Elvira Basevich - W.E.B. Du Bois

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3575-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Basevich, Elvira, author.

Title: W.E.B. Du Bois : the lost and the found / Elvira Basevich.

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Series: Black lives | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A totally fresh account of Du Bois and why his life and legacy remain as vital as ever.”-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020008754 (print) | LCCN 2020008755 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509535736 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509535743 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509535750 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. | Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963--Criticism and interpretation. | African Americans--Biography. | African American authors--Biography. | African American civil rights workers--Biography. | Civil rights workers--United States--Biography. | African Americans--Civil rights--History.

Classification: LCC E185.97.D73 B367 2020 (print) | LCC E185.97.D73 (ebook) | DDC 323.092 [B]--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008754LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008755

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for my teachers

Sections of chapters 2and 6have appeared in “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Critique of American Democracy in the Jim Crow Era: On the Limitations of Rawls and Honneth,” Journal of Political Philosophy 27(3) (2019): 318–40.

Sections of chapter 5have appeared in “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Critique of Radical Reconstruction (1865–77): A Hegelian Approach to American Modernity,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 45(2) (2018): 168–85.

My warmest thanks to the following individuals who, at one point or another, provided the inspiration, support, and encouragement critical to the successful completion of this project: Linda M. Alcoff, Lawrie Balfour, Nelli Basevich (1917–2017), Rosa Basevich, Eric Edmond Bayruns Garcia, Lawrence Blum, Julia Davies, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Sally Haslanger, Adam Hosein, Chike Jeffers, Serene Khader, Frank M. Kirkland, Pauline Kleingeld, José J. Mendoza, Charles W. Mills, Jennifer Morton, George Owers, Alice Pinheiro-Walla, Isaac A. Reed, Melvin L. Rogers, Maureen Ritchey, Tommie Shelby, Inés Valdez, Alex Zamalin, and the anonymous reviewers for the press, especially Review #3.

In a tape-recorded conversation with Margaret Mead in 1971, James Baldwin described the problem of racism in the United States: “So that’s what makes it all so hysterical, so unwieldy and so completely irretrievable. Reason cannot reach it. It is as though some great, great, great wound is in the whole body, and no one dares to operate: to close it, to examine it, to stitch it.” 1Baldwin discerned racism as an open wound that spans “the whole body” of the republic. Poets, philosophers, and social scientists struggle to explain its stubborn bloodletting rituals; like a chant, it has no clear beginning or end, pervading the legal and social conventions of our past and reaching out to cloud our future. In Between the World and Me , a spellbinding reckoning with white Americans’ complicity in white supremacy, Ta-Nehisi Coates remarks that racism has left him wounded, unable to console his young son in the face of perpetual loss. 2“I can only say what I saw, what I felt,” writes Coates. “There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound.” 3If one were to place a stone or a flower at every tree, church basement, stairwell, or dark stretch of road where a person of color has lost their body and left there a wound still painful to touch, a cemetery could overlie the entire geography of North America. Marx had once warned of the specter of communism haunting Europe, whereas actual ghosts haunt the United States. 4

In his characterization of American racism, Baldwin invoked two notions that, at first blush, appear to stand in opposition. He observed that reason “cannot reach it” and yet the “wound” remains open because “no one dares to operate: to close it, to examine it, to stitch it.” Reason is both powerless against racism and an indispensable tool to combat it. And so one is left wondering if it is possible to mend the wound using the power of reason in some broad sense, employing persuasion, imagination, and fact-based arguments. The long history of racial violence and terror might suggest that racism is too resilient to crumble under public scrutiny or government intervention, however well intentioned. And yet Baldwin maintained that one must nevertheless “dare” to “close [the wound], examine it, stitch it.” He thus asked his reader to redress the evil of racism. In doing so, we realize that racism, like all evil, as Hannah Arendt had put it, is “banal”; that is, it is a social phenomenon that, like any social phenomenon, originates in the human will and is therefore capable of being rooted from the world, however monstrous its proportions and stranglehold on institutions. What people have willed into existence, including a force as recalcitrant as white supremacy, by the same token can be willed out of existence. Racism is not a random and unstoppable event in the natural world, like an earthquake or the death of a star. To be sure, the fight against it must stretch the boundaries of the moral imagination, drawing on cultural and spiritual resources that are often overlooked as inspirations for democratic agency. The process must also support the transformation of major social and political institutions. But the prospect of a just world, nevertheless, remains viable. The question is only how and when to build it. 5

The driving question in W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings as a whole – a question that also inspired Africana philosophers from Frederick Douglass to James Baldwin – was the following: Can reason close the wound of racism that spans the whole body of the republic; and if reason cannot reach it, how else might it be closed? Africana philosophers do not all share the same optimism about finding solutions to anti-black racism. 6But Du Bois had faith in reason – a kind of moral attitude of sustained hope for a better world – that the wound of racism can close and heal, even if it will leave an irremovable scar on the US republic and the world.

Though we cannot imagine that we can go back to a world untouched by racism, we have a moral obligation to figure out how to repair the world we have inherited, to put the ghosts of the dead to rest. The conviction that our profoundly nonideal world is reparable, I believe, is the conviction that inspired W. E. B. Du Bois’s life and work. In his career as an academic, writer, and activist, this conviction motivated him to experiment with a great variety of methods for stitching shut the wound that racism has left on the body of the US republic and on the world. From the scientific method to literature and the arts, Du Bois dedicated his life to theorizing new approaches to anti-racist critique. In my mind, his originality and willingness to adopt new methods sets him apart from most political theorists. His methodological experimentation is perhaps why his thought is both so exciting and so challenging to reconstruct using general philosophical principles.