The Souls of Black Folk
Why are we still caught up in century-old protest politics?
BY SHELBY STEELE
Tuesday, April 29, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
One hundred years ago this month, W.E.B. DuBois--one of 20th-century America's leading intellectuals--published what may be the most prophetic book written on the subject of race: "The Souls of Black Folk." Its most famous prophecy was simply that the 20th century would be the century of the "color-line." If this prediction was ultimately qualified by the great ideological struggles against communism and fascism, it was also borne out by the struggles against segregation, apartheid, caste and world-wide colonialism. So, for its prescience alone, this book deserves the many centennial celebrations it is now receiving around the nation.
But "Souls" did more than predict. It gave the 20th century its first encounter with unapologetic black protest. Just beneath its eloquent King Jamesian surface was a brittle indignation that anticipated the unequivocal racial anger of later protest writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Most importantly, "Souls" was an impassioned reaction against a black racial ideology of accommodation and humility. It introduced moral accountability into the racial debate in a way that asserted white responsibility for racial reform and justified black protest. Today, 100 years after its first appearance--and even after the great civil-rights victories of the '60s--we still understand race by the protest framework laid out in "Souls."
But this last point--that a 100-year-old book on race is not essentially dated--is more a statement about America today than about the book. In 1903, DuBois was nothing less than heroic, and as the century unfolded his protest ideology transformed America's social conscience. But shouldn't we be beyond it now? Why is it that most any American commenting publicly on a racial issue in 2003 will drop right into the comfort zone of DuBoisian protest where whites are always responsible and blacks are always victims?
There are surely many reasons for this, but maybe the most important is that we keep seeing oppression as the source of our racial problems when it no longer is. We are like Plato's cave dwellers, staring robotically at a wall marked "Oppression" when in fact our true problem is something just behind us outside the cave--a problem that was present but more understandably overlooked in DuBois's day.
This new 21st-century racial problem might be called the problem of emergence--the shock that formerly oppressed people experience when they first emerge into new freedom, and the struggle with responsibility that always follows. In freedom their underdevelopment looks precisely like the inferiority their oppressor had always accused them of, because now it no longer has the excuse of oppression. Under this threat of humiliation, the newly free will have to decide who should be responsible for their development. And the society that oppressed them will also have to decide. All discussions of race in America today are discussions of responsibility.
So the first phase of emergence is rarely a wholehearted embrace of freedom but rather a resurrection of the enemy just defeated. For blacks the old enemy of racism mutes the humiliation of new freedom by absorbing blame for inferiority. "I can't because of racism." Perhaps the most pernicious feature of real oppression is that it is always, in itself, an argument that others should be responsible. So when it ends, a new and kinder dependency will look like justice. This is why the dream of freedom for many oppressed peoples is a socialistic "promised land," not really a dream of freedom at all. When you are oppressed, you tend to believe in the power that oppresses you. You only want it to make your life prosperous rather than wretched.
"The Souls of Black Folks," wonderful as old-fashioned protest, has no answer for any of this. Its ambition was oppression, not freedom. In fact, its centennial comeback may be a little of the "old enemy" strategy--covering the terrors of emergence with a familiar narrative of protest. And yet, because "Souls" is such a fine articulation of the protest ideology, it perfectly illustrates the dilemma of protest: if it wins us freedom, it ill prepares us for it.
The most famous idea in "Souls" is what DuBois called 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." But his true point here is more in the framing of the idea than in the idea itself. "Double consciousness" is not a truth as much as it is a protest, an idea fashioned for white consumption. Its voracity is not nearly as important as its implied charge that white America is responsible for black suffering.
Protest is always for the oppressor's consumption. It always sees real transformative power in the oppressor and never in his victim. To press his protest DuBois even argues against black responsibility altogether, saying that black striving "cannot hope for success" unless "encouraged by the initiative of whites"--a formulation that perfectly reinforces the relationship of dominance and subordination at the heart of oppression.
