Du Bois. Reiland Rabaka
Du Bois’s life and work, when objectively engaged and fully understood, provides us with a framework for not only identifying problems but developing viable solutions to them. Whether we turn to the resurgence of global racism and xenophobia, misogyny and gender injustice, the neocolonial conditions of the wretched of the earth and the Global South, the constantly changing character of capitalism and the misinterpretation of Marxism, or the seemingly never-ending imperialist wars, W. E. B. Du Bois’s discourse offers us both extraordinary insights and cautionary tales.
To access the lessons Du Bois’s legacy may teach us, we must ask a set of crucial questions: Why is it imperative for us to know who Du Bois was and what he contributed to contemporary thought? Even more – and methodologically speaking – why is it important to not only know what but how, in his own innovative intellectual history-making manner, Du Bois contributed when he contributed to contemporary thought? The real answers to these questions lie not so much in who Du Bois was, but more in the intellectual and political legacy he left behind. That is to say, the answers lie in the lasting contributions his discourse has historically made and is currently making to our critical comprehension of the ways the social inequalities and injustices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have informed and morphed into the social inequalities and injustices of the twenty-first century. Let us begin, then, with Du Bois’s early social science in the interest of social reform in his seminal study The Philadelphia Negro.
Notes
1 1 For the award-winning volumes widely considered the definitive discussions of Du Bois’s polymathic life and work, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 2009).
2 2 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today, ed. Booker T. Washington (New York: J. Pott & Company, 1903), 31–75; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903).
3 3 For selections of Du Bois’s work in The Crisis, see W. E. B. Du Bois, The Emerging Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois: Essays and Editorials from The Crisis, ed. Henry Lee Moon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972); W. E. B. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Crisis Writings, ed. Daniel Walden (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1972); W. E. B. Du Bois, Selections from The Crisis, Vol. 1, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1983); W. E. B. Du Bois, Selections from The Crisis, Vol. 2, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1983).
4 4 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935).
5 5 W. E. B. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1952).
6 6 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 64.
7 7 Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 23.
8 8 Ibid., 29. On Du Bois’s childhood and adolescence, see Amy Bass, Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle Over W. E. B. Du Bois (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 1–22, 83–108; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 11–55.
9 9 Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 29.
10 10 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Reminiscences of W. E. B. Du Bois: An Oral History [transcript of a series of tape-recorded interviews with W. E. B. Du Bois conducted by William T. Ingersoll for the Oral History Research Office of Columbia University in New York City, May 5–June 6, 1960] (Glen Rock, NJ: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1972), 5. See also Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2–3, and chapter 3, “The Souls of Black Folk: Critique of Racism and Contributions to Critical Race Studies,” in this volume.
11 11 W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 12–13; Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, 102; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 53.
12 12 For further discussion of Du Bois’s relationship with Max Weber, see Nahum D. Chandler, “The Possible Form of an Interlocution: W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in Correspondence, 1904–1905,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 3 (2006): 193–239; Kazuhisa Honda, “Max Weber and W. E. B. Du Bois on the Color-Line,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2015): 35–9; Thomas M. Kemple, “Weber / Simmel / Du Bois: Musical Thirds of Classical Sociology,” Journal of Classical Sociology 9, no. 2 (2009): 187–207; Aldon D. Morris, “Max Weber Meets Du Bois,” in Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 149–67.
13 13 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Harvard University, 1895); Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 160–1.
14 14 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (New York: Longmans, Green & Company, 1896).
15 15 For further discussion of the evolution of Du Bois’s relationship with Africa and anti-colonialism, see W. E. B. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois on Africa, ed. Eugene F. Provenzo and Edmund Abaka (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012). See also Babacar M’Baye, “Africa, Race, and Culture in the Narratives of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Philosophia Africana 7, no. 2 (2004): 33–46; Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136–208; Eric Porter, “Imagining Africa, Remaking the World: W. E. B. Du Bois’s History for the Future,” Rethinking History 13, no. 4 (2009): 479–98; Eric Porter, The Problem of the Future World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 103–44; Earl Smith, “Du Bois and Africa, 1933–1963,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 8, no. 2 (1978): 4–33.
16 16 For more detailed discussion of Du Bois’s contributions to the origins and evolution of intersectionality, see chapter 4, “‘The Damnation of Women’: Critique of Patriarchy, Contributions to Black Feminism, and Early Intersectionality,” in this volume.
17 17 Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 55–178.
18 18 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899).
19 19 Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, 197. See also Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 150–92.
20 20 W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment (Atlanta University Press, 1898); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Negro in Business (Atlanta University Press, 1899); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The College-Bred Negro (Atlanta University Press, 1900); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Negro Common School (Atlanta University Press, 1901); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Negro Artisan (Atlanta University Press, 1902); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Negro Church (Atlanta University Press, 1903); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia (Atlanta University Press, 1904); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., A Select Bibliography of the Negro American (Atlanta University Press, 1905); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Health and Physique of the Negro American (Atlanta University Press, 1906); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans (Atlanta University Press, 1907); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Negro American Family (Atlanta University Press, 1908). W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans (Atlanta University Press, 1909); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The College-Bred Negro American (Atlanta University Press, 1910); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Common School and the Negro American (Atlanta University Press, 1911); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Negro American Artisan (Atlanta University Press, 1912); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., Morals and Manners among Negro Americans (Atlanta University Press, 1914).
21 21 Lewis R. Gordon, “Du Bois’s Humanistic Philosophy of Human Sciences,” Annals of the American Academy of Political