Marianne Weber
gracecanigbata
WEBDuBois2021NARRATIONOFCONCEPTS.pptxW.E.B. Du Bois
1868-1963
Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.
—WEB Dubois, 1897
“Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.”
W. E. B. Du Bois was a political and literary giant of the 20th century, publishing over twenty books and thousand of essays and articles throughout his life.
Du Bois is arguably one of the most imaginative, perceptive, and prolific founders of sociology.
NARRATION POWEROINT OF Du Bois’ WOrk
The Souls of Black Folk, arguably W.E.B. DuBois’ most famous work, addresses two concepts that describe the quintessential Black experience in America— the concepts of “the veil” and “double-consciousness.”
Though DuBois uses these terms separately, their meanings and usage in his works are deeply intertwined. These two concepts gave a name to what so many African-Americans felt but previously could not express due to a lack of words to accurately describe their consciousness, pain and pride. The implication and connotation of these words were far-reaching because not only did it succinctly describe the plight of being Black and American then, it rings true to the core and essence of what it means to still be Black and American today.
For DuBois, the veil concept primarily refers to four elements of social and perceptual life:
First, the veil suggests to the literal darker skin of Blacks, which is a physical demarcation of difference from whiteness. The darkness of skin hides ‘sameness’ under the veil of blackness. This is (master status of race).
Second, the veil refers to social space—it is a marginalized space—a social invisibility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UznNg94lJA chris rock on race neighborhood.
Thirdly, the veil suggests white people’s lack of clarity to see Blacks as “true” Americans. Civic exclusion… (and there is an awareness of this on the part of Blacks—example, due process laws – differential application of rules/laws). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQejcZc4uFM. “If you are a citizen why do you have to fight for your civil rights” James Baldwin
And lastly, the veil refers to Blacks’ lack of clarity to see themselves outside of what white others describes and prescribes for them (connects to Double Consciousness– interplay between social identity/self identity—connects to Cooley Looking Glass Self). Self reflects Society– Social Psychological reality-
Double Consciousness
is a sociological term akin to role taking (GH Mead)
The experience of being able to see oneself through the eyes of the other—only in the case of double consciousness the others who see us have highly contradictory interpretations. Loved and hated simultaneously. Viewing oneself and the world simultaneously in such conflict creates complex, deeply conflictual social selves. Negative views/images/constant backdrop against which one must live. Manifested at the individual level--
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cjv7hEAytU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNcloTmvTeA&feature=related
Star Spangled Banner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i9nqBL5PSM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_DeHMVAkM. Hey Black Child Poem recitation
Add to this gender and social class (Du Bois only really addresses social class later—but the term of double consciousness can easily become triple, quadruple consciousness: or as we now call it INTERSECTIONALITY---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5oZOoWsebs
Cuban Raw Feminist Hip/Hop
Irony: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3raYwdhmu1g
THE REAL THING JIMMI HENDRIX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKAwPA14Ni4
Any socially-aware, present-day African-American has had at least two life-altering experiences in life— the moment he/she realized he/she was Black, and the moment when he/she realized that was a problem. Like DuBois, many African-Americans can pinpoint the exact instance at which both of these life altering encounters took place, and they too came to this realization at a young age.
For DuBois, “ Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like [them perhaps] in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. “
“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”
“This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.”
You can see the concepts emerging/ illustrated in his fine expressive style!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCc4VBMEUnI. Ali – talking about white washing…being Black
No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with Negroes?
In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime.
It is important to note that in much of the general usage of the quote, the “problem of the color-line” is sometimes interpreted as only being a problem in the United States. However, in Du Bois’ initial writing, he extended the problem across much of the world to “Asia” “Africa” and “the islands of the sea”. Du Bois’ thought in “Of the Dawn of Freedom” implied a universal exclusivity, of “color” as the greatest problem of the 20th century.
And now the 21st century—what do you think?
THE PROBLEM of the twentieth century is the problem of the
The Color-Line… a social barrier, present in custom, law, economic relations, and so, that separates nonwhite persons from whites.
Race is a socially constructed category and the racist thought and practice which it produces are among those social forces which will “move and modify (our) age”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw
Ali on fighting in Vietnam (conscientious objector—makes the line clear – different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeFMyrWlZ68
Problem of the Color Line is “about the continuing plague of racial discrimination in the United States.”
DuBois wrote “No, the race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.” [7] This quote reflects an expansion of DuBois original definition of the color-line to include discrimination beyond that of color discrimination –although color discrimination is an enduring and negative social force in human history.
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It starts with the notion of a working class bifurcated along racial lines.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/08/web-du-bois-black-reconstruction-civil-rights
W. E. B. Du Bois’s in his book Black Reconstruction in America, suggested a different paradigm for thinking about capitalism than the class structures put forward by both Marx and Weber. Du Bois argued that capitalism created two proletariats:
“[the] black proletariat is not part of the white proletariat. . . while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalist system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers. It is white labor that deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies him affiliation with trade unions, expels him from decent houses and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination.”
