Race, Freedom & Equality
Poli 110J
The problem of the the 20th century
is the problem of the color-line.
Essay 2
• 5-7 pages
• Due at final exam, Friday Sept. 2nd.
– Late essays will not be accepted
• If you would like to receive your graded essay
at the exam, hand it in no later than
Wednesday, Aug. 31st.
• Turnitin.com required
Essay 2
• 1. “’Howl’ and ‘Footnote to Howl’ perfectly
illustrate Marcuse’s arguments, and he would
find himself wholly in agreement with
Ginsberg.” Agree, disagree, or modify this
statement.
Essay 2
• 2. Does the Autobiography of Malcolm X
support or contradict W.E.B. DuBois’ theories
on the importance of education for oppressed
minorities? How, and to what extent?
Essay 2
• 3. Using Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man as your
source, critique one of the following texts. The text
must air or be published between the time that this
prompt was assigned and the day that you turn it in:
–
–
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–
–
Front section of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal
A NFL game of your choice
Episode of Jersey Shore
Episode of Gossip Girl
Two hours of a cable news network (CNN, FOX News,
MSNBC)
W.E.B. Du Bois
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•
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•
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1868-1963
First black PhD at Harvard
Pan-Africanist
Radical (equality)
Publisher of NAACP’s The
Crisis
• Communist
– MLK: “It is time to cease
muting the fact that Dr. Du
Bois was a genius and chose
to be a Communist.”
Du Bois gets radicalized
• Sam Hose (1899)
– Accused of murdering employer & raping his wife
– Admits murder (over debt, possibly in self-defense),
denies rape
– Lynched w/2,000 witnesses outside of Atlanta
– Emasculated, face skinned, tied to a tree and burned
alive. Knuckles displayed for sale in shop window.
– Lynching a communal activity
– Du Bois comes to believe that “one could not be a
calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were
lynched, murdered, and starved.”
Major Themes
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•
•
•
•
The Veil
Double-consciousness
Race consciousness
Racial essentialism
Education
Race Consciousness
• “How does it feel to be a problem?”
– American society consistently and irresistibly
forces awareness of one’s own blackness
– Blackness is not a quality of appearance, but of
identity
• Not just what the individual looks like, but who the
individual is
– Blackness is a “problem”
The Problem of the Color Line
• The problem of the twentieth century is the
problem of the color-line,--the relation of the
darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and
Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”
– Not geographical, but a “line” nonetheless.
– A notably American (and to a lesser extent,
European) way of looking at the world.
The color line
• “Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the
others; or like, mayhap, in heart and longing,
but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”
– Parallel worlds
– Restrictive only to blacks, who cannot move
beyond the veil, while whites can move back and
forth.
• Privilege.
The color line
• The American world “yields him no true selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself
through the revelation of the other world. It
is a peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at
one’s self through the eyes of others”
The color line
• “One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in
one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder.”
– Internal division on the color line
– Partly self, partly not-self
– Constant internal conflict
The color line
• Blacks exist in some sense on both sides of the
color line
– “He would not Africanize America, for America 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 for the world.”
• Essentialism
– Partly inherent, partly historical
The color line
• “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 in his face.
• “to merge his double self into a better and
truer self.”
The Color Line
• Three parties in Civil War: North, South, Blacks
– Freedman’s Bureau constitutes a separate government for
liberated slaves
• Du Bois on Imperial Japan vs. China
• The “blighted, ruined form” of the post-War white
“with hate in his eyes” vs. the “form hovering dark and
mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of
centuries” who had raised his children, buried his
wives, and slaked his lust
– Metaphor: male & female
– “The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous
Negro”
What is to be done
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed
unmanned!
....
Hereditary bondsman! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the
blow?
-Byron (epigraph to III)
Booker T. Washington
• 1856-1915
• Support from white establishment in North &
South
• Some support from black leaders
– “Leader not of one race but of two” (38)
• Advocated assimilation (as does Du Bois),
recognition of political & social realities of the
South, modus vivendi w/Southern whites
– After the War, North & South looked to re-join as a
single nation, diminishing patience for the question &
fate of blacks in both Sections
Booker T. Washington
• Washington insists that to advance, blacks must give up
hopes for
– Political power
– Insistence on civil rights
– Higher education
• In return for
– Peace
– Industrial schooling
• An issue of practicality: believed blacks would benefit most from
trade school rather than liberal education
– Example: disapproval of poor black boy trying to learn French
– Long-term assimilation & advancement
Booker T. Washington
• In short order, he gets
– Black disenfranchisement
– Jim Crow laws
• Legal inferiority
• Example, OK: literacy requirement, unless you were
eligible to vote before 1866
– Abandonment of blacks by institutions of higher
learning
Du Bois’ Criticisms
• Washington wants to advance black business,
but how can this be done without the right to
vote in your own interests?
• Insists on thrift & self-respect, but also on
“unmanly” submission to whites
• Advocates elementary & industrial school, but
who will teach at black schools if blacks can’t
get higher education?
