Political Companions to Great American Authors

Nick Bromell, Nick Bromell

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813174938
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Literary scholars and historians have long considered W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) an extremely influential writer and a powerful cultural critic. The author of more than one hundred books, hundreds of published articles, and founding editor of the NAACP journal The Crisis, Du Bois has been widely studied for his profound insights on the politics of race and class in America. An activist as well as a scholar, Du Bois proclaimed, "I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy."

In A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, Nick Bromell assembles essays from both new and established scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore Du Bois's contributions to American political thought. The contributors establish a conceptual context within which to read the author, revealing how richly and variously he engaged with the aesthetic and theological modalities of political thinking and action. This volume further reveals how Du Bois's work challenges and revises contemporary political theory, providing commentary on the author's strengths and limitations as a theorist for the twenty-first century. In doing so, it helps readers gain an understanding of how Du Bois's work and life continue to stimulate lively and constructive debate about the theory and practice of democracy in America.

I

Du Bois and Political Philosophy

1

W. E. B. Du Bois

Black Radical Liberal

Charles W. Mills

The distinctive features of the black experience in modernity—the original categorization of blacks as a “slave race,” Ham’s grandchildren, and the continuing post-Emancipation imprint of this stigma on the black body in Africa and the African Diaspora—raise a challenge for the inherited categories and frameworks of Western political theory. Can an apparatus generally presuming free and equal citizenship and, even more fundamentally, equal recognized moral status, be adapted to the political agenda of those humans so differently related to both? Can it be adopted as is, or does it need to be fundamentally modified, or should it simply be rejected outright?¹

Varying in its answers to these questions, what has come to be called “Afro-modern political thought” covers a wide range of political alternatives, united on the mission of overcoming racial subordination—“the regimes of white supremacy”—but divided on the diagnoses of its workings and the most effective prescriptions for its elimination. Michael Dawson’s well-known taxonomy offers the following listing: radical egalitarianism, disillusioned liberalism, black Marxism, black nationalism, black feminism, black conservatism. Of course, divergences in the interpretation of these positions (even without the qualifying adjective) necessarily introduce a significant element of uncertainty and boundary fuzziness in determining their content, which is only exacerbated when the “black” is brought into the semantic equation. How does racial subordination modify the crucial terms and theoretical logics of political ideologies predicated on racial equality, or “racelessness”? Is what is produced by the synthesis still going to be recognizable by its genealogy as legitimately liberal, Marxist, nationalist, feminist, conservative? So the investigation into what a “black” political philosophy would be will necessarily have ramifications for the cartography of “white” political philosophies also, perhaps producing seismic shifts in our perception of the terrain they have been claiming to be mapping.²

W. E. B. Du Bois was the Afro-modern incarnate, and he is uncontroversially its greatest and most accomplished representative. “Talented Tenth” elitist, democrat, Eurocentric snob, celebrant of the folk tradition, integrationist, separatist, Marxist, black nationalist, Stalinist, radical democrat, prophetic pragmatist—the list of possible and actual descriptions of Du Bois’s political identity is long and contradictory. Throughout his extended and extraordinarily productive activist and scholarly life, he engaged critically and increasingly radically with white liberalism and white Marxism, black nationalism, black conservatism, and early black feminism. In Michael Hanchard’s characterization of one main purpose of black political thought, Du Bois “situate[d] racism and race-making at the core of the projects associated with Western modernity … [that] consequently have affected many societies and civilizations, not only black peoples…. [thereby exploring] the implications of racial domination for the epistemic frames, definitions, and modes of classifications for politics, polity, and society in the vocabulary and lexicon of the Western political tradition.”³

In the process, Du Bois developed a comprehensive worldview with multidisciplinary sources and multidisciplinary implications that even now, more than a half a century after his death, the American academy, as Cornel West points out, is “just not ready” to “assimilate,” “incorporate,” and “render intelligible,” because they so profoundly challenge scholarly orthodoxies. Ironically, Du Bois may be both “the most contemporary figure in the twenty-first century for us” and the one who for that very reason has until lately been most thoroughly ignored by mainstream scholarship.⁴

