February is Black History Month in the United States. The 23rd day of February 2022 is W.E.B. Du Bois’s 154th birthday. It is fitting to offer a reflection on this great African American intellectual for both celebrations.
I teach a course entitled “Race in the Formation of the Human Sciences,” in which students first examine how race was formed as a concept of human classification and distinction, and then the kinds of disciplines created for its study. Among the disciplines to which we pay close attention are history and sociology. Du Bois configures as a giant in those, in addition to an extraordinary set ranging from philosophy to poetry. As often happens in class discussions, heuristic examples emerge. I recounted one that occasions this blog entry.
Eleven years ago, when I was the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, I received a peculiar written request. I was asked to evaluate Dr. Du Bois for a professorship with tenure at an illustrious U.S. university. Thinking it was a practical joke, I tossed the letter into the garbage can. A few weeks later, I received another letter. Wondering if it were an act of trolling—as I have received letters and emails from hatemongers over the years—I tossed that one away as well. Then I received an email, which I ignored. I began to wonder if there were another Du Bois in mind, since the name isn’t unusual in the French-speaking world, and I also evaluate scholars in French literature. Finally, I received a phone call from the Dean of Arts and Sciences of the institution. The Dean confirmed it was a request to evaluate W.E.B. Du Bois.
“You know he is dead, right?” I asked.
“Of course,” the Dean replied. He then explained it was part of a process to correct an historic wrong. It didn’t take much explanation for me to understand what was going on. So I wrote a letter of evaluation.
One could imagine the daunting task mixed with the profound honor and sense of absurdity that I was asked to evaluate this giant of what Nahum Chandler—perhaps, other than David Levering Lewis, the greatest scholar of Du Bois’s life and thought—called “thought.”
I offer my evaluation here, as it serves not only as a historical artifact but also an exemplary case of identifying a historic injustice in the midst of an effort to rectify it. The rest of this entry is what I wrote.
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The recognition here sought for W.E.B. Du Bois at the University of —— is, simply, much overdue. The scandal of his appointment at the end of the 19th century as “assistant in sociology” in an effort to assure the university’s not officially having a black faculty member demands, in part, an act of redemption on the part of the institution in the interest of justice. In my review of Bruce Kuklick’s Black Philosopher, White Academy, a book devoted to the life and thought of William Fontaine, the first black appointed and tenured in philosophy in the Ivy League, I made the following observation:
Fontaine had the distinction of not only being the only black philosopher in the Ivy League in the first half of the twentieth century but also being the first tenure-track and then tenured black faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. Fifty years earlier, the institution had the opportunity to offer W.E.B. Du Bois that honor, which Kuklick describes as a “nasty episode” and “the institution’s chief experience with African Americans, [which] indicated that the university did not want an extended association with a black man” (p. 85). Part of the basis of that episode, we should recall, was that Du Bois had produced The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a tome that provided the groundwork for American sociology as did no other text by an American from the nineteenth century. None of the scholars entrusted to evaluate Du Bois during that episode is part of the collective memory of the species or even in their fields without consulting works on minor figures in the history of sociology. Du Bois, by contrast, is not only internationally known but also many of his books remain in print and are on sale in academic bookstores. If one considers the additions of his other books and essays, his doctorate in History from Harvard and his completion of work for the Dr. Econ., which qualified him in political economy and sociology, at the University of Berlin, the travesty of the Du Bois example was that it was an egregious case of over-qualification. Du Bois simply revealed the mediocrity of much of the world entrusted to evaluate him [at that time].
The status of Professor Emeritus should be accorded to Herr Dr., Professor Du Bois, and I would recommend, as well, the addition of resources to Africana Studies in his name, especially since a dream at the time of his death was for an Encyclopedia Africana through which an accurate portrayal of African Diasporic peoples could be available to the world. Such a task was taken on at Harvard, but as only an extinct people would be a closed subject, the project of articulation and research continues. Du Bois gave the world much more than he had received from it. The institution could paradoxically give to him through exemplifying his spirit of giving to those for whom he fought.