– Imagining a different world
3 bad consequences
• 1. South is justified in despising blacks
because of blacks’ current degradation
– They are in Washington’s depiction ignorant and
slothful, not quite up to par with whites & have to
catch up
3 bad consequences
• 2. Cause of this degradation is the wrong
education in the past
3 bad consequences
• 3. Idea that the future of blacks in America
depends primarily on their own efforts
• These are “Dangerous half-truths” for Du Bois
– 1. What about slavery and systematic exclusion
from politics, economy, society?
– 2. black schooling lagged because it had to wait
for first generation of black teachers
– 3.While blacks must work for their own
improvement, Du Bois argues that they must be
assisted and encouraged “by the initiative of the
richer and wiser environing group” (whites)
• Is this problematic?
• Du Bois & NAACP insist on more militant,
though still peaceful, position, demanding
– Right to vote
– Civic equality
– Education of youth according not to race, but
ability
• In essence, Du Bois accuses Washington of
apologizing and covering over for systematic
racism, making it appear as if the
disadvantaged position of American blacks has
nothing to do with whites and everything to
do with blacks.
• “By every civilized and peaceful method, we
must strive for the rights which the world
accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to
those great words which the sons of the
Fathers would fain forget: ‘We hold these
truths to be self-evident…’”
Education
• Can blacks be educated?
• “Most Americans answer all queries regarding
the Negro a priori, and that the least that
human courtesy can do is listen to evidence.”
– Note: not most white Americans
– Basic assumptions as part of the Veil
Why is education necessary?
• This segregation is reinforced the places that
blacks & whites live
• Either they live in proximity, encountering one
another at their worst, or whites own black
homes but never encounter their tenants
– “…the family of the [former] master has dwindled
to two lone women, who live in Macon and feed
hungrily off the remnants of an earldom.”
Why is education necessary?
• Relatedly, uneducated blacks are often
victimized in business by outsiders. They can
own nothing themselves.
– Debt: repossession and exploitation
• Deeper and deeper year by year
– Whites, Yankees, Jews
– Antisemitism
Permanent Alienation
• Thus, two attitudes come to the forefront:
• Disengagement: “Happy?—Well, yes; he
laughed and flipped pebbles, and thought the
world was as it was. He had worked here
twelve years and has nothing but a mortgaged
mule. Children? Yes, seven; but they hadn’t
been to school this year,--couldn’t afford
books and clothes, and couldn’t spare their
work.”
• Resentment: “Let a white man touch me, and
he dies; I don’t boast this,--I don’t say it
around loud, or before the children,--but I
mean it. I’ve seen them whip my father and
my old mother in them cotton-rows till the
blood ran”
• “Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce
hate & vindictiveness there;--these are the
extremes of the Negro problem which we met
that day, and we scarce knew which we
preferred.”
Why is education necessary?
• 3 possibilities and dangers at the turn of the
20th Century:
• 1. “The multiplying of human wants in culturelands calls for world-wide cooperation of men
in satisfying them.”
– Globalizing markets serve to bring people into
contact and commerce with one another,
presenting the possibility for equal exchange
Why is education necessary?
• “Behind this thought lurks the afterthought of
force and dominion,--the making of brown
men to delve when the temptation of beads
and red calico cloys.”
– Color line
– Exploitation
Why is education necessary?
• 2. “The thought of the older South,--the
sincere and passionate belief that somewhere
between men and cattle, God created a
tertium quid, and called it a Negro,--a
clownish, simple creature, at times even
lovable within its limitations, but straitly
foreordained to walk within the Veil.”
– A tolerance based in hierarchy
Why is education necessary?
• Within this, “the afterthought,--some of them
with favoring chance might become men, but in
sheer self-defence we dare not let them, and we
build walls about them so high, and hang
between them and the light a veil so thick, that
they shall not even think of breaking through.”
– Become men = access to the spheres of life reserved
for whites
– But privileges of whites are based in the exclusion of
blacks
Why is education necessary?
• “The thought of the things themselves, the
confused, half-conscious mutter of men who
are black and whitened, crying, ‘Liberty,
Freedom, Opportunity—Vouchsafe to us, O
boastful World, the chance of living men!’”
– Assimilationist
– Demand/plea for equality
– Asking to be treated as humans
• To have one’s rights respected is to be acknowledged
and be treated as fully human
Why is education necessary?
• “To be sure, behind the thought lurks the
afterthought,--suppose, after all, the World is
right and we are less than men? Suppose this
mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock
mirage from the untrue?”
– Double consciousness
– Awareness of the hostility of the wider society
Who is to be educated?
• Men
• “The Talented Tenth”
• “The rule of inequality:--that of the million
black youth, some were fitted to know and
some to dig”
– Individualistic
– Leadership
– Serve to raise other blacks “out of the defilement
of the places where slavery had wallowed them.”
What is the goal of education?
• “we almost fear to question if the end of racing is
not gold, if the aim of man is not rightly to be
rich.”
• Some negative social changes result from “the
sudden transformation of a fair far-off ideal of
Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning
and the consequent deification of Bread.”
– Vs. Booker T. Washington’s industrial schooling
– Vs. the view of advancement as referring only to
money
What is the goal of education?
