The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois

Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line

José Itzigsohn, Karida L. Brown

• Editorial: NYU Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781479830961
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: African American Studies

The first comprehensive understanding of Du Bois for social scientists The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois provides a comprehensive introduction to the founding father of American sociological thought. Du Bois is now recognized as a pioneer of American scientific sociology and as someone who made foundational contributions to the sociology of race and to urban and community sociology. However, in this authoritative volume, noted scholars José Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown provide a groundbreaking account of Du Bois's theoretical contribution to sociology, or what they call the analysis of "racialized modernity." Further, they examine the implications of developing a Du Boisian sociology for the practice of the discipline today.The full canon of Du Bois's sociological works spans a lifetime of over ninety years in which his ideas evolved over much of the twentieth century. This broader and more systematic account of Du Bois's contribution to sociology explores how his theories changed, evolved, and even developed to contradict earlier ideas. Careful parsing of seminal works provides a much needed overview for students and scholars looking to gain a better grasp of the ideas of Du Bois, in particular his understanding of racialized subjectivity, racialized social systems, and his scientific sociology. Further, the authors show that a Du Boisian sociology provides a robust analytical framework for the multilevel examination of individual-level processes—such as the formation of the self—and macro processes—such as group formation and mobilization or the structures of modernity—key concepts for a basic understanding of sociology.

1

Double Consciousness

The Phenomenology of Racialized Subjectivity

Double consciousness is the pillar of Du Bois’s analysis of subjectivity, that is, the culturally and historically situated understandings of self and other, and the meanings that construct the world in which we live. The best-known articulation of double consciousness is found in the first essay in Souls, titled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” although Du Bois initially introduced the concept in an essay titled “Strivings of Negro People,” published in 1897 in the Atlantic. In these essays Du Bois poses the question that animates his exploration of the lived experience of Black people: “How does it feel to be a problem?” In answering this question Du Bois develops a phenomenological analysis of Black subjectivity; that is, he sets out to describe how Black people experience the world and themselves in everyday life.1 The sociological importance of the theory of double consciousness is barely acknowledged.2 Yet Charles Lemert, one of the few sociologists who recognizes its importance, asserts, “Du Bois’s double-self concept deserved a prominent place in the lineage of self theorists which, from James and Baldwin through Cooley to Mead to the symbolic interactionists, has been one of sociology’s proudest traditions.”3

But the theory of double consciousness does not simply deserve a place in a lineage of the early sociology of the self. The theory is central to the analysis of subjectivity under racialized modernity, and it addresses an important “ontological myopia” in the work of other classical theorists of the self and subjectivity.4 The theory points to something that other theorists of the self and identity who were Du Bois’s contemporaries, such as William James, Charles Horton Cooley, and George Herbert Mead, did not comprehend: the significance of the color line as the central social structure organizing lived experiences under racialized modernity. As a result of his personal encounter with the color line, Du Bois is able to analyze racialized subjectivity in ways that his contemporaries, and many of our contemporaries, cannot. The theory of double consciousness points to the epistemological importance of lived experience for social theory.

Double Consciousness

Double consciousness describes the subjectivity of racialized subjects. In one of his most famous and often cited passages, Du Bois asserts that Black people in America are

a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this 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. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.5

In this short but significant paragraph, Du Bois introduces the three elements of the theory of double consciousness: the veil, twoness, and second sight. The veil—i.e., the color line—structures the subjectivity of racialized modernity. The social world is seen and experienced differently on either side of the color line. The veil works as a one-way mirror: Whites project their own constructions of Blacks onto the veil and see their projections reflected on it. They have the power to define themselves and others, and for them, the racialized subject is invisible. On the other hand, the projections of whites onto the veil become realities that Black subjects have to contend with in their self-formation.