Life and context
The rest of this evaluation is premised on my assessment of Du Bois’s work in my An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge UP, 2008) and various other writings. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) is known among African Diasporic academics as the “dean of African American scholars.” He is the most known and most written about African Diasporic thinker, and he has few equals in late modern scholarship. He wrote three autobiographies, scores of books, and subsequent biographies and studies have been written on him, many of which have been more obsessed with locating him under the rubric of either a major European thinker or American and European social movement. Du Bois, however, was a pioneer whose innovations actually placed him in a class by himself. He studied philosophy while an undergraduate at Harvard University and, although a gifted student, was discouraged by the independently wealthy William James from pursuing a career in philosophy on the grounds that he could better serve his race through working in the discipline of history.
Du Bois took James’s advice. While studying for the doctorate in history, he also studied at Berlin, since the German universities were considered the premier institutions of the age. His work qualified him for the Dr. Econ. degree at the University of Berlin, but the process was held up by one faculty member. It was awarded to him in his later years. After returning to the United States and achieving his doctorate in history, Du Bois embarked on a career that touched nearly every aspect of American academic and political life, especially across the humanities and social sciences. In spite of his credentials, he was never hired as faculty at a predominantly white university. He taught first at Wilberforce and then, after conducting his classic ethnographic study in the city of Philadelphia for the University of Pennsylvania, taught at Atlanta University before embarking on a career in public life that included co-organizing the Niagara Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the first Pan-African Congress, as well as editing the Crisis magazine, becoming an organizer in international peace movements, and eventually joining the Communist Party USA and emigrating from the United States to Ghana, where he died one day before the famous Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. in August of 1963. His writings and ethnographical work spanned the scope of many fields and, in the case of sociology, literally created American urban ethnography and much of the theoretical foundations of American sociology. In Africana Studies, he is the founding scholar. In history, he stands among the greats. In literature, whether in poetry, fiction, literary essays, and autobiography, his contributions are worthy of continued study. Most of these contributions emerge from his originality in the study of race as a human science. I will therefore begin with that insight.
Du Bois’s contributions to the study of America’s “problem”: the study of race
Du Bois’s prodigious body of works left him a legacy as arguably the Father of American sociology and American race theory, among other areas of thought. Along with Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, he should also be considered one of the fathers of sociology in general. Many of his articles are canonical texts for the study of race. In “The Study of the Negro Problems” (1897), he outlined several major challenges in the study of race. There is at first the presumption that race functions as a descriptive anthropological classification. Du Bois showed, however, that there were normative presuppositions of white normality versus gradations of colored abnormality that dominated the field. Implicit in the study of “Negro problems” was the notion of “Negroes as problems” and, a correlate, “problem Negroes” instead of “people facing problems.” Research on such populations was thus affected in advance by a priori claims about them. Du Bois further argued that there was an absence of social scientific rigor [in American social science of race] because of the abandoning of basic social scientific practices of theorizing from a shared social world on one hand and the failure to interrogate the methodological presuppositions of applicability on the other. As the Sociologist and Africana Studies Professor Paget Henry at Brown University recently argued in his lecture at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard [2011], the social scientific study of populations in the late 19th century presupposed the legitimacy of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinian biosociology, where human populations were placed on a hierarchy of “fitness” according to who dominated and who was dominated. In the European context, different schemas had emerged such as the class analysis of Karl Marx, the typification models of social rationalization offered by Max Weber, and the examination of sacred symbols and social meaning in the work of Émile Durkheim. By way of methods, the expectation of positivism, from the thought of August de Comte, and the general environment of the expected advancement of natural science, suggested that the scientific method offered much for the development of sociology and, as the followers of Spencer believed, the overall grounding of the study and classification of human populations according to the prevailing scientific models. From Darwin, as Ernst Cassirer observed in his Essay on Man(1944), the dominating scientific influence was biology.
