Contempt and Pity

Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996

Daryl Michael Scott

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807846353, 9780807823255
• eBook ISBN: 9780807864425
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

For over a century, the idea that African Americans are psychologically damaged has played an important role in discussions of race. In this provocative work, Daryl Michael Scott argues that damage imagery has been the product of liberals and conservatives, of racists and antiracists. While racial conservatives, often playing on white contempt for blacks, have sought to use findings of black pathology to justify exclusionary policies, racial liberals have used damage imagery primarily to promote policies of inclusion and rehabilitation. In advancing his argument, Scott challenges some long-held beliefs about the history of damage imagery. He rediscovers the liberal impulses behind Stanley Elkins’s Sambo hypothesis and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Negro Family and exposes the damage imagery in the work of Ralph Ellison, the leading anti-pathologist. He also corrects the view that the Chicago School depicted blacks as pathological products of matriarchy. New Negro experts such as Charles Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, he says, disdained sympathy-seeking and refrained from exploring individual pathology. Scott’s reassessment of social science sheds new light on Brown v. Board of Education, revealing how experts reversed four decades of theory in order to represent segregation as inherently damaging to blacks. In this controversial work, Scott warns the Left of the dangers in their recent rediscovery of damage imagery in an age of conservative reform.

1. Amused Contempt and Pity: Exposing the Black Psyche in an Age of Racial Conservatism, 1880–1920

In the late nineteenth century, as the disciplines professionalized and university-trained experts asserted their authority over knowledge, those who opposed the entry of blacks into the mainstream of American society dominated the image of the African American. These racial conservatives operated primarily from within a biological framework and argued for the innate inferiority of people of African descent. The African's biological makeup, it was argued, limited his or her ability to create or be assimilated into an advanced civilization. Racial conservatism was limited by neither region nor discipline. In the North as well as the South, biologists, physicians, and race psychologists pointed out the physical differences that explained the alleged cultural and intellectual inferiority of black peoples.¹ Ethnologists documented the backwardness of African peoples. Historians highlighted the folly of Reconstruction, the moment in history in which people of African descent played a prominent role in the nation's political life.²

Those who used social science to argue for the inclusion of Africans in the mainstream of American life tended to accept the biological paradigm but argued for either the equality of the races or, at the very least, the ability of the African to function in an advanced civilization. Many experts who accepted the inferiority of blacks rejected the idea that the race's biology determined social destiny. Racial liberalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era rested more on the experts’ confidence in their ability to direct social evolution than on the belief in the biological equality of the races.³

While the common humanity of black people led some experts to support the cause of black inclusion, the social science debate over the place of African Americans in society generally eschewed humanitarian arguments. Yet those who engaged in the “race problem” would occasionally examine the human side. In The Souls of Black Folks, published during the early years of Progressive reform, W E. B. Du Bois explored the subjective aspect of oppression for “a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”⁴ His collection of essays sought to elicit the sympathy of educated, middle-class whites who were concerned about their own mental well-being. Unfortunately, the experts who dominated the study of African Americans at the turn of the century were racial conservatives who rejected Du Bois's assumptions about the nature of black personality, and the causes of psychic sufferings of those of African descent. An examination of Du Bois's appeal and the response of students of the race problem reveals that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries posing blacks as damaged was more likely to elicit contempt than pity.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Damage Imagery, and the Rising Therapeutic Ethos

On February 28, 1893, William Edward Burghart Du Bois, an African American studying at the University of Berlin, put aside his work to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday. Afterwards the young scholar assessed his life and sought to divine his future. He wrote of feeling a special mission and struck the pose of a man of destiny—“I am either a genius or a fool”—who was willing to sacrifice his own aspirations, “convinced that my own best development is now one and the same with the best development of the world.” He would commit himself to his race, “taking for granted that their best development means the best development of the world.” He made ambitious plans “to make a name in science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race.”⁵ His aim was not simply to demonstrate his scientific ability and thereby vindicate the capabilities of the race. Like a growing number of experts and politicians in late-nineteenth-century America, Du Bois believed that science rather than politics should be used to adjudicate social problems. It was his belief that the race problem, if made the subject of scientific inquiry, could be comprehended and solved.⁶