• The post-war South has forgotten “the old
ideal of the Southern gentleman,--that newworld heir of the grace and courtliness of the
patrician, knight, and noble…” in favor of
sharp & unscrupulous businessmen.
– An odd kind of valorization of the antebellum
white Southern elite culture
– Non-capitalist
What is the goal of education?
• Du Bois fears that wealth will become the goal
of politics, the fuel of law, and even replace
“Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” as the ideal of
the Public School.
– Why is this a problem? Who doesn’t like money?
• Regards “human beings as among the material
resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to
future dividends.”
– Slavery in fact after slavery in law
The goal of education
• The purpose of education for Du Bois is not to
train men (by which he means men) for
business, but to train them for life, which is to
say confront the whole of the world.
– What is the utility of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
for this project?
The goal of education
• Generates the “breadth and broadening of
human reason, by catholicity of taste and
culture.”
– Character
• To overcome the problem of the color line will
require “broad-minded, upright men, both white
and black, and in its final accomplishment
American civilization will triumph.”
– Belief in American telos of equality
The goal of education
• “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. …
• So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is
this the life you grudge us, O knightly
America? … Are you so afraid lest peering
from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and
Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?”
– Transcending power of truth
The Role of the Church
• “given the peculiar circumstances of the black
man’s environment [his religious institutions]
were the one expression of his higher life.”
– Aesthetic
– Spiritual
– Philosophical
– Economic & social
• “Three things characterize the religion of the
slave” from which the black church descends
– The Preacher
– The Music
– The Frenzy
The Preacher
• “A leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss’, an
intriguer, an idealist.”
• Descended from the Medicine Man/Priest
– The chief could not survive enslavement, but the
Priest could
• Christianized by exposure & convenience
• Center of the church organization
The Music
• “The most original and beautiful expression of
human life and longing yet born on American
soil”
• “The articulate message of the slave to the
world”
• “a faith in the ultimate justice of things”
• “Of death the Negro showed little fear, but
talked of it familiarly and even fondly”
The Music
• “They tell us in these eager days that life was
joyous to the black slave, careless and
happy…” But these songs are “the music of an
unhappy people, of the children of
disappointment, they tell of death and
suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer
world…”
The Frenzy
• “When the Spirit of the Lord passed by, and,
seizing the devotee, made him mad with
supernatural joy”
• “Old as religion, as Delphi and Endor”
• “Many generations firmly believed that
without this visible manifestation of the God
there could be no true communion with the
invisible.”
Du Bois on the church
• The church is historically the core institution
of black society in America
– It predates even the monogamic black household
– It remains the center of black society and
economy
– It is also the ethical and political center of black
communities
Problems
• Historically, especially in the South, the church
has served not to undermine but to reinforce
the oppression of blacks
• “Nothing suited [the slave’s] condition better
than the doctrines of passive submission
embodied in the newly learned Christianity”
• Deep religious fatalism
– “Children we shall all be free/When the Lord shall
appear!”
Problems
• Transformation of the African into the slave
– “Courtesy became humility, moral strength
degenerated into submission, and the exquisite
native appreciation of the beautiful became an
infinite capacity for dumb suffering.”
– Losing faith in this world, the slave looked to the
next
– Marxist criticism of class & religion as applied to
race
The Enslaving Power of Ideas
• Example: “The Coming of John”
– John is happy in Altamaha, plays with the Judge’s
boy
• “One never sees in the North such cordial and and
intimate relations between white and black as are
everyday occurrences with us [Southerners].”
– Goes away to school, sees wider world, advances
himself.
– Now wants to be addressed not by his first name,
but as Mister.
The Enslaving Power of Ideas
• On return to Altamaha, is denounced by
others as “stuck up.”
• In church, when he argues that church &
sectarian concerns should be replaced in black
life with a focus on unity, on racial and social
issues, he is “held up to scorn and scathing
denunciation for trampling on the true
Religion.”
The Enslaving Power of Ideas
• Thus for Du Bois the structure & beliefs of
black society, especially in the South, are
complicit in the oppression of black people
• As in Marcuse, even though the beliefs and
desires are sincere, the are tools of the
oppressing group
– Consider the Judge: “I like the colored people, and
sympathize with all their reasonable aspirations,
but you and I both know, John, that in this country
the Negro must remain subordinate.”
Transcending the Veil
• Through Truth
– “I sit with Shakespeare and he flinches not”
– How does work out for John?
• One cannot remain in the world of Truth, the world of
Fact must at some point be reckoned with.
Transcending the Veil
• In Death
– John
– Burghardt Gomer Du Bois: 1897-1899
• Died of diphtheria in Atlanta, could have been saved.
• “He knew no color-line, poor dear, and the Veil, though it
shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun.”
• “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.”
• “Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your
ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and
taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void
that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.”
Transcending the Veil
• “Sleep, then, child,--sleep till I sleep and
waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless
patter of little feet—above the Veil.”
• “I shall die in my bonds.”
– Behind the Veil, life is a chain
– Despite the death of his son, Du Bois asks only
that he and hpeople be treated as human beings,
having access to the same world as whites. He
lives in the hope that blacks and whites will one
day be is able to live in equality.