to his socially ascribed race.

But what of the little White girl who refused his visiting card? How had the color line shaped her psyche? If double consciousness is a psychologically and emotionally traumatic result of the racial divide, what effects does the color line have on White group psychology? While central to the literature of white estrangement, these questions have only been marginally engaged by contemporary scholars of critical whiteness studies. Instead, scholarship from this field has produced important analyses of the ways in which Whiteness has been reproduced, naturalized, and deployed during various historical moments. The field has also illuminated how efforts to rationalize and maintain White sociopolitical supremacy have intersected with a variety of other rhetorical and disciplinary efforts to legitimate racial difference and hierarchy, such as those coming from science, religion, philosophy, and economics.¹ However, Du Bois’s groundbreaking work on the effects of racism on Black Americans urges me to engage Whiteness from a different angle. I want to ask not only “How have White people benefited from the racial politics of this country?” I also want to understand what psychological, spiritual, and emotional effects the color line has produced in White Americans.²

The concept of double consciousness is, of course, not original to Du Bois. In his book W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought, Adolph L. Reed usefully outlines the range of intellectuals and artists who utilized the term prior to and during Du Bois’s lifetime.³ But unlike Henry B. Wonham, author of “Howells, Du Bois, and the Effect of ‘Common-Sense’: Race, Realism, and Nervousness in An Imperative Duty and The Souls of Black Folk,” who stresses the “rich cultural exchange [that happened] between writers on opposite sides of the color line,” Reed concludes that “attempts to establish direct links … would require very elaborate arguments and layers of supposition and presumption. Nor would they—even if arguably successful in establishing some plausible, though remote tie—shed much light either on Du Bois’s thinking or his relation to his contemporary world” (Wonham, 129; Reed, 105). Tracing lines of direct influence might, indeed, prove nearly impossible, but there is no doubt that a fuller appreciation of Du Bois’s reworking of double consciousness is possible when one considers the full range of contexts in which it was being used at the turn of the twentieth century. The disciplines of philosophy, history, psychology, and various fields of medicine were all exploring the concept of a “divided self,” if not specifically appropriating the term. Indeed, as Dickson Bruce points out in “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,” the concept had been “the subject of rather extensive experimentation and debate for at least seventy-five years” by the time Du Bois reframed it, and the great public intellectual was undoubtedly attracted to the discourse because of how richly dynamic, malleable, and contested the term was (303). It is also likely, however, that Du Bois was drawn to this particular cultural conversation because of the ways in which the discourse of double consciousness was being racialized, particularly by the white medical community of his time, to exclude people of color. Writings about double consciousness provide ample evidence that modernity was being framed and debated by white intellectuals and cultural elites as if considerations of racial and social justice were inconsequential; their work evidences a willed ignorance of the significant role that race would play in either accelerating or arresting American progress. The fact that the meaning of “double consciousness” was not yet fixed, and that there was still space in which to intervene, shape, and reconceptualize it, meant that it could be made to serve a different agenda. Thus, Du Bois’s rearticulation of double consciousness in terms of the experiences of African-descended people was one way of challenging the narrow and regressive conceptualizations of race of his time. This haunting connection between Du Bois’s work and the medical, psychological, and philosophical theories of white Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that there is much to be gained from reconsidering Du Bois’s interest in White double consciousness.⁴

Writing around the same time but at the end of his career, author Charles Chesnutt was also thinking about double consciousness. Two years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, Chesnutt’s final novel, The Colonel’s Dream, was released to mixed reviews and poor sales. Yet, the white life novel is an extraordinary literary extension of many of the deliberations Du Bois was working out early in his career. Like Du Bois, Chesnutt was thinking about how the racial past continues to shape the present and future of the nation. He was concerned with the ways in which the atrocities and injustices of slavery in America were being whitewashed and forgotten in the name of sectional reconciliation, and he was outraged that people of color were still being discounted and largely prohibited from becoming productive, contributing citizens and intellectuals. Chesnutt also believed, as did Du Bois, that “the problem of the color line” was not strictly or even primarily located with Black Americans (Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 359). As such, Chesnutt sought to understand the sources of white anxiety around race and the emotions and habits of mind that explained racial animosity, white violence, and white indifference to the suffering of people of color. With a solid belief that through his writing he could “head a determined, organized crusade against” the “unjust” racial caste system of the United States, at the end of his writing career he joined the public discourse surrounding White double consciousness (Journals, 140).

