Elvira Basevich - W.E.B. Du Bois

One might also object to presenting Du Bois in the context of modern political philosophy or to my emphasis on his political liberalism. In providing a philosophical reconstruction of Du Bois’s critique of American democracy, I establish, among other notable accomplishments, his contributions to modern political philosophy. I build bridges between Du Bois and major figures in the history of philosophy, including Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. My aim is neither to canonize Du Bois in order to prove that he is a formidable political philosopher nor to chastise and chuck central philosophical figures for neglecting the problem of race and racism in general and of Du Bois in particular. Yet where racial violence abounds, and a nation still struggles to be free, it is instructive to see why more mainstream philosophical schools struggle to make sense of phenomena like the color line and double consciousness; and I believe that it is worth the effort to show their limitations. What is more, even in his so-called “late” period when Du Bois read Marx more closely, his major published works confirm that he continued to share some basic ideals with modern political philosophy, such as a commitment to civil and political rights and representational democracy; to be sure, he also experimented with political strategies and developed a critique of empire, colonialism, and global racial capitalism. 15Even if political liberalism does not exhaust the richness of the Duboisian framework, it is nevertheless indispensable to it. 16However, unlike most modern political philosophers, Du Bois concentrated on theorizing and tackling white supremacy, which he considered to be a defining obstacle to the advance of modernity.

Finally, I would like to briefly comment on my decisions regarding the structure of the book, as well as my personal motivation for writing it. The book has a rough chronological structure, though some chapters treat individual themes, such as Du Bois and the Black Lives Matter movement and his feminist thought, which incorporate different parts of his career and life. The second chapter opens with the birth of Du Bois and the conclusion of the book ends with his death. Most chapters begin with a brief biographical statement about the particular stage of Du Bois’s life where we find him, where he was living and working, and his vision of political struggle at that point in his career, drawing in particular on D. L. Lewis’s and Manning Marable’s exquisite biographies of Du Bois. As a man who described himself as “bone of the bone” and “flesh of the flesh” of the people living and striving behind the color line, Du Bois noted that the “veil” too fell over his own life and that of his family. 17His life provides some insight into his political thought, as he often reflected on his personal experiences to chart new directions in his research and activism. I therefore surmised that it would be helpful to include biographical information in an overview of his life and work. The inclusion of biographical information also meets the objective of the Black Lives series to represent the singular lives of powerful and neglected black thinkers.

I take the subtitle of the book, The Lost and the Found , from the dedication that Du Bois wrote to his children in The Souls of Black Folk : “To Burghardt and Yolande, The Lost and the Found.” Du Bois’s firstborn son, Burghardt, died from diphtheria in Atlanta in 1899, “The Lost.” “I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness in its train.” 18A daughter, Yolande, was born the following year, “The Found.” The Du Bois family, however, never fully recovered from the loss of their firstborn. In chapter 11 of Souls , “On the Passing of the Firstborn,” Du Bois invites his reader to mourn the loss of his toddler with him, to join his family in its grief. Mourning is a sign of respect that is often denied to black children; and the loss of black life hardly bereaves a white-controlled world. The subtitle of the book is also a comment on the reception of Du Bois in academia and the American public. To suggest that Du Bois is the lost and the found is not just to foreground his life, work, and experience of the twentieth century. It is a call for the formation of new habits of judgment that realize his vision of a racially pluralistic democracy. In that sense, to “find” Du Bois is to learn to respect and esteem historically excluded groups and to move through the world from their perspective.

I would like to conclude my introduction with a brief note about my interest in Du Bois. As a white woman, I am often asked by well-meaning people for an “origin story,” so to speak, explaining my interest in a black philosopher. I doubt my research would inspire as many calls for an explanation if it were limited to the study of Kant, Hegel, and analytic political philosophy. I reject the suggestion that a scholarly interest in Du Bois deviates from established norms; if this remains the widespread perception, then every new book on Du Bois must make a claim to “finding” him anew. Absurdly, Du Bois’s prodigious writings would remain perpetually “lost,” in spite of a growing body of Du Bois scholarship.

Yet it would be naive to ignore the connection between identity and the development of intellectual interests, though, on my view, family background and racial identity ultimately explain little. My family arrived in the United States as asylum seekers from the former Soviet Union. I grew up in a diverse immigrant community in south Brooklyn and remember Clinton’s welfare reform of the 1990s not as a newspaper headline but through the gradual disappearance of my favorite breakfast items on the kitchen table. Because my parents did not speak English well, I was often the intermediary between public schoolteachers, welfare administrators, and census workers, translating my parents’ fears and insecurity into a moral claim before the federal government. I felt like David slinging stones at Goliath, inserting myself and my family before a state apparatus that at any moment could leave us adrift or quash us. I struggled to explain on what basis anyone had any responsibility towards us – in what way were we part of a greater whole? The question preoccupied me, especially given the radical contingency of our being here in the first place. Why was our desperate need reason enough for someone to help?

In my philosophical studies, I focused on how social identity – especially racial identity – amplifies or mitigates a community’s vulnerability to the excess of state power or the withdrawal of state resources. Whether one even has public standing to make a formal claim for rights, resources, and legal protection is often a reflection of one’s position in a racial hierarchy. In a philosophy canon dominated by whites, I was fortunate to have teachers who turned my attention to Du Bois to help me theorize the influence of race on the organization of polities and inspired me to contribute to Du Bois scholarship.

On a more personal note, Du Bois’s writing gave me a version of America that I can make my own inasmuch as it showed me a way of assuming responsibility for the white supremacist violence and racial trauma on which the republic was built. Even as my own family had experienced the vertigo of making formal claims before the federal government, so many communities of color and immigrant communities lack a formal platform to even assert their rights and to protect their needs and have existed – and continue to exist – outside the formal domains of political power. Their humanity remains invisible or, as Du Bois puts it, “veiled.” With so much at stake in adopting the United States as my newfound homeland and making myself at home as a white person in a white-supremacist polity, Du Bois’s vision of the future of American democracy gave me an opportunity to make sense of my own potential role in the country: I strive to make the future that Du Bois dreamt for America real. Only in a still-to-be-born America might I be at home. In a sense, I have accepted that to be fully committed to justice I must remain a refugee. Yet I am grateful to have been welcomed by a community of Du Bois scholars from whom