Reiland Rabaka - Du Bois

Perhaps more than anything else, Du Bois’s indefatigable commitment to self-change and social change in the twentieth century provides us with a paradigm for transforming ourselves and the twenty-first century. As David Levering Lewis noted, “In the course of his long, turbulent career … W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism – scholarship, propaganda, integration, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, Third World solidarity.” Lewis importantly continued, “First had come culture and education for the elites; then the ballot for the masses; then economic democracy; and finally all these solutions in the service of global racial parity and economic justice.” 23Lewis helps to highlight both the aspirations and contradictions at the heart of this book.

Du Bois’s dedication to racial justice, gender justice, decolonization, and an end to economic exploitation was an aspiration that brought numerous struggles, and at times caused contradictions and many mistakes, in determining the most appropriate course of action. Undoubtedly, his late-life enthusiastic commitment to the oppressed as agents of their own emancipation in many instances made him impetuous, and led him to misjudge calamitous political episodes such as the errors and horrors of Stalinism and Maoism. However, for those deeply interested in or committed to democratic social transformation, Du Bois’s thought remains important precisely because he was right about some things and downright wrong about others, and frequently admitted it. In the end, it is Du Bois’s trajectory from reformist to radical to revolutionary and his principled commitment to democratic social transformation, “rather than the solutions he proposed, that are instructive” – because Du Bois, Lewis shared, “was an intellectual in the purest sense of the word – a thinker whose obligation was to be dissatisfied continually with his own thoughts and those of others.” 24Du Bois’s life and work, when objectively engaged and fully understood, provides us with a framework for not only identifying problems but developing viable solutions to them. Whether we turn to the resurgence of global racism and xenophobia, misogyny and gender injustice, the neocolonial conditions of the wretched of the earth and the Global South, the constantly changing character of capitalism and the misinterpretation of Marxism, or the seemingly never-ending imperialist wars, W. E. B. Du Bois’s discourse offers us both extraordinary insights and cautionary tales.

To access the lessons Du Bois’s legacy may teach us, we must ask a set of crucial questions: Why is it imperative for us to know who Du Bois was and what he contributed to contemporary thought? Even more – and methodologically speaking – why is it important to not only know what but how , in his own innovative intellectual history-making manner, Du Bois contributed when he contributed to contemporary thought? The real answers to these questions lie not so much in who Du Bois was, but more in the intellectual and political legacy he left behind. That is to say, the answers lie in the lasting contributions his discourse has historically made and is currently making to our critical comprehension of the ways the social inequalities and injustices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have informed and morphed into the social inequalities and injustices of the twenty-first century. Let us begin, then, with Du Bois’s early social science in the interest of social reform in his seminal study The Philadelphia Negro .

1 1 For the award-winning volumes widely considered the definitive discussions of Du Bois’s polymathic life and work, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 2009).

2 2 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today, ed. Booker T. Washington (New York: J. Pott & Company, 1903), 31–75; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903).

3 3 For selections of Du Bois’s work in The Crisis, see W. E. B. Du Bois, The Emerging Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois: Essays and Editorials from The Crisis, ed. Henry Lee Moon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972); W. E. B. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Crisis Writings, ed. Daniel Walden (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1972); W. E. B. Du Bois, Selections from The Crisis, Vol. 1, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1983); W. E. B. Du Bois, Selections from The Crisis, Vol. 2, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1983).

4 4 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935).

5 5 W. E. B. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1952).

6 6 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 64.

7 7 Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 23.

8 8 Ibid., 29. On Du Bois’s childhood and adolescence, see Amy Bass, Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle Over W. E. B. Du Bois (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 1–22, 83–108; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 11–55.

9 9 Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 29.

10 10 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Reminiscences of W. E. B. Du Bois: An Oral History [transcript of a series of tape-recorded interviews with W. E. B. Du Bois conducted by William T. Ingersoll for the Oral History Research Office of Columbia University in New York City, May 5–June 6, 1960] (Glen Rock, NJ: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1972), 5. See also Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2–3, and chapter 3, “The Souls of Black Folk: Critique of Racism and Contributions to Critical Race Studies,” in this volume.

11 11 W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 12–13; Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, 102; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 53.

12 12 For further discussion of Du Bois’s relationship with Max Weber, see Nahum D. Chandler, “The Possible Form of an Interlocution: W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in Correspondence, 1904–1905,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 3 (2006): 193–239; Kazuhisa Honda, “Max Weber and W. E. B. Du Bois on the Color-Line,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2015): 35–9; Thomas M. Kemple, “Weber / Simmel / Du Bois: Musical Thirds of Classical Sociology,” Journal of Classical Sociology 9, no. 2 (2009): 187–207; Aldon D. Morris, “Max Weber Meets Du Bois,” in Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 149–67.

13 13 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Harvard University, 1895); Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 160–1.

14 14 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (New York: Longmans, Green & Company, 1896).

15 15 For further discussion of the evolution of Du Bois’s relationship with Africa and anti-colonialism, see W. E. B. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois on Africa, ed. Eugene F. Provenzo and Edmund Abaka (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012). See also Babacar M’Baye, “Africa, Race, and Culture in the Narratives of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Philosophia Africana 7, no. 2 (2004): 33–46; Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136–208; Eric Porter, “Imagining Africa, Remaking the World: W. E. B. Du Bois’s History for the Future,” Rethinking History 13, no. 4 (2009): 479–98; Eric Porter, The Problem of the Future World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 103–44; Earl Smith, “Du Bois and Africa, 1933–1963,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 8, no. 2 (1978): 4–33.