The man DuBois attacked most fiercely in "Souls" was Booker T. Washington, the great accommodationist who believed blacks should develop in the trades, practice entrepreneurialism, and win admiration through the achievement of excellence. This outraged a protester like DuBois, who believed black dignity had to be a given under the law. Washington, he said, was allowing whites to "shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders . . . when in fact the burden belongs to the nation." But Washington believed black dignity was an outgrowth of achievement, ownership and success in commerce despite the restrictions of Jim Crow. He believed, in effect, that emergence and the self-development it required were not tied to a civil-rights kind of freedom. To read his "Up From Slavery," published three years before "Souls," is to encounter a true understanding of slavery's human desolation, and to learn how simple achievements compiled over time, and through the mastery of ever more complex skills, could transform the slave into a responsible citizen.
His genius was not to give away responsibility, not to let others carry the burden of one's uplift. Responsibility, he knew, was the transformative agent, the only power that could change a slave into an individual who could know himself as the true equal of others. Washington did not deny black inferiority; he started his work there.
But, of course, he lost the debate to DuBois. People who have been oppressed are not always eager for struggle. So the socialist dreams of protest, the easy dignity of racial militancy, the promise of benevolent intervention will all touch a deep longing. Today we live in a DuBoisian age. And today there is even a new competitor for responsibility over black uplift: white guilt.
More than 100 amicus briefs have been filed with the Supreme Court in support of racial preferences not because they work (they don't) or because the nation wants them (it doesn't). Preferences allow institutions to engineer a diversity that has not been earned through genuine human transformation. This is the DuBoisian model of black protest and white responsibility intervening mechanically and socialistically. And today's ubiquitous question--if we take affirmative action away, what will there be?--is a DuBoisian question presuming that only white responsibility can save blacks. The historic resonance of this case comes from the fact that the court is fiddling with the DuBoisian model of racial reform by adjusting the precise range of white responsibility--of white burden.
The centennial of Washington's "Up From Slavery" three years ago passed like the sound of the proverbial tree falling in the forest. This is not to say that "Souls" should not enjoy its centennial, or that protest has not been profoundly important to black advancement. It is only to say that the sin of protest was to diminish and defame black responsibility in its rush to make black problems into white burdens. DuBois deserves much respect, but only if he is also accepted as a cautionary tale.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "A Dream Deferred" (HarperCollins, 1998).
Why are we still caught up in century-old protest politics?
BY SHELBY STEELE
Tuesday, April 29, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
One hundred years ago this month, W.E.B. DuBois--one of 20th-century America's leading intellectuals--published what may be the most prophetic book written on the subject of race: "The Souls of Black Folk." Its most famous prophecy was simply that the 20th century would be the century of the "color-line." If this prediction was ultimately qualified by the great ideological struggles against communism and fascism, it was also borne out by the struggles against segregation, apartheid, caste and world-wide colonialism. So, for its prescience alone, this book deserves the many centennial celebrations it is now receiving around the nation.
But "Souls" did more than predict. It gave the 20th century its first encounter with unapologetic black protest. Just beneath its eloquent King Jamesian surface was a brittle indignation that anticipated the unequivocal racial anger of later protest writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Most importantly, "Souls" was an impassioned reaction against a black racial ideology of accommodation and humility. It introduced moral accountability into the racial debate in a way that asserted white responsibility for racial reform and justified black protest. Today, 100 years after its first appearance--and even after the great civil-rights victories of the '60s--we still understand race by the protest framework laid out in "Souls."
But this last point--that a 100-year-old book on race is not essentially dated--is more a statement about America today than about the book. In 1903, DuBois was nothing less than heroic, and as the century unfolded his protest ideology transformed America's social conscience. But shouldn't we be beyond it now? Why is it that most any American commenting publicly on a racial issue in 2003 will drop right into the comfort zone of DuBoisian protest where whites are always responsible and blacks are always victims?
There are surely many reasons for this, but maybe the most important is that we keep seeing oppression as the source of our racial problems when it no longer is. We are like Plato's cave dwellers, staring robotically at a wall marked "Oppression" when in fact our true problem is something just behind us outside the cave--a problem that was present but more understandably overlooked in DuBois's day.
This new 21st-century racial problem might be called the problem of emergence--the shock that formerly oppressed people experience when they first emerge into new freedom, and the struggle with responsibility that always follows. In freedom their underdevelopment looks precisely like the inferiority their oppressor had always accused them of, because now it no longer has the excuse of oppression. Under this threat of humiliation, the newly free will have to decide who should be responsible for their development. And the society that oppressed them will also have to decide. All discussions of race in America today are discussions of responsibility.