Among Du Bois’s many contributions, however, as Henry argues, is his recognition of how race was central for the formation of American sociology, even though the American scientific communities sought legitimacy through the European models. The result was one in which, although race was nearly a ubiquitous object of concern, its importance was also denied in universalistic claims. To study race, in other words, was treated as indulgence in the particular at the expense of studying the universal “man.” The prejudices, however, centered the categories of universal man in terms of particularities that excluded racialized people and related ethnic typographies with the result of a particular kind of man becoming the presumption of man. The continued relevance of Du Bois’s sociological work, which has outlived the Spencerians of his day, is because of the centrality it accorded race, which is a continued sociological thematic, and “problem,” of not only American social life, but also much of those across the globe, exemplified in his prophetic claim that the twentieth century was going to be governed by the problem of the color line, as contemporary studies of global racism attest. Finally, a crucial dimension of Du Bois’s early reflections on sociological theory was his putting the problem of formulating social problems to the fore. That task required understanding the role of social institutions and pressing social concepts, what later structural anthropologists would call “symbols,” by which race appeared and is understood.
Du Bois’s efforts crystallized into the three tropes found throughout race theory: (1) the meaning of racial concepts, (2) the policy considerations that can be drawn from them, and (3) the critical reflective theoretical tools by which the first two considerations can be assessed. It was clear to Du Bois that discussions of all three were infused with political significance. The policy concerns of Du Bois were resolutely devoted to expanding institutions by which freedom could be made manifest. Since racial hierarchy also resulted in categories of people who went from a condition of being property to that of struggling for equality and respect as human beings, the political focus for Du Bois eventually took the form of examining the impact of political economy on human classification. In Black Reconstruction in America (1935), for instance, he argued that the thwarted potential of reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War resulted in new forms of servitude rationalized by a system of racial segregation.
Du Bois in Africana Studies or the study of modern life through potentiated double consciousness
The importance of W.E.B. Du Bois to the study of blacks and the development of Africana thought in the New World is that he outlined most of the important themes of this area of inquiry since the 1890s. If there were any doubt, a consultation of nearly every text in the field would reveal his influence. Although there are many concepts generated by the work of Du Bois, I should like here simply to focus on two that have been of great influence on 20th-century and contemporary Africana thought, given my having primarily engaged him as a theorist of the human sciences.
Let us return to his meditations on what it means to be a problem. Du Bois recognized that the question of black people was of philosophical importance. He formulated it at first subjectively, in The Souls of Black Folk(1903), as how does it feel to be a problem and, since addressed to a black person, to be black. Though seemingly banal, the question was of great importance since in one sweep it brought an ontological and a methodological problem to the fore. To admit that black people could feel anything was to acknowledge the presence of an inner life with a point of view. Such acknowledgment is crucial for the building of communication, public exchange, and, as one climbs the lists of ascriptions, humanity. The question, then, signals the being of blacks as human being. But this question of being required explanation or, as Du Bois eventually formulated it, meaning. This question of the relationship of meaning to being enabled Du Bois to pose the classic social-theoretical problem of explanation in the face of freedom: How could one explain (that is, utilize a discourse premised upon determined criteria) a free being (who, in other words, challenges and often transcends determined criteria)? The methodological significance of the question could be understood through the lens of his earlier empirical work on blacks in Philadelphia, that studying black people was not like studying other peoples. Because the society presumed blacks lived outside of the framework of peoplehood, their study required breaking through the veil imposed against their humanity. As we have seen, he made this clear in “The Study of the Negro Problems” in terms of the challenges it posed to positivistic science. The methodological implication of the question is, thus, that people should be studied as human beings, but what do we do when the humanity of a group is challenged? We need, in other words, to find a way to study black people without black people becoming problems-in-themselves.
