Elvira Basevich - W.E.B. Du Bois

I have learned so much and will continue to learn. I am especially indebted to Du Bois scholars of color and the public alike who have placed a modicum of trust in my voice. I can only hope that my work can carry the moral faith to achieve what seems impossible in the light of the history of the irrevocable failures of white humanity: to rebuild an interracial political community in the aftermath of the sorrows of the past and the still burgeoning structural inequalities of the present.

My turn to Du Bois as a philosophy student coincided with the popular resurgence of white nationalist movements in the United States in the 2010s. With the aid of Du Bois, I aim to restore a vision of American democracy that dethrones white supremacy as the “true” meaning of our republican heritage and whiteness as the condition for being a “true” American. In turning to Du Bois, then, I would like to contribute, however little, to repairing the moral spirit of American democracy, telling a different story about how the parts relate to the whole that we are always building and rebuilding. With Du Bois, I refuse to believe that white fear and insecurity asserts complete sovereignty over the human spirit, though it will likely take uncharted moral imagination to properly mourn the black lives lost to bombs, nooses, and knives. I am grateful to the life and work of W. E. B. Du Bois and to the community of scholars and teachers who have taught me to feel the warmth and power of a new world being born and that what it means to be an American is an inversion of the inscription Dante read over the gates of the inferno: “ Never abandon hope, all ye who enter here .”

1 1. James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race, Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1971, p. 3.

2 2. For an incisive critique of Coates, see Melvin L. Rogers, “Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Missing,” Dissent, July 31, 1995, online.

3 3. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, New York: Random House, 2015, p. 69.

4 4. Susan Neiman notes that a major difference in the twentieth-century political history of Europe and North America is that Europe was willing to confront its atrocities and genocide – at least with respect to the Holocaust – and thus attempted to atone for the past, whereas the United States has never really tried. See her Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019.

5 5. In contrast, the “Afropessimist” intellectual movement posits that anti-black racism is almost an unstoppable, permanent, and quasi-natural force in US history. See Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism, New York: Liveright, 2020.

6 6. Africana philosophy is an umbrella term that categorizes philosophical inquiry centrally focused on the experiences of African and Afro-descendant peoples. For an overview of the subfield, see Lucius T. Outlaw, “Africana Philosophy,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 edn), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/africana/

7 7. See Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

8 8. Charles W. Mills, “W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Liberal,” in Nick Bromell (ed.), A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2018, pp. 19–56.

9 9. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, New York: Penguin, 1989, pp. 3–4.

10 10. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Development of a People,” in N. D. Chandler (ed.), The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015, p. 244.

11 11. Christopher Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, p. xx.

12 12. W. E. B. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace: The Story of my 83rd Birthday, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 82.

13 13. Chike Jeffers, “Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 51(4) (2013): 488–510; Chike Jeffers, “The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s ‘The Conservation of Races,’” Ethics 123(3) (2013): 403–26; Ines Valdez, Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

14 14. Juliet Hooker, Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 113–54.

15 15. In my view, it is not plausible to hold that Du Bois became an anarchist who rejected the legitimacy of the modern state or an anti-democratic who favored strong-man leaders like Stalin and Chairman Mao. He did, however, write several opinion pieces in support of the latter.

16 16. Mills, “Du Bois: Black Radical Liberal,” pp. 49–50.

17 17. Du Bois, Souls, pp. 3–4.

18 18. Du Bois, Souls, p. 142.

During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 28, 1963, the prominent civil rights leader, Roy Wilkins, announced that Du Bois had died the night before: “If you want to read something that applies to 1963, go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois published in 1903.” 1There are as many reasons why it is helpful to look to Du Bois today as there were in 1963 and in the early twentieth century. A voice from the past meditating on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, Du Bois wrote about a world that appears bygone and foreign – a world that is not our own. One might wonder what his political critique can add to our understanding of the world today. His writings often conjure up images of dusty country roads, shaded by poplars, carrion-eating birds, and a fragment of dusk that approaches like a threat of violence. The takeaway from Du Bois’s writings is that today – as in the past – any meaningful political analysis must underscore our racial realities. In the United States, racial matters constitute the central obstacle to the flourishing of the republic and the central contradiction between empirical reality and democratic ideals. This is why Du Bois asserted that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line. 2The problem of race and racism implicates the entire nation and stretches across historical time. To motivate sustained public scrutiny of the significance of race remains a hurdle and explains, at least in part, why Du Bois’s writings continue to spell both trouble and an opportunity to reflect on our world. In response to the Holocaust in Europe, Hannah Arendt warned that “once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.” 3In his foresight, Du Bois intimated that the problem of the color line will reemerge as the problem of our century.

For those new to Du Bois, one might wonder why he focused on race and racism. Perhaps to a white reader unaccustomed to viewing the world from the perspective of race – or viewing oneself as “raced” at all – the analytic lens of race might appear to be forced or overstated. After all, we embody multiple identities and it is not clear why race should center our sense of self and approach to democratic politics. Though he had much to say about class, gender, and nationality, Du Bois reaffirmed that the institutional and social practices that signify the withdrawal of respect and esteem from people of color generally and African Americans specifically mediate the overall structure of American society, wherein racial whiteness functions as a license to assert unconstrained power. He thus posited that the fate of roughly 12 percent of the population has and will continue to determine the fate of the republic. This strong connection between the part and the whole may be true for other social groups, but he aimed to show why it is true with respect to the African-American community.