Du Bois and Chesnutt problematized the concept of double consciousness on at least two levels. First, they both entered the cultural conversation about the “divided self” by engaging intellectuals of their time on their own terms, that is, by thinking about the sources and implications of White double consciousness. To appreciate their interventions at this level necessitates that we engage the explanations of neurasthenia that were being advanced by the white medical community in the early twentieth century. Here we can discern, as Du Bois and Chesnutt did before us, an ephemeral but traceable anxiety that hints at the dis-ease of Whiteness in an already pluralist nation. The second approach they deployed to transform the discourse around White double consciousness was to challenge the assertion that white social, cultural, and political elites were better suited than others to lead the United States into the next period of sociopolitical development. Du Bois and Chesnutt framed White double consciousness as a malaise—one that threatened not only the individual but also national progress and development. In both cases the authors exposed the racialized assumptions and ideologies at work in the discourse of White double consciousness and demonstrated the folly of concentrating power in the hands of a group who, by virtue of a medical discourse that they had advanced, had already acknowledged their inability to adapt to the challenges of modern life.

By the late 1800s a new diagnosis, nervous diathesis, dominated medical discourse in the United States. Affecting many of the most recognized artists and intellectuals of the time, neurasthenia, as it was more commonly known, was a supple and malleable disorder that encompassed a wide range of symptoms under its conceptual umbrella—from insomnia and irritability to chronic headaches and epilepsy, sometimes culminating in paralysis and insanity. Men and women, young and old, were equally susceptible; those who were well established and those still striving to become members of the cultural elite. Neurasthenia seemed to affect almost everyone who was awake and paying attention to the rapid cultural shifts happening in American society at the end of the nineteenth century. By the time of Du Bois’s publication of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, the condition had become a cultural marker of distinction and refinement. For people of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, being diagnosed as a neurasthenic meant that one was a sensitive and reflective person, albeit one who was (understandably) having difficulty navigating the changing norms and expectations of modern American life.

Dr. George Miller Beard perhaps did more to advance neurasthenia as a medical diagnosis and a cultural term than anyone else. A neurologist by training and practice, he began to explore neurasthenia when, “like other neurologists of his day, [he] … discovered that a large proportion of his patients complained not of clearly-defined ailments, but of vague and unclassifiable symptoms, of morbid anxiety, unaccountable fatigue, irrational fears, of erratic sexual behavior” (Rosenberg, 247). After further study, he classified a whole range of ailments under the term “nervous diathesis,” claiming that they all were diseases of the “central or peripheral nervous system” (Beard, 25). Like medieval formulations of the humors that were believed to regulate human temperament and mental and physical health, the nervous system at the turn of the twentieth century was understood to be the seat of bodily, and thus psychological, well-being. When the system was in balance, being expended and replenished appropriately, the body and mind could maintain health. But when the system was overtaxed and unable to sustain all the demands that were placed upon it, physical and mental deterioration could result. Thus, neurasthenia asserted a connection between the body, the environment, and the psyche—a way of thinking about human psychology (and physiology) that gained significant credibility under Sigmund Freud. Unlike Freud, however, these early medical doctors believed that the stresses of a changing modern society—anything from technological advances like the advent of the telegraph and steam power to rapid shifts in social class—could trigger the disorder in certain classes of people. Once afflicted, patients could anticipate lifelong management of the disease in an effort to limit relapses and further debilitation. This was Beard’s signature contribution to the field of neurology, advanced by doctors around the world until well into the 1920s. Beard published widely (if not repetitively) on the topic, including his tour de force, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881). He intended this last contribution to be the most accessible, and he wrote it for the audience of everyday Americans who wanted to know more about the disease that seemed to define their age.

Neurasthenia achieved social and medical ascendancy in part because many of the most influential social, cultural, and intellectual leaders of the early modern era—including Theodore Roosevelt, Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry Adams—all suffered from the disorder (Lutz, 15). Yet, while its debilitating effects certainly could be disruptive, neurasthenia was never stigmatized, and thus there was never any sense that the disease automatically made one unfit for leadership. In fact, Beard claimed just the opposite in American Nervousness, arguing that neurasthenia made one significantly more suited to leadership roles because it evidenced one’s superior intellectual and emotional constitution. It externalized and made visible, in effect, the internal, superior lineage and “blood” of the White cultural elite. Thus, nervousness became one’s claim to a right of rule, a right to sit at the tables where America’s future was being envisioned.