The question of problem-people also raises a theodicean question. The term is from the conjunction of the Greek words Zdeus [or Zeus](which became deus, theus, and then theo) and dikê—the term “theodicy” refers to G-d’s justice or the justice of G-d. It is an area of inquiry in which one attempts to find an account of the compatibility of an all-good and all-powerful G-d in a world marked by injustice and evil. Theodicean problems emerge from any system of thought in which G-d or a perfect set of gods is the source both of being and value. Most theodicean arguments defend G-d’s goodness as compatible with G-d’s omniscience and omnipotence through an appeal either to our ignorance of G-d’s ultimate plan for us all or through an appreciation of the freedom endowed on us by G-d. In the first instance, the conclusion is that things only appear bad because serving G-d’s purpose is ultimately good. In the second, injustice and evil are our fault because they are consequences of our free will, which is, in the end, a good thing. In either formulation, G-d is without culpability for evil and injustice. In the Modern Age, theodicy has paradoxically been secularized. Whereas G-d once functioned as the object, the rationalization, and the legitimating of an argument, other systems come into play, such as systems of knowledge and political systems, and they have taken up the void left by G-d. The clear system of knowledge is modern science and the modes of rationalization it offers. Political systemic rationalization avers an intrinsic goodness and justice of the given political system. We thus see here the persistent grammar of theodicy even in an avowed-secular age. In the context of modern attitudes toward and political treatment of black folks, a special kind of theodicean grammar has, however, asserted itself. The appeal to blacks as problem-people is an assertion of their ultimate location outside the systems of order and rationality. The logic is straightforward: A perfect system cannot have imperfections. Since blacks claim to be contradictions of a perfect system, the imperfection must either be an error in reasoning (mere “appearance”) or lie in black folk themselves. Blacks become rationalized as the extraneous evil of a just system.
The formation of such systems and their theodicean rationalizations leads to the construction of insiders and outsiders. The “outside” is an invisible reality generated, in its invisibility, as nonexistent. The effect, then, is that a new link with theodicy emerges and the result is the rationalization of people who are inherently justified versus those who are not necessarily people and thus could never be justified under the principles of the systems that form both. The result is, as Du Bois famously observed, the splitting of worlds and consciousness itself according to the norms of American society and its contradictions. He first addresses this conflict as one of “twoness” in which the Negro, as blacks were characterized then, struggled with being part of a Negro nation while trying to become part of the American avowed nation; is, in other words, a Negro American possible? The problem was that “American” was persistently defined as “white.”
The epistemological dimension of double consciousness emerges from supposedly mainstream approaches to the study of black folk. The standard view in most disciplines of human study is to treat white people as the standard or norm. The effect is to make whites function as the standard of the real, and as a consequence, knowing or studying only whites becomes the equivalent of studying humanity. In effect, whites become “universal” and non-whites “particular.” Since blacks are human beings, this means that their relation to this logic is a constant encounter with a false universal. This means that the black world is more linked to truth than the white world because the black world realizes that the domain over which truth claims can appeal is much larger than the white world, as universal, is willing to allow, admit, or see. All this leads to a phenomenological problem of perception. That double consciousness is a form of consciousness already locates it as a subject rich with phenomenological significance. Phenomenology examines meaningful reality as constituted by consciousness, where consciousness is understood in its intentional or directed form as always having to be of something. The consciousnesses that manifest themselves in double consciousness are (1) consciousness of how mainstream society sees itself (dominant “reality”) and (2) consciousness of its contradictions (subaltern reality). Since to see both is to see the dialectical relationship constitutive of truth, then the first by itself must manifest a form of consciousness that hides itself.
In addition to his closing meditation on freedom in Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois brings these questions of social contradictions to the study of American history, which, as told by historians who treated black inferiority as axiomatic, was a rationalization of white supremacy and the curtailment of freedom. The period of Reconstruction [in the United States] was an opportunity for history to move forward with a broadening of opportunities available for every human being in the country that was poised to assume world leadership. That project was destroyed by the creation of American apartheid or Jim Crow and served as a counter case to notions of history as progress. The doubled contradiction here is that a form of anti-freedom, white supremacy and a new kind of capitalism that deepened inequalities worldwide, was being touted by the mainstream as progress. Du Bois thus showed that although history was indeed dialectical, it was not necessarily, as Hegel had argued, a resolving, unfolding one of increased freedom. In effect, Du Bois, argues Susan Searls-Giroux in Between Race and Reason (Stanford UP, 2010), offers an explanation for why movements of increased freedom lead to greater struggles against their elimination in the modern world, namely, that the underlying logic of race as its governing anthropology, anxiety, and theodicy occludes critical reflection on human possibilities. Du Bois, Searls-Giroux further argues, offers a philosophy of critical historical analysis that can be foundational for a critical pedagogy for radical democratic freedom.