The internal processing of the external gaze gives rise to the second element of Du Bois’s theory: the sense of twoness. Twoness means that in the process of self-formation, the racialized subject must account for the views of two different social worlds—the Black world, constructed behind the veil, and the white world, which dehumanizes Blacks through lack of recognition of their humanity. The third element of the theory of double consciousness is second sight. A world in which the racialized can “only see himself through the revelation of the other world” forces Black people to wrestle with constant dehumanization but, on the other hand, allows them to glance into the white world. This may in some cases neutralize the mirroring effects of the veil. And indeed, Du Bois relied on his second sight to develop an analysis of white subjectivity and lived experience.6

Du Bois’s phenomenological account of racialized subjectivity is present throughout his work, but it is most developed in The Souls of Black Folk and in Dusk of Dawn.7 Souls is a text that most sociologists do not embrace.8 Few are aware that Max Weber wanted to get the work translated and published in German. Charles Lemert suggests that Souls is a canonical work in the discipline, and views its rejection as an example of how work that comes from behind the veil is rendered invisible.9 We agree that Souls should be read and discussed as a classical text in the discipline, a text that inaugurates the phenomenological study of Black subjectivity, that is, the analysis of the basic structures of Black consciousness and experiences.

Du Bois’s analysis of double consciousness is rooted in his reflections on the life of African Americans, particularly in the South, and in his own lived experience. Autobiographical reflections are at the core of his theorizing. In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” the first essay of The Souls of Black Folk, he tells of a moment in which he understands that he is different. It is a moment in his boyhood when a girl refuses his card while playing a group childhood game. Du Bois does not return to this particular moment in Dusk of Dawn or in his posthumous Autobiography, but those texts make it clear that when he was growing up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a predominantly white community of middle- and working-class families, he understood the difference the color line makes. And in Souls he asserts that this difference is built on what he describes as “a thousand and one little actions.” Still, if it is in his growing up in New England that Du Bois learns that he is different, it is only when he goes south to study at Fisk that he fully comprehends the exclusionary work of the color line.

His experiences studying at Fisk and later on teaching in Atlanta are front and center in the essays in Souls. Some of the essays, including “Of the Black Belt” and “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece,” are descriptions of the social and economic structure of the South and the place and predicament of African Americans within it. Sociologists should recognize these as early examples of community studies. Other essays in the book, such as “Of the Meaning of Progress” and “Of the Coming of John,” are analyses of the lived experience and subjectivity of Blacks in the South around the turn of the twentieth century. We should pay close attention to these essays, which focus on Du Bois’s analysis of the lifeworld of Black people. In the first one, “Of the Meaning of Progress,” he recalls his experience teaching school in rural Tennessee, describes the hopes of the people he teaches, and shows how those hopes were crushed by the color line. In “Of the Coming of John,” Du Bois returns to the question of the lifeworld inhabited by rural Blacks in the South, to the hopes and attempts related to leaving it behind, and to the disciplinary forms and effects of the color line.

One essay in particular reflects the development of Du Bois’s thought and political activism at the turn of the twentieth century: his essay titled “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” In this essay, he airs his political differences with Booker T. Washington, who was the most influential power broker between the white elite class and the Black serving institutions of the time.10 Du Bois’s disagreement with Washington was central to his development as an intellectual and political leader. In particular, his differences with Washington regarding the importance of accessing higher liberal education and demanding political rights led Du Bois to become a founder of the Niagara Movement, and later the NAACP.

Whereas few sociologists embrace Souls, Dusk of Dawn is almost entirely ignored by the discipline. Upon the republication of Souls on its fiftieth anniversary, Du Bois stated that he thought about updating the book but decided not to so do because the work reflected his thoughts in 1903 and he hoped that other works would reflect his evolving thought. This is indeed what Dusk accomplishes.

While neither Souls nor Dusk was intended as a scholarly text, these two books’ analysis of racialization and self-formation makes them key texts for sociological theory. Dusk is organized as an autobiography, but Du Bois explains that his life “is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” adding that the “peculiar racial situations and problems could best be explained in the life and history of one who has lived them. My living gains its importance from the problems and not the problems from me.”11