It is all the more significant, but perhaps not surprising, then, that Beard’s conceptualization of neurasthenia was heavily influenced by contemporary understandings of and biases about race, class, and gender. This was so much the case that Tom Lutz comments in his seminal study of neurasthenia, American Nervousness, 1903, “The class, race, and gender biases encoded in the neurasthenic [diagnosis] demonstrate that socially constructed practices and positions determined who, how, and why one becomes diseased” (20). Neurasthenia was a comfortable companion to the scientific racism that dominated nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectual discourse, a time when social Darwinists were still arguing that “lesser” races should be allowed to “naturally” decline so that the fitter Caucasian race could thrive, biologists were using cranial measurements to explain the purported lagging intellectual development of “Negroes,” and scholars in the nascent field of sociology were classifying humankind into superior, and, of course, inferior, races. Neurasthenia simply built upon the commonsense understandings of racial difference that had been elevated to scientific “fact” by this time. Beard did not question white American superiority in his field of neurology any more than the majority of physicians in the 1930s and 1940s doubted that the blood of white and black Americans should be segregated in blood banks.⁵ In fact, the racist foundation of his conception of neurasthenia is explicit in his explanation of who is susceptible to the disease: “The fine organization is distinguished from the coarse by fine, soft hair, delicate skin, nicely chiselled features, small bones, tapering extremities, and frequently by a muscular system comparatively small and feeble” (26). As Toni Morrison has argued of the Africanist presence in American literature—that it is often a backdrop by which white characters come to know themselves—this description gains its force of persuasion by an implied contrast with an unnamed Other who is figured as antithetical to the White subject (Playing, 51). The “fine, soft hair, delicate skin” and “nicely chiselled features” are implicitly compared with races and ethnicities for whom this physical description would not generally apply. Later in American Nervousness Beard explicitly excludes the “North American barbarian” (Native Americans) and the “negro,” by virtue of their “immature mind[s]” and “savagery,” from those who can be affected by nervous diathesis. His reason: their presumed inferiority (130–131). As a scientist, the most he would allow is that as the “less civilized” people of the world became more educated and refined, there would likely be a concomitant increase in nervous disorders among them, too.

Thus, race is a subtext for Beard’s conceptualization of American nervousness. Importantly, it also became a mechanism for diagnosing the disease. Any physician who recognized neurasthenia as a legitimate medical diagnosis also, as a matter of course, bought into the discourse of White superiority. African Americans might be afflicted with a number of physiological and psychological ailments, but they were not often diagnosed as neurasthenic.⁶ Beard’s understanding of nervous diathesis reflected as well as shaped the racial discourse of his time, reinforcing White supremacy as a “common-sense” approach to understanding the modern world. Culturally, the disease carved out an imaginative space within which only White Americans could exist, leading the disease to be reappropriated as a marker of social and cultural elevation. It also supported a vision of White America as uniquely conditioned for the work of reshaping American society and best suited for the work of moving America into her promising future.

Beard believed that neurasthenia was a consequence of modern advances and the freedom of a youthful and unfettered America. Charles Rosenberg argues in his introduction to the 1972 republication of Beard’s American Nervousness that “Beard’s doctrine of nervous exhaustion was … a nationalistic concept” that essentially celebrated the superiority of American social, cultural, and industrial accomplishments (n.p.). However, those advances often required the rethinking of established systems of belief and ways of being in the world. Not only were new technologies emerging that brought the world into much closer intellectual and physical proximity, but expectations about work and leisure, religion and spirituality, success and failure, the roles of men and women and of black and white citizens were also, consequently, changing rapidly. On the heels of the Civil War and the ending of slavery, newly enfranchised African Americans were being educated, asserting their political voices and rights, and migrating from the South in numbers previously unknown; women, who had become much more socially and politically active in the early to mid-nineteenth century, were continuing to transform themselves through their embrace of the “New Woman” ideal; and immigration, urban population growth, and industrialization were transforming the focuses of power in the United States in previously unimagined ways. It was a time of tremendous flux, and what nervous exhaustion evidenced as much as anything was the inability of White Americans to adapt to and work through those changes. Without the veneer of White supremacist assumptions, nervousness begins look like what it actually was, a psychological infirmity that manifested among people who were having trouble negotiating the demands and realities of social change. The discourse of neurasthenia, however, rhetorically and culturally masked the inflexibility of Whiteness. Without it, the tenets of White racial superiority would have faced serious ideological challenges. People might have begun to wonder why America’s future was being entrusted to the guardianship of such a distraught White elite.

At least one physician broke ranks and advanced a theory of neurasthenia that read it as social debilitation rather than distinction. Dissatisfied with the “multiform variations” that medicine had settled on in its understanding of neurasthenia and “seeking to fathom” the pathology of the disease more completely, neurologist Dr. Joh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Capitalization
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Naming
• Chapter One “A Form of Insanity Which Overtakes White Men”
• Chapter Two “Shaping Herself into A Dutiful Wife”
• Chapter Three “Occupied Territory”
• Conclusion “No White and Legal Heir”
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index