Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois

In a small Massachusetts schoolhouse in the 1870s, the children decided one day to exchange visiting cards, ten cents a package, the ordinary ritual of polite New England. The exchange went merrily until one tall newcomer refused the card of the one Black child in the room, refused it peremptorily, with a glance. The boy was about ten. In that instant, he later wrote, it dawned on him that he was different from the others, "shut out from their world by a vast veil." Most people who take such a wound early spend a lifetime nursing it or fleeing it. This boy did something far stranger: he made the wound into an instrument for seeing. Out of that schoolroom came the veil, double consciousness, second sight, the color line: the conceptual kit with which W. E. B. Du Bois turned the experience of being Black in America into hard philosophy, and the announcement, in 1903, that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." The book that opens with that sentence, The Souls of Black Folk, remains the rare philosophical classic a stranger can read in two sittings and never afterward set down for good.

Double consciousness. The famous passage arrives in the first chapter. The American world, Du Bois writes, yields the Black American no true self-consciousness; he is "a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world." Then the definition: "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 forever feels the twoness: "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body." The phrase had ancestors, and Du Bois knew them. Emerson had used "double consciousness" decades earlier for the split between the soul's life and the understanding's; the psychology of the 1890s, William James's included, used it for personalities divided in two; and behind both, generations of readers have heard Hegel, in whose Phenomenology self-consciousness is never private property but something won or withheld in the gaze of another. What Du Bois did was carry that seminar-room problem of recognition out into streetcars, censuses, and schoolyards: an entire people required to know itself through the eyes of a world that despised it. And he insisted the concept cuts two ways. The veil shuts out and distorts; the second sight it confers sees American society from an angle the majority cannot reach, which is why the excluded often understand the social order better than its beneficiaries do.

A philosopher who chose evidence. The cartoon remembers Du Bois as an activist who happened to write movingly, not as a philosopher. The training says otherwise. Born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he went south at seventeen to Fisk University, then to Harvard, where he took his degree in philosophy under William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana; James became his guide and friend. Two further years at the University of Berlin placed him inside Gustav von Schmoller's historical school of economics, where the method was archives, statistics, and patience. In 1895 he became the first Black American to receive a Harvard doctorate. It was James who steered him from pure metaphysics toward the study of living society, and the redirection produced something new under the American sun: The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the first scientific survey of a Black community in the United States, built on thousands of door-to-door interviews Du Bois conducted himself, followed by the Atlanta Studies he directed for more than a decade. Souls even coins a name for the opposite procedure, the "car-window sociologist" who reads the South from a passing train. His early wager was that racism was at bottom a problem of knowledge, curable by evidence. He came to judge that wager too hopeful: the facts were available, and people acted otherwise anyway. The mature books are written for readers whose deficit is will rather than data, and that is why they sound like philosophy and prophecy at once.

What this room reads. Three books, all in Du Bois's own English, all public domain. The Souls of Black Folk (A. C. McClurg, 1903; Project Gutenberg ebook 408) is fourteen essays, each opening with a paired epigraph: a stanza of verse and a bar of the sorrow songs printed without words. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Harcourt, Brace, 1920; Gutenberg 15210) is the fiercer postwar sequel, essays interleaved with poems and parables. The Negro (Home University Library, 1915; Gutenberg 15359) is a one-volume history of Africa and its diaspora written when the academy held there was nothing to write. Cite by work and chapter: Souls, Chapter III, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others"; Darkwater, Chapter VI, "Of the Ruling of Men"; The Negro, Chapter IX, "The Trade in Men." The gaps are real and the chat discloses them: Black Reconstruction (1935) and Dusk of Dawn (1940) remain in copyright, and the 1903 "Talented Tenth" essay and The Philadelphia Negro are not yet in the namespace; questions that turn on those texts are answered from general scholarship, plainly labeled as such.

The color line is planetary. The sentence everyone quotes from the Forethought had debuted three years earlier, in the closing address Du Bois drafted for the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900. It was never a merely American complaint; it was a thesis about the modern world-system. The Negro makes the historical case: Ethiopia and Egypt, the empires of the Niger, Great Zimbabwe, a continent dense with history, set against the most prestigious philosophy of history in Europe, Hegel's lectures having declared Africa no historical part of the world. The student had learned the dialectic; on Africa he filed the master's verdict under ignorance and answered it with twelve chapters of evidence. Darkwater presses the thesis into the present tense. "The Souls of White Folk" reads whiteness itself as a modern invention, a religion scarcely three centuries old whose creed he summarizes in one devastating line: "whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!" And "The Hands of Ethiopia" reads the World War as the scramble for Africa come home: the methods Europe perfected upon the darker peoples returning to its own soil. Years before the celebrated European theories of imperialism, Du Bois had argued that empire is the color line exported, and that no peace which ignored Africa would hold.

Washington, then Garvey. Souls is also a book of public argument, and its third chapter performs one of the most consequential acts of intellectual courage in American letters: a measured, signed break with Booker T. Washington, then the most powerful Black man in America. Du Bois grants the Tuskegee program its due (thrift, skill, property) and refuses its price: the ballot surrendered, civic equality deferred, and the higher education of the gifted starved, the "Talented Tenth" on whom, he argued, the leadership of any people depends. Self-respect, he answers, cannot be bought by giving it up. Two decades later the antagonist came from the other flank: Marcus Garvey, whose mass movement read Du Bois's congress-and-petition pan-Africanism as a parlor exercise, and whom Du Bois judged a sincere and electrifying mobilizer chained to ruinous finances and a separatist program. The quarrel turned bitter and personal, and it structures Black political thought to this day, the integrationist line descending from one man and the nationalist line from the other. This site keeps both rooms, and the Garvey room argues the other side. Du Bois's own position resists the cartoon: he wanted full citizenship in America and a free Africa, and he held the two demands together for sixty years.

Democracy as epistemology. The most underrated pages in the corpus are Darkwater's sixth chapter, "Of the Ruling of Men," which argues for universal suffrage on grounds much democratic theory still has not caught up with. The case for democracy is not that the many are wise; it is that "only the sufferer knows his sufferings." Every excluded class (workers, women, the colonized) holds knowledge of the social world that no ruler, however benevolent, can possess secondhand, and a state that shuts them out governs in self-imposed ignorance, deprived of what Du Bois calls this "excluded wisdom." The same volume carries "The Damnation of Women," among the strongest feminist essays written by any man of his generation, on the double burden carried by Black women; "Of Work and Wealth" extends the suffrage argument into industry. Then, startlingly, "The Comet": an early flight of Black speculative fiction in which a comet's passage seems to empty New York of everyone but a Black bank messenger and a white heiress, and for one afternoon the veil hangs in shreds, until the city comes back. Philosophy, sociology, poetry, and science fiction bound in one volume: Darkwater is the whole Du Bois method in miniature.

The afterlife of these ideas has been immense. Fanon carried double consciousness into the colonial clinic in Black Skin, White Masks; Paul Gilroy made it the organizing concept of the Black Atlantic; standpoint epistemology and whiteness studies each begin from pages Du Bois wrote decades before those names existed. American sociology, which long kept him out of its official history, now teaches him as a founder, and its highest career award bears his name. But the best reason to enter this room is a sentence in the sixth chapter of Souls, where Du Bois describes his own reading: "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not." He summons "Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil." He claimed the whole republic of letters as his country when his own country would not seat him, and he propped its doors open behind him for everyone who follows. Sit with him now. He winces not.