Six years later, Du Bois seemed well on his way to attaining his goal. With the publication of The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, Du Bois provided the social science community with one of the earliest and best empirical studies of an urban social group, a study that sociologists could still point to as a model more than fifty years later.⁷ In that study, underwritten by Progressives concerned about social instability among blacks, Du Bois gave ample attention to social pathology in the black community. In an age during which criminal behavior among blacks was assumed by many to be biological, he spoke candidly about “criminal classes” and illegitimacy. At points he could sound like the conservative Social Darwinists, seeing a connection among biological traits, social behavior, and social evolution. At moments he wavered in his environmentalism, referring to blacks on one occasion as one of the “half-developed” races in order to explain social behavior such as stealing and fighting.⁸ As a believer in biological differences among groups, he accorded “natural racial antagonism” a part in explaining race riots.⁹ In contrast to conservative Social Darwinists, Du Bois held that social problems arose from the social environment and history. In summing up his view of the causes of the problems of the Philadelphia Negro, he wrote, “Here then we have two great causes for the present condition of the Negro: Slavery and emancipation with their attendant phenomena of ignorance, lack of discipline, and moral weakness; immigration with its increased competition and moral influence.” As great an influence was “the environment in which a Negro finds himself—the world of custom and thought in which he must live and work, the physical surrounding of house and home and ward, the moral encouragements and discouragements which he encounters.” Among these, of course, was racial prejudice.¹⁰

Like many social scientists who would follow, Du Bois was concerned about problems afflicting black family life. Unlike them, he was not concerned about whether black women dominated the family or whether black family life produced damaged personalities. Rather his attention centered on the state of monogamy and what he perceived as a high level of promiscuity in the black community. He believed that the weak status of monogamy belied the census numbers, which suggested that the family life of black people was as stable as that of native-born whites.¹¹ Unlike scholars who would later use statistics to show that three-quarters of black families were healthy, Du Bois, peering into his subjects’ homes to gather data, found problems. Many who lived together were not married, which he interpreted as making them more vulnerable to breaking up. Among the high number of widows, many had never actually been married. In general, black people, including the middle and upper classes, married late. Moreover, large numbers of blacks, male and female, never married. “The great weakness of the Negro family,” he said in summation, “is still the lack of respect for the marriage bond, inconsiderate entrance into it, and bad household economy and family government. Sexual looseness then arises as a secondary consequence, bringing adultery and prostitution in its train.”¹²

The causes of the weakness of black monogamy lay not in black biology but in history and in the economics of black life. Slavery bequeathed to black people a poor record in monogamy. “The lax moral habits of the slave regime still show themselves in a large amount of cohabitation without marriage.”¹³ Of the imbalanced ratio of black men to women in the antebellum period and its ongoing effects, he wrote, “the disproportion still indicates an unhealthy condition, and its effects are seen in a large percentage of illegitimate births.” Even among the married, the efforts of poor and middle-class black families to maintain fidelity were militated against by the widespread practice of taking in lodgers, single individuals who provided a family income but caused temptation. Higher social status did not free one from concerns of sexual looseness and fidelity. The gender imbalance also created “an unhealthy tone in much of the social intercourse among the middle class of the Negro population.”¹⁴ The inability of blacks to find adequate jobs only exacerbated matters by making it necessary for all blacks to stay single for a longer period of time. He pointed out that it was his experience that upper-class males did not marry until their mid-thirties.

The consequences of a weak family life meant a lack of morals and values. Du Bois was concerned about the group's moral character, not its mental health. In his thinking, “demoralization” spoke to a moral rather than a psychological condition, to character rather than personality. A demoralized person was one without morality, not without morale. He thought of crime, pauperism, and alcoholism as “individual depravity.”¹⁵ Crime was an index of the “moral status of the mass of Negroes.”¹⁶ While he explained criminal behavior among blacks primarily by the lack of economic opportunity resulting from discrimination, he also believed the lax home life of blacks played a role. Black households, he reported, “often are … breeders of idleness and extravagance and complaint.¹⁷

If Du Bois believed the present generation bore the weight of the past, as an advocate of “practical reform” he also believed that the social pathologies in the black community could be remedied. The burden for change fell upon blacks and whites alike. Like most other Progressives, Du Bois viewed uplift as outside the purview of the state. He charged the black elite with the responsibility for racial uplift, or the rehabilitation of the masses. The “better classes,” he asserted, “have their chief excuse for being in the work they may do toward uplifting the rabble.”¹⁸ On the other hand, he called upon whites to end discrimination, deeming it the source of the “Negro problem,” including crime. In step with virtually all racial liberals, Du Bois could not conceive of using the state to end discrimination in employment. “We need then a radical change in public opinion on this point,” he argued. Assuming that the power for change resided at the top rather than with labor, he believed that “the leaders of industry and opinion ought to be trying here and there to open up new opportunities and give new chances to bright colored boys.”¹⁹

On the heels of his intellectual success, Du Bois proposed a much more ambitious study that would have encompassed “the complete Negro problem in the United States.”²⁰ In a paper delivered before the American Academy for the Arts and Sciences, Du Bois urged that the effects of racial prejudice be assessed. “An attempt,” he urged, “should be made to isolate and study the tangible phenomena of Negro prejudices in all possible cases; its effect on the Negro's physical development, on his mental acquisitiveness, on his moral and social condition.”²¹ Toward this end, he called for the establishment of a first-rate black college that would be “a center of sociological research, in close connection and cooperation with Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania.”²² Du Bois was prepared to examine the psychological and mental problems of black folk, not in order to manipulate white sensibilities but to expose pathologies that could be healed by progressive social engineering.