Fortunately, things are changing. Aldon Morris’s recent The Scholar Denied makes the strongest case yet for the long-standing claim of many black sociologists that Du Bois should be seen as the real father of American sociology, not Robert Park. Historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds acknowledge his influence in their entry in Cambridge University Press’s Critical Perspectives on Empire series, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, as do “critical” international relations theorists Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam in their coedited Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line. In addition, the new body of work on slavery, American capitalism, and the global economy by such writers as Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist, and Sven Beckert surely vindicates Du Bois’s line of analysis, even when he is not explicitly cited.⁵

The aim of this essay and this volume—along with two recent important books by Robert Gooding-Williams and Lawrie Balfour—is to catalyze a comparable recognition of Du Bois’s theoretical achievements in political philosophy. I will begin by establishing the racialized nature of Western political philosophy—certainly modern political philosophy, but possibly including the classical tradition also—and the consequent need for the black rewriting of its “epistemic frames, definitions, and modes of classifications.” I will then turn to an overview of some of the key themes in Du Bois’s version of this rewriting to make a case for Du Bois as being—at least for a significant stretch of his long intellectual and political career—a black radical liberal, simultaneously engaging with and critiquing the most successful ideology of modernity, and the one that has been the most consistent reference point for black political thinkers.

Racism and Western Political Philosophy

Philosophy, the oldest of the Western humanities, has—perhaps more than any other discipline—presented itself as a dialogue among “talking heads,” an image literalized in the iconography of white marble busts of the classical Greek and Roman figures who are its founding fathers. Elsewhere, the body might make a difference, but not here in the world of pure thought and supposedly disincarnate thinkers. But as the pioneers of the second wave of feminist theory showed, these heads were indeed solidly attached to male bodies, and “fatherhood” was not a gender-neutral parenting but a patriarchal one. Such early texts as Susan Moller Okin’s Women in Western Political Thought and Lorenne Clark and Lynda Lange’s The Sexism of Social and Political Theory documented the routinely sexist assumptions in virtually all the canonical male philosophers, stretching back to antiquity, and the relegation of women to a functional reproductive role. As a result, gender bias in the putatively sexless world of philosophy is today a far less contested notion than it was thirty years ago.⁶

But if the maleness of the founding fathers has been grudgingly established as relevant, the significance of their whiteness remains more controversial, and there are far fewer texts on philosophy and race. One obvious explanation of this asymmetry is demographic: the whiteness of the profession (about 97 percent) is more pronounced than its maleness (about 80 percent). Gradually, however, a growing body of work has focused on race, attaining sufficient quantity and visibility to have earned an official designation: critical philosophy of race. This literature has explored various issues—the metaphysics of race, race and social epistemology, race and ethics, the phenomenological and existential realities of race, and others—but for our purposes its most crucial research focus has been on race and the history of philosophy, especially political philosophy. Its central question has been: Assuming that race is constructed, when does race enter the world and how does it affect Western philosophy?⁷

Two main competing answers have emerged. One, a short periodization, argues that race and racism are products of modernity or, at the earliest, of the late medieval epoch. Of course, this view does not maintain that the premodern world was free of human bigotry and prejudice of various kinds—for example, ethnocentrism, color prejudice, xenophobia, religious hostilities, etc. But these did not, it is asserted, take a “racial” form, since race as a social category did not yet exist. Thus, racism as a body of thought or a set of discriminatory institutions and practices did not exist either. Nell Painter’s The History of White People, for example, begins: “Were there ‘white’ people in antiquity? … People with light skin certainly existed well before our own times. But did anyone think they were ‘white’ or that their character related to their color? No, for neither the idea of race nor the idea of ‘white’ people had been invented, and people’s skin color did not carry useful meaning.”⁸

