Talk:W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

From Studyplace

Categories Concepts Subjects People Essays Reviews Commons Courses Help	Pathways Concepts Subjects People Essays Reviews Commons Courses Help
Key tabs
article tab edit tab move tab	study tab history tab watch tab

W.E.B Du Bois address the race problems in America through studying the individual experiences of oppressed southern blacks. He attributes their difficulty in succeeding as freemen after emancipation to the system of oppression that takes away opportunity, education, resources, hope, etc. He explores the tension between blacks and whites of this time as living in separate worlds, divided by “the Veil.” (he is able to go above the Veil, but not escape it). “I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, economic, and political relations of the Negroes and whites in the South, as I have conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and education.” –page 147. Du Bois raises questions of higher-education and fears that mammonism will replace the desire for knowledge. He also raises questions on leadership. Through the use of emotional personal stories, he strives to give readers a glimpse of the black community inside the Veil. Do the sorrow songs help to do this? Who are his readers? What is the call to action? What is the Veil? Are there problems with individuals representing the group (leaders)? What about individuals' stories representing the soul of the group? Does it work?

Education

“we are training not isolated men but a living group of men,--nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must neither be a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,--not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold.” –page 72

“In the Black World, the Preacher and the Teacher embodied once the ideals of this people,--the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold…. What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life?” –page 67/8

“The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, and adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.” –page 70

“This is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men for life.” –page 75

The Veil

“Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual like or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thought and feelings of the other.” –page149

"The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment." -page 164/5

The social separation of the races “Thus and now, there stands in the South two separate worlds; and separate not simply in the higher realms of social intercourse, but also in church and schools, on railways and street-cars, in hotels and theaters, in streets and city sections, in books and newspapers, in asylums and jails, in hospitals and graveyards. There is still enough of contact for large economic and group cooperation, but the separation is so thorough and deep that it absolutely precludes for the present between the races anything like that sympathetic and effective group-training and leadership of the one by the other, such as the American Negro and all backwards peoples must have for effectual progress.” –page 80

Action and communication “In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men and their relations to each other fall in a few main lines of action and communication: there is first, the physical proximity of homes and dwelling-places, the way neighborhoods group themselves, and the contiguity of neighborhoods. Second and in our age chiefest, there are the economic relations,--the methods by which individuals cooperate for earning a living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the production of wealth. Next there are the political relations, the cooperation in social control, in group government, in laying and paying the burden of taxation. In the fourth place, there are the less tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversation and conference, through periodicals and libraries; and, above all, the gradual formation for each community of that curious tertium quid which we call public opinion.” –page 135

Leadership

Freemen’s Bureau – “It’s successes were the result of hard work, supplemented by the aid f philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect.” –page 31

Mr. Washington – “But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing.” –page 39 “But, Booker T. Washington arose as essential the leader not of one race but of two,--a compromiser between the South, the North, and the Negro.” –page 43

Black leadership— “Such leadership, such social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves.” –page140

Emotion

"Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passion that swayed and blinded men.” –page 26

car-window sociologist

“To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unraveling the snarl of centuries,--” –page 126

_______________________________________________________________________________

“They are careless because they have not found that it pays to be careful” -127

“And yet, by the irony of fate, nothing has more effectually made this programme seem hopeless than the recent course of the United States towards weaker and darker peoples in the West Indies, Hawaii, and the Philippines,--for where in the world may we go and be safe from lying and brute force?” –page 45

“The South is not ‘solid’; it is a land in the ferment of social change, werein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is to-day perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good.” –page 48

“I insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the present, so that all the energies may be bent towards a cheerful striving and co-operation with their white neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future.” –page 89

“The young men marry between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; the young women between twenty and thirty.” –page 116

“All social struggle is evidenced by the rise, first of economic, then of social classes, among a homogeneous population. To-day the following economic classes are plainly differentiated among these Negroes…” –page 128

“how sorely in need of such economic and spiritual guidance the emancipated Negro was..” -144

crime—144 religion-157

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." -page 5

_______________________________________________________________________________

class discussion:

The Veil is sustained from both sides.

Does Du Bois use ideal types?

The Wings of Atalanta

The Coming of John —alienation; an isolation that comes with creating your own value structure. Is this the place Du Bois occupied? As high as education can be, the Veil is still in place

Of the Sons of Master and Man —sits in the memory as an experience

Different than previous readings:

political vs. science

advocacy vs. analysis

Committed to trying to bring about change--making the study of history an advocate for change. Consciously goal oriented.

Du Bois is a public intellect rather than an academic.

Obama’s speech on race: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-t_n_92077.html

Study

Generative questions originating the article

Key points to make

Key resources to draw on

Scope and tone of coverage

Talk

help talk. . . .

Queries, critiques, and points of discussion

Lead off: Mathangi Subramanian

Background

The son of a Haitian immigrant and an African American, W.E.B. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Barrington, Massachusetts, after the passage of the fourteenth amendment. After graduating from Fisk University in 1888, Du Bois immersed himself in politics, founding several civil rights organizations, the most famous of which is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was a vocal critic of his contemporary Booker T. Washington, a fellow African American civil rights activist. Washington argued that blacks should not be given the same rights as whites until blacks proved they were worthy of those rights. Du Bois criticized Washington not only for his willingness to compromise, but also for locating the "race problem" in the "Negro" rather than in the social institutions that kept African Americans from advancing socially. Du Bois remained active throughout his long life, joining the communist party at the age of 93 and becoming a citizen of Ghana at the age of 95. His eloquent, flowery book, The Souls of Black Folk, is largely considered one of earliest and most influential works in American sociology.