In Dusk Du Bois takes us through his life and tells us how his understanding of what race is and how it works changed as a result of his encounters with the color line as a scholar and as an organizer. Even more than Souls, Dusk underscores the centrality of lived experience in Du Bois’s analytical approach. There we learn how his time in Germany led him to understand race as a global phenomenon, not just an American one, and to attend to the presence of local differences within the global construction of the color line. As he explains, when he was young he thought that the color line was particular to the United States, but his years studying in Germany led him to realize that racialization was a global phenomenon and that “the majority of mankind has struggled through this inner spiritual slavery.”12 Already at the beginning of the second essay in Souls, titled “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” he states, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”13 As sociologist Katrina Quisumbing King shows, many people are aware of the first part of the phrase—the color line as the central problem of the twentieth century—but not of its continuation—that is to say, Du Bois’s understanding of the color line as a global phenomenon. Du Bois was the first sociologist to develop a historical and social constructionist understanding of race.14

Du Bois’s autobiographical reflections in Dusk help him to develop a phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of racialized people, and to link lived experiences to a broader analysis of the intersections of class, race, and colonialism. His aim in this book and others was not so much to give an account of his life and worldviews relating to the color line as to theorize from his own experience as a Black person living behind the veil. He introduces the book thusly:

My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a Problem; but that problem was, as I continue to think, the central problem of the greatest of the world’s democracies and so the Problem of the future world. The problem of the future world is the charting, by means of intelligent reason, of a path not simply through the resistances of physical force, but through the vaster and far more intricate jungle of ideas conditioned on unconscious and subconscious reflexes of living things; on blind unreason and often irresistible urges of sensitive matter; of which the concept of race is today one of the most unyielding and threatening. I seem to see a way of elucidating the inner meaning and significance of that race problem by explaining it in terms of the one human life that I know best.15

This focus on lived experience and its link to global structures of oppression, exploitation, and exclusion is a central element of Du Bois’s sociology and something that differentiates it from the sociologies of his, and our, contemporaries.

Du Bois relies on his second sight to develop an analysis of the lived experience of whiteness. The phenomenology of whiteness, an inquiry into the meaning and experience of being socially constructed as white, was a subject of Du Bois’s analyses throughout his life. He first explored this in his biography of John Brown, and further developed it in “The Souls of White Folk” and “The Hands of Ethiopia,” two essays in Darkwater. He also dedicates a full chapter to this topic in Dusk, and returns to it, in a global context, in his analysis of the subjectivity of the colonialist in The World and Africa.

For Du Bois, whiteness confers material privilege as the result of the exploitation of workers of color and the appropriation of colonial resources, and it also grants social and symbolic privilege, as a result of the power to define the social world and the many little and large forms of social recognition attached to this power in everyday life. In Black Reconstruction Du Bois refers to these forms of privilege as the psychological wage of whiteness. The power of whites to impose a definition of who they and others are is the basis for racialization and double consciousness.16

To better understand the uniqueness and importance of Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness, it is useful to contrast it with the work of his contemporaries who were theorizing about subjectivity and the self. Classical as well as contemporary theorists affirm that subjectivity and the self are constructed and reconstructed through continuing social interaction. At the core of social interaction are the acts of communication and mutual recognition between individuals in society.

William James, Du Bois’s mentor and friend at Harvard, was one of the first American theorists of the self and subjectivity. James was a professor of philosophy and psychology and one of the founders of the philosophical approach known as pragmatism. In his book The Principles of Psychology, James divided the self between the “I” (the self as knower) and the empirical self, or “me” (the self as known, the accumulated experiences that constitute the self).17 He further divided the “me” into four components: the material self (our material existence, our bodies, our families, our possessions), the spiritual self (our states of consciousness and feelings), the pure ego, and, most important in this context, the social self. The social self emerges through interaction and mutual recognition between people and from the internalization of the images that others have of us.

As mutual recognition is central to the formation of the self, lack thereof has a devastating impact on the formation of the self. Of this condition James wrote,

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke or minded what we did, but if every person we met “cut us dead” and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily tortures would be a relief; for those would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.18

Recognition is so crucial to one’s own subjective understanding that we may develop as many social selves as there are individuals that recognize us.19 In James’s formulation, this splitting divides us into several selves, which may at times adopt group positions that are misaligned with one another. Du Bois reformulates this splitting of the selves into the concept of “twoness.”

Although James’s...