Du Bois's failure to transform race relations through social science is a well-known chapter of his biography.²³ He found none interested in his ambitious program.²⁴ As if to mock his efforts, the rise of de jure segregation and the era of lynching coincided with his years of labor as an idealistic expert committed to scientific reform. In the wake of a lynching and public display of the victim's body, Du Bois recognized that he “could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.”²⁵ He also recognized that the world had no great demand for his social science.

Losing faith in science as an effective means of adjudicating the racial crisis, the disillusioned Du Bois moved away from a life of pure scholarship. Shaken but undefeated, the social scientist turned to literature, his other means of racial uplift, to awaken the conscience of white America. Putting aside his mantle of objectivity and relying upon his knowledge of black life, Du Bois began writing essays for what he considered the “better classes” of whites in the hope of engendering a spirit of “intelligence and sympathy across the color line.”²⁶ In an age in which social scientists believed in value-oriented research, Du Bois transgressed the bounds of acceptable scientific discourse by emphasizing the personal aspect of the social experience. Moreover, he violated a cultural tradition of the black folk on whose behalf he spoke. Through slavery and even in freedom, African Americans had taken pride in keeping their inner world hidden from whites.²⁷ Du Bois, a leading student of black life, surely knew of this folk value.

Black tradition and professional ideals notwithstanding, Du Bois, like a docent for a public museum, proceeded to raise the veil and give whites a guided tour of his representation of the inner sanctum of black people's lives. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois posed the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” He spoke of his own sufferings, of the refusal of a white classmate to exchange visiting cards with him. “Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others … shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Du Bois lamented his alienation: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”²⁸ So poignant was his sorrow behind the veil that he could view his newborn's death as an “escape” from a life of suffering and humiliation. “Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil.”²⁹ Du Bois viewed rejection as playing a central role not only in his life but also in the lives of other blacks, including the black theologian and emigrationist Alexander Crummell. Generalizing from Crummell's experience and his own, Du Bois wrote that the “tragedy of the age” was neither poverty, wickedness, nor ignorance, but rather it was alienation, “that men know so little of men.”³⁰

Along with rejection and alienation, blacks were subjected to the pains of double consciousness, of having two conflicting identities, “two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”³¹ Du Bois believed that “From the double life that every American Negro must live … must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence.”³² Double consciousness also undermined black folk's racial self-esteem. “At times,” he wrote, double consciousness “has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.”³³ Even his Christlike figure Crummell, who triumphed over hate and despair, almost capitulated to racial self-doubt. Du Bois believed that the pangs of double consciousness tended to “tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.”³⁴

Double consciousness, he held, was not the sole cause of hypocrisy and radicalism among black folk. Du Bois believed that unfolding developments in race relations were also placing a peculiar stamp on the personalities of blacks in the North and the South. Unable to speak candidly about racial conditions and black people's aspirations and having learned the folly of violent self-defense from Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, southern blacks, he argued, tended toward “hypocritical compromise.” Lacking a viable defense against worsening conditions, they were resorting to the use of “deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same defense which peasants of the Middle Ages used which left its stamp on their character for centuries.”³⁵ By contrast, blacks who migrated to the North were able to voice their objection to oppression and hence were given to radicalism. Having been repressed, “What wonder that every tenden...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contempt and Pity
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Amused Contempt and Pity: Exposing the Black Psyche in an Age of Racial Conservatism 1880–1920
• 2. No Consensus, No Crisis, No Outrage: The Experts and Black Personality, 1919–1945
• 3. “Matriarchies” without Damaged Personalities: The Black Family in Social Science Imagery, 1928–1945
• 4. Of Pride and Scientism: Racial and Professional Ideologies and the Muted Image of the Damaged Black Psyche
• 5. Plumbing for Damage: The Black Psyche in Postwar Social Science
• 6. The Mark of Oppression: Liberal Ideology and Damage Imagery in Postwar Social Science
• 7. Justifying Equality: Damage Imagery, Brown v. Board of Education, and the American Creed
• 8. Beyond the American Creed: Damage Imagery and the Struggle for Race-Conscious Programs
• 9. Defining Pride and Redefining Racism: The Radical Assault on Liberal Damage Imagery, 1965–1980
• 10. The Resurgence of Damage Imagery: Representations of the Black Psyche in an Age of Conservative Reform, 1981–1996
• Notes
• Index