Overview

“…it is equally true to assert that on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington’s propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro’s degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro’s failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths must never be lost sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are potent if not sufficient causes of the Negro’s position; second, industrial and common-school training were necessarily slow in planting because they had to await the black teachers trained by higher institutions, - it being extremely doubtful if any essentially different development was possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and third, while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing groups, he cannot hope for great success.” (p. 34)

The Souls of Black Folk is essentially one long recommendation for studying "the race problem," i.e., the tense relations between blacks and whites in America and the inability of blacks to raise themselves socially and economically. Du Bois is, in many ways, a product of his times: he agrees that the practices, habits, and appearances of rural, uneducated blacks are "barbaric." He also agrees that blacks do not do succeed in society because they are uncivilized. He is the first to admit that African Americans perpetrate a disproportionate number of crimes, are largely uneducated, and often display professional apathy. However, through several case studies (inclucing Of Alexander Crummell and Of the Coming of John), Du Bois argues that all of these phenomena are the result of systematic oppression rather than racial deficiency. Therefore, he advocates studying the social mechanisms that repress African Americans through studying individual experiences.

The Veil

Throughout his writing, Du Bois refers to institutional racism as “The Veil.” The Veil falls between whites and blacks everywhere from a New York orchestral performance of Lohengrin’s Swan to the Jim Crow (segregated) train car to Nashville to a farm in Dougherty County, Georgia. The concept of The Veil is important in that it suggests a shift in thinking about America’s “race problem” as a problem with the inferiority of individual African Americans rather than a problem of institutionalized, systematic repression that keeps individual African Americans from rising above their circumstances. Du Bois argues that in order to reform African Americans, society needs to be reformed. As the above passage illustrates, Du Bois feels that many African Americans do not succeed because they feel it is impossible for them not to fail. Du Bois says that in order to reform individuals, society must be reformed, because individuals will not change unless they feel that they can improve their circumstances by doing so.

The Individual

“We seldom study the condition of the Negro today honestly and carefully...how little we really know of these millions, -- of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meanings of their crimes! All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in time and space, and differing wildly in training and culture.” (p. 84)

"It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul." (p. 88)

Although Du Bois advocates reforming social institutions to solve “the race problem,” he advocates studying these institutions through studying individuals. Here, then, we see Du Bois actually recommending a methodology for a sociological study: Du Bois seems to think that a collective experience is best documented through individual experiences. Du Bois takes his own advice by including a number of case studies in his own book. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece , for example, analyzes the economic position of blacks in Dougherty County. Du Bois uses the very anthropological techniques of interviewing families and taking field notes on daily activities. He then analyzes these notes through the lens of the "The Veil," i.e., with the purpose of examining how social systems repress individuals rather than how individual deficiencies shape social systems.

Education

"The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfcation and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know." (p. 20)

Throughout his work, Du Bois emphasizes that education is a prerequisite for social mobility. This is why he says the greatest contribution of the Freedmen's Bureau was the establishment of free public schools for African American youth (p. 20) Although Du Bois explicitly refers to education as a tool for liberation, he implicitly calls it a form of slavery and an avenue for discontent. When he says "dangerous," he refers not only to the prospect of organized rebellion by a group of people who feel empowered to challenge the system that oppressed them, but also the emotional damage incurred by those who simultaneously discover a love of knowledge and the limitations that will keep them from cultivating this newfound love in the way they choose to do so. The case studies of Crummell and Jones, for example, tell stories of highly educated blacks who die either of desperation and anger. Once again, the studies lay the blame for these disasters not within individuals, but within the institutions individuals deal with on a daily basis.

The Sorrow Songs

"And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song -- the rhythmic cry of the slave -- stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression fo human experience born this side the seas." (p. 156)

The last chapter of Du Bois’ book is particularly important in what it reveals about his attitude towards his race. Despite his negativity about the prospect of ever escaping The Veil, and his apparent feeling that education and liberation are limited in their abilities to improve the lives of African Americans, he ends the book with stories about how blacks convert their sorrow into America's earliest art form. Du Bois' inclusion of the sorrow songs not only make this book a multimodal text, his decision to end his book with them serves as reminder of the contributions African Americans have made to a society that consistently reinforces their oppression.

Questions for Discussion

1) Is there a tension in Du Bois' work between individual and collective experience? If so, how does he resolve this tension? If not, where does this tension exist, and can it ever be overcome?

2) How are Du Bois' views on education similar to Veblen's? Are they essentially optimsitic or pessimistic?

3) Time to put myself on the chopping block. In what ways does Du Bois' experience as a minority influence his contribution to the conversation about social and communication theory? Does the fact that he is African American make his voice unique in anyway, or could someone of any racial background and experienced produced these same ideas in a different context?