So the first phase of emergence is rarely a wholehearted embrace of freedom but rather a resurrection of the enemy just defeated. For blacks the old enemy of racism mutes the humiliation of new freedom by absorbing blame for inferiority. "I can't because of racism." Perhaps the most pernicious feature of real oppression is that it is always, in itself, an argument that others should be responsible. So when it ends, a new and kinder dependency will look like justice. This is why the dream of freedom for many oppressed peoples is a socialistic "promised land," not really a dream of freedom at all. When you are oppressed, you tend to believe in the power that oppresses you. You only want it to make your life prosperous rather than wretched.
"The Souls of Black Folks," wonderful as old-fashioned protest, has no answer for any of this. Its ambition was oppression, not freedom. In fact, its centennial comeback may be a little of the "old enemy" strategy--covering the terrors of emergence with a familiar narrative of protest. And yet, because "Souls" is such a fine articulation of the protest ideology, it perfectly illustrates the dilemma of protest: if it wins us freedom, it ill prepares us for it.
The most famous idea in "Souls" is what DuBois called 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." But his true point here is more in the framing of the idea than in the idea itself. "Double consciousness" is not a truth as much as it is a protest, an idea fashioned for white consumption. Its voracity is not nearly as important as its implied charge that white America is responsible for black suffering.
Protest is always for the oppressor's consumption. It always sees real transformative power in the oppressor and never in his victim. To press his protest DuBois even argues against black responsibility altogether, saying that black striving "cannot hope for success" unless "encouraged by the initiative of whites"--a formulation that perfectly reinforces the relationship of dominance and subordination at the heart of oppression.
The man DuBois attacked most fiercely in "Souls" was Booker T. Washington, the great accommodationist who believed blacks should develop in the trades, practice entrepreneurialism, and win admiration through the achievement of excellence. This outraged a protester like DuBois, who believed black dignity had to be a given under the law. Washington, he said, was allowing whites to "shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders . . . when in fact the burden belongs to the nation." But Washington believed black dignity was an outgrowth of achievement, ownership and success in commerce despite the restrictions of Jim Crow. He believed, in effect, that emergence and the self-development it required were not tied to a civil-rights kind of freedom. To read his "Up From Slavery," published three years before "Souls," is to encounter a true understanding of slavery's human desolation, and to learn how simple achievements compiled over time, and through the mastery of ever more complex skills, could transform the slave into a responsible citizen.
His genius was not to give away responsibility, not to let others carry the burden of one's uplift. Responsibility, he knew, was the transformative agent, the only power that could change a slave into an individual who could know himself as the true equal of others. Washington did not deny black inferiority; he started his work there.
But, of course, he lost the debate to DuBois. People who have been oppressed are not always eager for struggle. So the socialist dreams of protest, the easy dignity of racial militancy, the promise of benevolent intervention will all touch a deep longing. Today we live in a DuBoisian age. And today there is even a new competitor for responsibility over black uplift: white guilt.
More than 100 amicus briefs have been filed with the Supreme Court in support of racial preferences not because they work (they don't) or because the nation wants them (it doesn't). Preferences allow institutions to engineer a diversity that has not been earned through genuine human transformation. This is the DuBoisian model of black protest and white responsibility intervening mechanically and socialistically. And today's ubiquitous question--if we take affirmative action away, what will there be?--is a DuBoisian question presuming that only white responsibility can save blacks. The historic resonance of this case comes from the fact that the court is fiddling with the DuBoisian model of racial reform by adjusting the precise range of white responsibility--of white burden.
The centennial of Washington's "Up From Slavery" three years ago passed like the sound of the proverbial tree falling in the forest. This is not to say that "Souls" should not enjoy its centennial, or that protest has not been profoundly important to black advancement. It is only to say that the sin of protest was to diminish and defame black responsibility in its rush to make black problems into white burdens. DuBois deserves much respect, but only if he is also accepted as a cautionary tale.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "A Dream Deferred" (HarperCollins, 1998).
