SYA 3010 Sociological Theory: W. E. B. DuBois

1. SYA 3010 Sociological Theory:W. E. B. DuBois © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

2. W. E. B. DuBois References DuBois, W. E. B. (1968). The autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois: A soliloquy on viewing my life from the last decade of its first century. New York: International Publishers Company, Incorporated. DuBois, W. E. B. (1903). The talented tenth. In The negro problem: A series of articles by representative American negroes of today, pp. 33-75. New York: J. Pott & Company. Retrieved October 30, 2002 from http://douglass.speech.nwu.edu/dubo_b05.htm Monteiro, A. (1995). The science of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois. Retrieved October 17, 2002, from http://members.tripod.com/~DuBois/tony.html © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

3. W. E. B. DuBois • 1868-1963 • Born February 23, 1868 • Great Barrington, MA • Died August 27, 1963 • Ghana (West Africa) • Education • Fisk University, B.A. 1888 • Harvard University, Ph.D. 1896 • Studied at the University of Berlin © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

4. W. E. B. DuBois DuBois’ intellect was impressive for its scope, discipline, rigor, creative and heroic imagination. His accomplishments in the battles to end racism and colonialism, and to bring peace and socialism to the world's peoples, are as impressive. Ultimately his scientific discoveries and predictions concerning race, civilization, world and African history have significantly altered world ideological relationships. (Monteiro, 1995) © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

5. W. E. B. DuBois • DuBois's scientific and scholarly work were organically intertwined with his life and revolutionary activity. The profound importance of his scientific achievements were that they laid the materialist foundation for the study of race and racial oppression. • He established that racism and colonialism were central organizing mechanisms of the modern world. That they stood along side and were in dialectical relationship to the system of capitalist exploitation. In the end, the world could not be understood or changed without grasping this central dynamic. VERY IMPORANTANT POINT! © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

6. W. E. B. DuBois • The ultimate form of DuBois's scientific work is inseparable from his humble and working class beginnings…While race prejudice was not unknown to whites or Blacks in Great Barrington, it in no way took on the violence and brutality of the South's Jim Crow segregation. As he reached his teenage years he knew he was racially different than most of his classmates, however, he overcame the affects of prejudice through becoming an academic overachiever. © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

7. W. E. B. DuBois • At Fisk University his general democratic leanings were deepened. As he would put it, it was during this period that he "learned to be a Negro." The summer after his sophomore year was spent in the poverty ridden Black Belt of rural Tennessee. He later wrote, he "touched the very shadow of slavery." • DuBois biographer David Levering Lewis writes of this period: • Wilson County, Tennessee, would remain in his memory bank for a lifetime, influencing a prose to which he was beginning to give a mythic spin, his conception of what he would later call the black proletariat, and most profoundly, his gestating, romantic idea about African American `racial traits'.“ • This early experience with the Black Belt proletariat would germinate throughout his life finding theoretical and social scientific expression in among other works The Souls of Black Folk (1903), The African Roots of the War (1914), and eventually in his monumental Black Reconstruction (1935). © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

8. W. E. B. DuBois • In the Fall of 1888 after graduating from Fisk he entered Harvard to pursue an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He found his Harvard professors no more qualified than those at Fisk, only better known. He would at Harvard come in contact with the new liberal racism and philosophical pragmatism, US imperialism's emerging philosophical and ideological paradigms. • The intellectual high point of DuBois' Harvard years was a 52 page handwritten essay entitled The Renaissance of Ethics: A Critical Comparison of Scholastic and Modern Ethics, prepared for a course taught by the American pragmatist William James. Pragmatism as articulated by James and later John Dewey held that human knowledge was severely limited to immediate experience. As such the possibilities for changing the world were restricted to the limitations of human knowledge. Human beings had to, more or less, make due with minor reforms in existing societies. Capitalism, racism and colonialism, in this rendering, were, therefore, immutable and even expressions of human nature. This was the reactionary essence of pragmatism. There were, as a consequence, no revolutionary alternatives to poverty, exploitation and racism. Pragmatism's roots must be traced to British empiricism and skepticism, and because of its subjective idealist substance shares a similar philosophical zone with logical positivism. Both positivism and pragmatism were viewed by their proponents as alternatives to dialectical and historical materialism. For the young DuBois pragmatist's limitations on knowledge and transforming the world were intellectually unacceptable, but more rang untrue. © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