Du Bois himself endorsed this short periodization of race. In his famous essay “The Souls of White Folk,” he writes: “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth.”⁹ Similarly, in The Negro, he claims:

The world has always been familiar with black men, who represent one of the most ancient of human stocks. Of the ancient world gathered about the Mediterranean, they formed a part and were viewed with no surprise or dislike, because this world saw them come and go and play their part with other men…. The modern world, in contrast, knows the Negro chiefly as a bond slave in the West Indies and America. Add to this the fact that the darker races in other parts of the world have, in the last four centuries, lagged behind … Europe, and we face to-day a widespread assumption throughout the dominant world that color is a mark of inferiority.¹⁰

So according to Du Bois, racism and antiblack prejudices are modern phenomena, rooted in racial slavery and imperial European domination. Although sexism and male gender domination can be argued to have shaped and distorted Western philosophy, including Western political philosophy, from its inception, the same cannot be said of racism and white racial domination, since they did not even exist in the period.¹¹

However, this short periodization has had its challengers. Even if “races” were not demarcated by skin color in antiquity, Denise McCoskey points out, this does not mean that races constructed by some other criteria did not exist. Benjamin Isaac contends in his The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity that the conventional scholarly wisdom on this subject is quite wrong (in part because of a problematic initial formulation of racism); he argues that the belief in hierarchically ordered groups with “physical, mental, and moral” “collective traits … which are constant and unalterable by human will” should count as racism. By this criterion, he judges Aristotle to be the progenitor of Western racism, given that his “natural slaves” are ethnically marked as non-Greeks. So even if we do not yet have a white/nonwhite racial hierarchy, we do have a Greek/non-Greek racial hierarchy, which becomes a more general civilized/barbarian racial hierarchy that influences other famous writers in Greco-Roman antiquity. Insofar as Aristotle was and is regarded as one of the towering figures in the Western political tradition, Isaac’s verdict, if vindicated, would demonstrate that racism in some sense, if not the color-coded modern sense, does indeed shape Western political philosophy from the start.¹²

Nor do all historians of the subject believe that there was no specifically antiblack racism before modernity. In a later conference volume edited by Isaac and other like-minded (that is, long periodization) scholars, David Goldenberg argues that the negative associations of blackness in Greco-Roman color symbolism were the source of a differentiated antipathy—deeper and more enduring than that targeting other groups—toward “Ethiopians” (the term used at the time for Africans in general). And from the third century onward, he notes, Christianity was marked by “the identification of the devil and demons as Ethiopians.” Goldenberg concludes: “Antiblack sentiment seems to be different from the hostile thinking encountered against other peoples. Against others, it is for what they do; against Blacks it is for what they are. And what they are, that is their blackness, is found to be objectionable because (a) it most visibly indicates their otherness, their somatic dissonance, and (b) its symbolic value connotes a host of negative notions…. The disparagement of black skin color began in classical antiquity, reached a height in Christian literature and in the literature of Christian societies.”¹³

Contra Du Bois, then, medieval Christendom had a long history of negative imagery of “Ethiopians” (along with Jews, Muslims, and Mongols), who were among the “monstrous races” routinely depicted in medieval art. In her Saracens, Demons, & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, Debra Strickland comments on the “interchangeability of demons and Ethiopians” in the iconography of the period: “[Ethiopians] were in fact a conflation of all Blacks living in sub-Egyptian Africa, a practice that began during the Classical period…. In effect, the blackness of the Ethiopians obliterated their humanity, paving the way for the abstract understanding necessary for ethnic stereotyping. That is, Ethiopians were transformed from living humans into symbols, setting a dangerous precedent for the mind-set that ultimately helped justify the social discrimination and intolerance of not only dark-skinned people but also other enemy groups within medieval Christian socie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I. Du Bois and Political Philosophy
• Part II. Du Bois, Politics, and Poetry
• Part III. Du Bois in the Space between the Known and the Imagined
• Part IV. Du Bois and the Challenges of Black Politics
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index