Although there is much more that could be said about Du Bois’s thought, my main concern here is on how Du Bois places the philosophical anthropological problem at the forefront with the normative one: We must ask what it means not to be a problem, what kinds of social forces are required for such a transformation, and what kinds of reflection and study are needed to articulate such possibilities.
Conclusion
There are many scholarships, fellowships, centers, and institutes in Du Bois’s name, including the Du Bois Institute at Harvard. No history of thought and political actions devoted to movement of freedom and the study of human beings from the late 19th through the first half of the 20th century would be accurate without reference to Du Bois (although, as we know, bad scholars often find a way). W.E.B. Du Bois has no equivalent in the [white] American academy. For his equals, one must reach across the global academy in the modern world. I have already mentioned Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émille Durkheim. To this list, we should also add Anna Julia Cooper and Paul Robeson in the U.S., Anténor Firmin of Haiti, Sri Aurobindo of India, Frantz Fanon of Martinique and Algeria, Ortega Y Gasset of Spain, C.L.R. James of Trinidad, Claude Lévi-Strauss of France, Octavio Paz of Mexico. I thus fully encourage this posthumous accolade.
Brief appendix of scholarship on Du Bois [by 2011]
See, e.g., David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois—Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1993), W.E.B. Du Bois—The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: H. Holt & Co., 2000); David Levering Lewis (ed.), W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1995); Daniel Agbeyebiawo, The Life and Works of W.E.B. Du Bois (Accra: Stephil Print, 1998); Samuel W. Allen, A Personal Interview of W.E.B. Dubois (Boston: Boston University, 1971); William L. Andrews, Critical Essays on W.E.B. Du Bois (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985); Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle Against Racism in the World (New York: United Nations, 1983); Bernard W. Bell and Emily Grosholz (eds.), W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics (New York: Routledge, 1996); Joseph P. DeMarco, The Social Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983); Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (NY: Schocken Books, 1990), and Adolph Reed, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997). In 2000, The Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science devoted its March issue of volume 56 to a reprint of and collection of critical essays on his article, “The Study of Negro Problems.” All this is just a fragment of the works on Du Bois and his thought.
A search through anthologies and journals in black studies will reveal references to Du Bois in a vast majority of work. For a sample, see A Companion to African-American Studies, ed. by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon; The African American Studies Reader, edited by Nathaniel Norment, Jr. (Durham, NC: Carolina Academics Press, 2001); Africana Studies: A Disciplinary Quest for Both Theory and Method, New Edited Edition, edited by James Conyers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005).
For discussion of his contributions to the human sciences, see e.g. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Originary Displacement,” boundary 2 27, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 249–286; Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), chapter 4, “What Does It Mean to be a Problem?: Du Bois and the Study of Black Folk.” Jane Anna Gordon, “Some Reflections on Challenges Posed to the Social Scientific Study of Race,” in A Companion to African-American Studies, edited with an introduction by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 279–304and “The Gift of Double Consciousness: Some Obstacles to Grasping the Contributions of the Colonized,” in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, edited by Nalini Persram (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), pp. 143–161. For a survey of Du Boisian double consciousness, see Ernest Allen’s “On the Reading of Riddles: Rethinking Du Boisian ‘Double Consciousness,’” in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, ed. with an introduction by Lewis R. Gordon (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 49–68. See also Sandra Adell’s Double Consciousness/Double Bind (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), Tukufu Zuberi and Elijah Anderson’s commemoration issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science (March 2000), and Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “The Souls of an Ex-White Man: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Biography of John Brown,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 179–195. See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Double Consciousness and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
This is not exhaustive. A search of index sources across the humanities and social sciences would reveal vast quantitative evidence of Du Bois’s impact, and a search on dissertations alone would substantiate this assessment globally.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