9. W. E. B. DuBois • In his paper DuBois proposed an elemental materialist alternative to pragmatism. In fact, he proposed answers to pragmatism, which in their larger significance, were not unlike the alternatives to idealist philosophy posited by Marx in Capital and Engels in Anti-Duhring and The Dialectics of Nature. What DuBois essentially argued was that the ethical and moral imperative was determined on the basis of what actions they led to. While it cannot be said that DuBois at this stage of his intellectual development had discovered a consistent philosophical position, his instincts were certainly in the right direction. In this regard, his term paper for William James was a harbinger of his future intellectual and ideological materialism. At the root of his argument was the idea that morality and ethics rather than being issues of pure reflection, as Kant and following him much of Western philosophy, were to the contrary matters decided in life and through practice. • After receiving his undergraduate degree and being accepted to Harvard's graduate program in the social sciences he expressed the view that he would apply the principles of the social sciences "to the social and economic rise of the Negro people." © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

10. W. E. B. DuBois • His experience at the University of Berlin had a profound impact upon his view of racism. • The historical methodology of both Marx and Hegel, and contemporary German academicians, along with deepening studies of the race question, helped to convince him that racial oppression must be understood as part and parcel of the world system of economic relations and thus its elimination would have world historic meaning. • He became further convinced that only the most advanced scientific and philosophical methods could advance understanding of this system. • In this regard he sought to do for the issue of racial oppression what Marx had achieved for class exploitation. VERY IMPORANTANT POINT! © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

11. W. E. B. DuBois • After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard, DuBois was offered a teaching position at Wilberforce College a small African American college in Ohio. • After a year of teaching at Wilberforce he was contacted by a group of upper class Philadelphia Quakers to conduct a study of the African American community in Philadelphia. They felt that such a study could embarrass the corrupt city administration. DuBois was offered an ‘assistantship' at the University of Pennsylvania, which meant the University would pay his salary, but he was neither allowed to live on its racially segregated campus or to teach in its all white classrooms. For two years DuBois his and wife Nina Gomer Du Bois lived in the 7th Ward in the heart of the Black ghetto at the corner of 7th and Lombard (across from Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church founded by the anti-racist radical Richard Allen) where he worked on what became the Philadelphia Negro. While his sponsors had no idea that such a major study would be produced, DuBois wrote a book that initiated the field of urban sociology and advanced empirical sociology itself. © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

12. W. E. B. DuBois • What the Philadelphia Negro achieved, in spite of an overdose of stern Victorian moralizing and a preaching to poor African Americans to conduct themselves in acceptable ways, was to empirically verify the social and class origins of poverty and inequality. He substantially showed that the Black ghetto was a creation of poverty and racism, rather than the so-called innate inferiority and supposed criminal tendencies of African Americans. • Upon the completion of his research in Philadelphia he took a teaching position at Atlanta University, an historically African American institution. For ten years he would not only teach, but became the prime mover of annual conferences which drew scholars from around the world to examine the social, economic, historical and cultural roots of Black inequality. He led researchers who produced a series of monographs and papers known as the Atlanta Studies, one of the most significant bodies of scientific research on Black folk at the beginning of the twentieth century. © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

13. W. E. B. DuBois • Landmarks of DuBois's scientific development are found in his Atlantic Monthly article "The African Roots of the War" and the Black Reconstruction. Together they demonstrate DuBois' full intellectual powers and his development of Marxism. "The African Roots of the War" parallels Lenin's Imperialism The Highest Stage of Capitalism and in several formulations anticipates it by two years. Like Lenin he viewed world economic relationships as being now dominated by finance capital --a new situation where banks controlled industrial and merchant capital. The merger of industrial and bank capital under the hegemony of big bank capital Lenin called finance capital. The nation itself, as Lenin and DuBois saw it, was now under the heal of the financier, who through the export of capital were carving out economic spheres throughout the world. DuBois makes his argument from the standpoint that a new epoch in world history had arrived. What Lenin would define as the imperialist stage of capitalism, which made capitalism overripe for revolution. But DuBois saw Africa as the weakest link in the imperialist chain. It is worth commenting at this point upon DuBois' alleged support of the US participation in WWI. To understand what was a tactical maneuver on his part was the attempt to play US against German imperialism in the interest of gaining time for and strengthening the position of the anti-colonial forces in Africa and the anti-racists in the US. Furthermore, DuBois' stance after the war at the Versailles Peace Conference is significant. Again his stance was a consistently anti-colonial position, geared to use the contradictions between European colonial powers and their weakened position after the war to advance the cause of African freedom. At this stage he indeed harbored illusions about the possible role of the US as an ally of the African struggle. And it should be remembered in evaluating DuBois' position that right at the moment of the Versailles Conference he called the First Pan African Congress, dedicated to the joint struggle and liberation of Africans and their descendants in the Americas and the Caribbean. © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

