Elvira Basevich - W.E.B. Du Bois

For Du Bois, being morally illiterate about race is more than just not carrying ill will and hatred towards people of color. Being morally illiterate about race showcases habits of judgment that rationalize white fear, indifference, and ignorance, undercutting a sense of shared political fate with communities of color. To be sure, white moral illiteracy about race also entraps African Americans in a system of social values that can undermine the development of black positive self-perception and establish the white-controlled world as the arbiter of truth and value. For whites to de-colonize their moral imagination takes more than just scanning the brain and the heart for racist thoughts or ill will. It requires a more nuanced account of the nature of white complicity in white supremacy and the myriad informal ways that communities of color are rejected as civic fellows. To de-colonize the white moral imagination, then, for Du Bois, entails illuminating a complex social architecture of domination and subordination that preforms interracial social interactions.

In Souls , Du Bois introduces the idea of double consciousness, describing it as a “peculiar sensation.” 18One begins to see oneself “through the revelations of the other world.” 19Seeing oneself from the perspective of another is an important way that humans develop self-consciousness. From childhood to adulthood, when others see us in a positive light, their recognition enables us to form a strong and well-defined sense of self. One’s subjective consciousness of being an honest, lovable, or smart person is confirmed in the recognition of others. Once the “subjective” self fuses with the “objective” self, which is reflected in the external world, one develops an integrated sense of self. The difficulty for Du Bois is that in a white-controlled world, white Americans “look on in amused contempt and pity” at African Americans, and a “conflictual two-ness” results for those standing behind the color line. 20Du Bois noted, “One ever feels one’s two-ness, – an American and a Negro; two warring ideals in one dark body.” 21One feels like one has to choose between identifying as an American or as a person of color. For the white perspective insinuates that a “true” American is not a person of color – they are white. African Americans can, then, feel compelled to “distance” themselves from their own blackness in order to “win” whites’ respect and esteem. And so, when the white-controlled world attempts to establish itself as the “measure” of the black “soul,” black consciousness “doubles”: the subjective self-consciousness of one’s unconditional moral worth as black conflicts with the derogated image of blackness that the world imposes on subjective consciousness.

Paul C. Taylor explains that the “peculiar sensation” of double consciousness represents that African Americans are in the white-controlled world, but not of it. 22The mere fact that one is there – a subject within a legal jurisdiction – does not mean that one has the formal capacity to assert democratic control over the terms of one’s physical, social, economic, or political existence. “Imagine spending your life looking for insults or for hiding places from them – shrinking […] from blows that are not always but ever; not each day, but each week, each month, each year […] forcing your way among cheap and tawdry idiots.” 23Poor treatment, violence, and marginalization profoundly constrain one’s scope of action. The fewer opportunities one has to exercise agency, the more one feels stuck “in” the white-controlled world as its dominated plaything rather than a free agent “of” a democratic republic. Fittingly, Du Bois employed the metaphor of a “prison-house” to illustrate black entrapment. For people of color are “imprisoned” in a world that does not welcome them and whose institutions they can hardly influence. And like a brutal warden, the white-controlled world is deaf to their outcry: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?” 24

A white-controlled world shapes interracial social interaction to enable the black experience of double consciousness. To watch over one’s shoulder as a police cruiser scopes out the neighborhood. To notice a security guard shadowing one’s movement in a shopping mall. So too, Du Bois warned, whites have a psychological and material incentive to preserve the color line. Racial division stokes discord among the working poor, impairing the formation of a strong interracial labor alliance, which in turn bolsters the ascendancy of the superrich. Poor whites withhold solidarity with black and brown labor and undercut their own economic interests, which can only be advanced through an interracial alliance of organized labor. In compensation, poor whites receive “the wages of whiteness,” a notion Du Bois formulated to illustrate the psychological feeling of superiority that incentivizes poor whites to reproduce white supremacist society that still leaves them poor and marginalized. 25

Ironically, Du Bois imagined that the black experience of double consciousness could function as a window into building a utopian future inasmuch as double consciousness “gifts” African Americans with “second sight” about how to reconstruct the polity. 26The challenge would be for a white-controlled world to cultivate the will to dismantle structural inequalities under black guidance, participating in anti-racist and interracial struggles as genuine allies of communities of color. Empathizing with the black experience of double consciousness can foment a shared sense of political and economic fate that substantiates the ties of interracial civic fellowship. With Du Bois, we can imagine the aftermath of white supremacy, when white Americans assume responsibility for racial realities, sacrificing their undue claims to power for the sake of a future without racial caste, state-sanctioned violence, and poverty. The success of the Black Lives Matter movement is that it has made the nation take responsibility for the racial realities it has created. Yet in forcing the white world to take responsibility for racial realities, the movement never makes black dignity contingent on white affirmation, as whites and white-controlled institutions slowly learn to achieve moral clarity about race.

Albeit Du Bois did not consider the limitation of the black/ white paradigm at length, the color line in policing practices transcends the black/white paradigm. For white supremacy draws a continuum in which whites’ social location tracks their power vis-à-vis non-whites; and the experience of racial marginalization targets multiple racial identities at once and in different ways. Hence, the #BrownLivesMatter and #MuslimLivesMatter have emerged to represent a more comprehensive experience of the color line in policing practices in order to refine the scope of public concern and intervention. 27

In Souls , Du Bois shared his personal experience of the loss of his firstborn. The reader plunges with his young family into grief, from which his partner, Nina, never fully recovered, “never forgiv[ing] God for the unhealable wound.” 28But the white world, Du Bois wrote, saw no one worth mourning and closed in around them like a devouring mouth: “The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say much – they only glanced and said, ‘N******s!’” 29To mourn is to feel the value of a life lost; public rituals of mourning show respect and a willingness to forge fellowship. Sharing in grief can even open a path to rebuilding shattered trust.

Of course, it is naive to assume that state-sanctioned rituals of mourning could spontaneously reconstitute a political community, especially if few measures are taken to redress structural inequalities. The philosopher Linda Alcoff cautions that even well-meaning whites are often ill prepared to do the difficult cognitive and emotional labor of interracial struggle. They would rather be portrayed as the saviors of the dark world, rather than an ally or a friend. 30And yet a republic that once celebrated lynchings with a family picnic – and sneered and continues to sneer at the death of black children – cannot forgo learning to mourn the lives lost to racial violence. In 1963, Baldwin reflected: “Morally, I think this nation should be, for the foreseeable future, in mourning.” 31After another unarmed black teenager, Mike Brown, was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, black residents built a makeshift memorial of flowers and teddy bears for Brown. The memorial was repeatedly run over by police vehicles; on one occasion, a police officer let his dog urinate on it. 32“Later that night,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, “the uprising began.” 33The destruction of Brown’s memorial precipitated days of intense protests by black Ferguson residents, on whom the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets.