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The PROBLEM of the FUTURE World

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................xiIntroduction Rewriting Du Bois's Future.......................11 Race and the Future World...................................212 Beyond War and Peace........................................633 Imagining Africa, Reimagining the World.....................1034 Paradoxes of Loyalty........................................145Notes.........................................................179Bibliography..................................................217Index.........................................................227

Chapter One

W. E. B. Du Bois's Dusk of Dawn (1940) begins with an "Apology." In this brief prefatory section Du Bois justifies his book's unexpected turn, for the imperatives of reflection upon the occasion of his seventieth birthday shifted its generic moorings closer to autobiography than originally anticipated. And autobiographies, he suggests, are often limited by hubris and selective memory. But Du Bois more subtly defends his use of the "concept of race," a term intimately connected to his life story by the book's subtitle, "An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept." At a moment when liberal and radical scholars and activists contended that race was an atavistic category that should be transcended, Du Bois, as he put it later in the book, "rationalize[s] the racial concept and its place in the modern world," retaining it as a social scientific analytic, mode of personal identification, and vehicle for political mobilization. Autobiography, in the end, provides "a way of elucidating the inner meaning and significance of that race problem by explaining it in terms of the one human life that I know best."

Du Bois has since, in a sense, been asked to apologize for his use of race in Dusk of Dawn. K. Anthony Appiah concludes his well-known critique of Du Bois's use of the "race concept" by arguing that despite his claim that Dusk of Dawn represents a move forward, he "lead[s] us back into the now familiar move of substituting a sociohistorical conception of race for the biological one; but that is simply to bury the biological conception below the surface, not to transcend it." Others have set themselves up as Du Bois's apologists, arguing that Dusk of Dawn is an erudite account of the complicated social and political life of race as a "social construction" and convincing argument for the need to continue to mobilize around it in a white supremacist world.

Despite their competing viewpoints, such accounts generally reproduce Du Bois's own assessment that the book represented the maturation of his thinking about race. This chapter instead considers Dusk of Dawn as a window onto his and the world's future in 1940. During the 1930s, as he witnessed both the successes and limitations of New Deal reforms, left activism, and scholarly inquiry, Du Bois had developed a powerful critique of liberalism's and Marxism's inattention to race. Common to the failures of left and liberal projects alike was a belief that new scientific research debunking the category would tear away the veil separating black and nonblack bodies and minds. But racial inequities clearly persisted into the first postracial moment, and Du Bois feared they might even be enhanced in the future if the promise of colorblindness supported by these findings turned into a refusal to see race (and racism) in its various manifestations or enabled its morphology to change. So Du Bois insisted on remaining attuned to the persistence and complexity of race, which remained a central "problem of the future world." As he asked a few years later, "Today as we stand near halfway through a century which has proven the biological theories of unchangeable race differences manifestly false, what difference of action does this call for on our part?"

I explore here Du Bois's account in Dusk of Dawn of how science, as an intellectual endeavor and institutional practice central to modernity, invented and upheld racial categories (and, more to the point, white supremacy) but in certain circumstances could still be used to promote racial justice at both the practical and rhetorical levels. Through his ambivalent portrayal of science and his role as scientist, Du Bois addresses the ways race, as it became destabilized as a concept and lost some of its scientific credibility, also became in some ways more powerful and more insidious through its articulations with and through the market, state policies, and academic discourses. Du Bois was attuned to domestic manifestations of race and to the ways its shifting ontological status was connected with U.S. imperialism.

To gain additional purchase on Du Bois's thinking about race during the early 1940s, I examine his contributions to the journal Phylon, which he edited from 1940 until 1944. I consider the "Apology" he wrote for the journal's first issue and discuss one of Phylon's regular features, "A Chronicle of Race Relations," which consisted of clippings from journalistic and academic writing, compiled and interspersed with commentary by Du Bois. His contributions to Phylon illustrate how he extended his mapping of the multifaceted, simultaneous unreality and reality of race at a crucial historical juncture. The Chronicle's perspective was international and transnational, addressing various spheres of racial activity (juridical, political, cultural, economic, and the like) and cataloging concepts and theories emanating from academia, civil rights and anticolonial struggles, and popular discourse.

Much of my analysis here focuses on Du Bois's negotiation of the scientific, political, and moral imperatives to move beyond race, which provides a particularly useful way to enter into a consideration of his midcentury thought. Not only do these imperatives continue to resonate within the critical and antiracist genealogies he helped establish; they also serve, ironically, to perpetuate racial hierarchies in the present. By attuning ourselves to the difficult questions Du Bois raised and the answers he posed about white supremacy's survival in the first postracial moment, we gain insights through his eyes into some of the social phenomena shaping our lives today. We also see the makings of an antiracism that was simultaneously against racism and colorblindness yet committed to investigating fully the logic of each at a crucial, transformative moment.

RACE, SCIENCE, AND MODERNITY

Du Bois had long theorized the centrality of race and racial terror to the development of modernity, its institutions, and its political languages. Paul Gilroy identifies in Du Bois's early work, especially The Souls of Black Folk, a "theory of modernity [that] pursues the sustained and uncompromising interrogation of the concept of progress from the standpoint of the slave," and which points out a "democratic potential disfigured by white supremacy." Through his multidisciplinary method, Gilroy argues, Du Bois posed a challenge to Marxian teleology. Not only did his deployment of "the history of slavery" challenge "the assumptions of occidental progress that Marxism shared" but his foregrounding of race and his attention to the complex, mutual articulations of racial hierarchies and...