14. W. E. B. DuBois • David Levering Lewis evaluates DuBois' African Roots as "one of the analytical triumphs of the early twentieth century." He goes on to contextualize the work in the following manner: • DuBois poured into it his mature ideas about capitalism, class and race...The essay opened with a novel proposition--that, 'in a very real sense' Africa was the prime cause of the World War. Using a quotation from Pliny as his text--'Semper novi quid ex Africa' ('Africa is always producing something new')--DuBois passed in kaleidoscopic review the ravages of African history from earliest times to the European Renaissance, Stanely's two-year charge from the source of the Congo River to its mouth in 1879, the partition five years later of the continent at the Berlin Conference, and the miasma of Christianity and commerce suffocating indigenous cultures and kingdoms. European hegemony based on technological superiority had produced the 'color line', which became 'in the world's thought synonymous with inferiority...Africa was another name for bestiality and barbarism.' The color line paid huge dividends, and DuBois described the 'lying treaties , rivers of rum, murder, assassination, rape and torture' excused in the name of racial superiority with his staple power and imagery. • DuBois posited that finance capital had produced mutually exclusive and competing economic spheres controlled by differing imperialist nations for the sake of exploiting peoples and natural resources. A situation which would inevitably cause world war. © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

15. W. E. B. DuBois • DuBois makes a crucial discovery concerning the nation, big bourgeois nationalism and white chauvinism. He argued that bourgeois democracy, big power nationalism and imperialism went hand in glove. • The lasting strength of DuBois's analysis , however, was how he understood the `scramble for Africa' as the central cause of World War I. And how the `scramble for Africa' imparted an irreversible and overriding racist nature to the colonial system and imperialism in general. Therefore, World War I had a racist imprint. DuBois' understanding of the historical evolution of European bourgeois nationalism and his recognition that it in substance had become a racist nationalism is of lasting significance. This feature would take on its most extreme forms with the rise of Nazism in Germany. © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

16. W. E. B. DuBois The Talented Tenth (DuBois, 1903) • Dubois envisioned a focused effort to educated a portion of the United States’ black population—as a way to lift up the standing of black Americans. • How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and universities of the land. We will not quarrel as to just what the university of the Negro should teach or how it should teach it — I willingly admit that each soul and each race-soul needs its own peculiar curriculum. But this is true: A university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation, through the training of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools. © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender

17. W. E. B. DuBois • All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold. This is true training, and thus in the beginning were the favored sons of the freedmen trained. Out of tile colleges of the North came, after the blood of war, Ware, Cravath, Chase, Andrews, Bumstead and Spence to build the foundations of knowledge and civilization in the black South. Where ought they to have begun to build? At the bottom, of course, quibbles the mole with his eyes in the earth. Aye! truly at the bottom, at the very bottom; at the bottom of knowledge, down in the very depths of knowledge there where the roots of justice strike into the lowest soil of Truth. And so they did begin; they founded colleges, and up from the colleges shot normal schools, and out from the normal schools went teachers, and around the normal teachers clustered other teachers to teach the public schools; the college trained in Greek and Latin and mathematics, 2,000 men; and these men trained full 50,000 others in morals and manners, and they in turn taught thrift and the alphabet to nine millions of men, who to-day hold $300,000,000 of property. It was a miracle - the most wonderful peace-battle of the 19th century, and yet to-day men smile at it, and in fine superiority tell us that it was all a strange mistake; that a proper way to found a system of education is first to gather the children and buy them spelling books and hoes; afterward men may look about for teachers, if haply they may find them; or again they would teach men Work, but as for Life — why, what has Work to do with Life, they ask vacantly. • DuBois was concerned that the focus of black education was technical/vocational—there was a need for liberally trained blacks to lead. © 2002 by Ronald Keith Bolender