Unreconciled Strivings

DU BOIS, THE SEDUCTION OF OPTIMISM, AND THE LEGACY OF SORROW

The twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously claimed that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. Sometimes it feels as if African American studies consists of a succession of footnotes to W. E. B. Du Bois. Not only do many genealogies of black intellectual production, to the chagrin of some scholars, begin with Du Bois, but many authors continue to draw from his corpus in order to frame, explain, and put forth solutions to the problems that currently beset black people. Although there are glaring blind spots and omissions within his corpus, he confronted many of the unpleasant realities, conditions, and topics that continue to haunt the social order — the problem of the color line, the subordination of women, the complicated relationship between race and class, Western imperialism, and the pernicious consequences of the capitalist-inspired accumulation of wealth, especially for the darker denizens of the world. In this chapter and chapter 2, I also argue for Du Bois's ongoing relevance, underscoring the capacity of his ideas to illuminate and reconfigure our understanding of the present. I am particularly interested in how the trope of sorrow operates in The Souls of Black Folk to challenge facile notions of racial progress. In this work, Du Bois adopts a melancholic mood or attitude in response to the harrowing dimensions of his recent past (a past that includes chattel slavery and the Civil War) as well as the postbellum arrangements that prevent black bodies from flourishing and living well after the putative triumph of emancipation. As Terrence Johnson suggests, the spirituals, or sorrow-song tradition, constitutes a central part of Du Bois's thought and practice; this musical legacy contributes significantly to his understanding of race, American history, religion, human suffering, and hope.

However, turning to Du Bois to develop a critique of progress is not an easy task. As many commentators have stressed, Du Bois adopts Enlightenment-inspired assumptions about the process and triumph of civilization, an inheritance that influences his conception of racial uplift. In his famous essay on the "Talented Tenth," a term that refers to the educated black elite, Du Bois takes for granted that "the Negro race, like all races will be saved by its exceptional men." These exceptional men will be those who have absorbed the higher ideals and truths of humanity, those who have been trained and acculturated to rescue the masses of black folk from their benighted state. These agents of civilization and uplift, to put it succinctly, will redeem black people. Du Bois's faith in cultural redemption exhibits a troubling elitism. More generally, it betrays a commitment to categories and processes — the civilizing process, for instance — that have had pernicious, if not ambiguous, implications for black people. As Cornel West points out, Du Bois appears to be "seduced by the Enlightenment ethos and enchanted with the American Dream." His optimistic vision of humanity, according to West, prevents Du Bois from wrestling sufficiently with evil, tragedy, and the legacy of white supremacy. Although there is some truth to West's concerns, to simply locate Du Bois within this Enlightenment trajectory flattens the complexities and tensions within Du Bois's corpus. More specifically, this reduction downplays the significance of sorrow, tragedy, and death in his writings, especially in The Souls of Black Folk. In this chapter, I argue that Souls is a fissured text. Although Du Bois occasionally locates black strivings within an all-too-familiar telos of human advancement, he also draws from the sorrow-song tradition to undermine narratives of progress. I encourage us to read this tension in a productive manner — as a commitment to a better future for blacks and other subjugated groups, but a vision that is mediated and informed by memories of racial loss and trauma.

Lawrie Balfour reminds us that Souls was written at a critical and painful juncture in black American history. The powerful concepts and metaphors that Du Bois introduces in this work — double-consciousness, the Veil, the color line — mark a moment in which the new freedoms and opportunities acquired by blacks after the Civil War have been undermined by the emergence of Jim Crow laws and practices. As Balfour describes, "Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Du Bois uses this language to limn the contours of a world in which long-awaited emancipation and new citizenship gave way to disenfranchisement, debt peonage, and de jure segregation, enforced by terror in the South and inaction in the North." Souls, as I argue in this chapter and chapter 2, reflects this broken predicament; it exists in a space between melancholy and hope, disappointment and possibility. Consequently, there are moments when Du Bois contends that the end of black people's strivings and aspirations should be "co-participation" or mutual recognition within existing social and political arrangements, a projected end that invokes Hegel's well-known Master-Slave dialectic. Along this line of thinking, American citizenship is imagined and valorized as an unequivocal ideal and good. Yet there are other moments in this collection when Du Bois suggests that the prevalent arrangements of America and modernity rely on the violent exclusion of certain kinds of bodies and communities, rendering integration a dubious, tension-filled aim. Mutual recognition (between whites and blacks, the oppressors and the subjugated) is a marker and benchmark of racial progress, and Du Bois hints at the losses, constraints, and failures that undermine endeavors to integrate formerly excluded groups into the nation-state, social order, and unstable category of the human. His writing renders us more attuned to those individuals, communities, and experiences that don't quite fit into overconfident narratives of freedom, civilization, and reconciliation. In this chapter and the next, I trace Du Bois's attunement to those bodies and subjects that cannot be easily placed in unifying imaginaries and optimistic frameworks of meaning.

DOUBLE-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE DUPLICITY OF RACIAL RECOGNITION

The play between optimism and lament in Du Bois's thought is articulated powerfully in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," the first chapter of Souls. In this chapter, the reader encounters Du Bois's early attempts to wrestle with self-estrangement, an uncanny mode of existence that reflects black people's marginalized status within the contours of American democracy and the modern world more generally. In this essay, Du Bois invites the reader to confront the harrowing...