Du Bois “the two proletariats’
Moreover, according to DuBois, capitalism (beginning with slavery) offered white workers, the second proletariat, a policing role in relation to the first proletariat:
The system of slavery demanded a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of the poor whites. . . . Considering the economic rivalry of the black and white worker in the North, it would have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police slaves. But two considerations led him in the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters.
Black Marxism
Cedric Robinson – 1940-2016
~Cedric Robinson
“Capitalism was “racial” not because of some conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and dispossession, but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society. The first European proletarians were racial subjects (Irish, Jews, Roma or Gypsies, Slavs, etc.) and they were victims of dispossession (enclosure), colonialism, and slavery within Europe. Indeed, Robinson suggested that racialization within Europe was very much a colonial process involving invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchy. Insisting that modern European nationalism was completely bound up with racialist myths, he reminds us that the ideology of Herrenvolk (governance by an ethnic majority) that drove German colonization of central Europe and “Slavic” territories “explained the inevitability and the naturalness of the domination of some Europeans by other Europeans.” To acknowledge this is not to diminish anti-black racism or African slavery, but rather to recognize that capitalism was not the great modernizer giving birth to the European proletariat as a universal subject, and the “tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”
Theoretical Contributions
1. Racial distinctions and racial constructs are supremely important and central to how human beings experience the world (externally constraining)—from health to politics to crime to international politics--understanding/misunderstandings about RACE SHAPES PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR on all sides of the color line.
As DuBois put it, “The Negro ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings . . . two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
2. Race is a social construction (where do these ideas/understandings about race come from). They are socially constructed. Much bigger than biology and physicality. THE FIRST SOCIOLGIST to argue explicitly that race could not be reduced to a scientific category or biological detriment. Argued further that Marxism could not explain race and class connections.
Recognized limitations of Marx—but kept the good (not unlike his friend Weber). Quote from Souls of Black Folks captures the Marxist class analysis but the quote also emphasizes his notions of the importance of race.
“White man sit down whole year, Nigger work all day and night and make crop; nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man sittin down gits all. It’s wrong.” (This is post slavery but captures the alienated nature of black labor and white privilege in the US).
Dubois notes that blacks are separated from the proletariat movement by racism—proletariat splits on race lines.
“Today we realize that there are no hard and fast racial types among men. Race is a dynamic and not static conceptions and the typical races are continually changing and developing, amalgamating and differentiating.”
Race prejudice not just COLOR prejudice! He saw and understood the Jewish Problem as well.
3. Linked RACE and CLASS to globalism—one of the first thinkers of de-colonization—colonial studies. Used Marx and Engels and critiqued the colonial world system (before Wallerstein), he explained how the color line plays out in global capitalism and politics. Facilitated a pan-African movement—would become increasingly important for him as he would be exiled from the US for his political beliefs. Colonies—look at them around the world. Dark people in alienated oppressed situations. Look at global tourism for a contemporary example. War on drugs for example—it is against the oppressed and then an extra amount of hurt for poor blacks!
4-Contributions to the understanding of crime. Again, a kind of Marxist start but a Dubois finish. Crime is always related to lack of harmony with social surroundings—alienation of but more than simply economic. Criminal behavior must be understood as being the result of social conditions, institutional arrangements/dynamics, rather than the result of genetic predispositions. He stated the important role of the community in providing a bond and place of social refuge for the oppressed. Importance of religion for providing social spaces for the marginalized—can help A LOT! (later became critical of the church for not being political enough). One of the first to see the important role of the church in African American Politics—MLK and others would soon know.
5-Analyzed war from a social-political-historical position. Saw war as BIG BUSINESS. The military-industrial complex as a term (Galbreith and CW Mills). Profitable for a few but measurelessly harmful and the death of many. Dreams and lives of the everyday person are ripped/destroyed for the interests of a few. Was highly critical of political administrations.
He said:
War is Big Buisness and a business immensely profitable to a few, but measureless disaster and death of dreams to many. Big business wants war in order to keep your mind off social reform; it would rather spend your taxes for atom bombs than for schools because in this way it makes more money; it would rather have your sons dying in Korea than studying in America and asking awkward questions.
It is horribly immoral. Critique of war included work on the necessity of agitators & free expression. Free expression—voices of need and hurt as he called them. Not pleasant for anyone---but you know what---pleasant ain’t the point when life and death is at stake. VOICES.
Du Bois wrote many books and articles (some of his books listed here):
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America: 1638–1870
1896, (Harvard Historical Studies, Longmans, Green, and Co.: New York) Full Text
The Study of the Negro Problems (1898)
The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
The Negro in Business (1899)
The Evolution of Negro Leadership. The Dial, 31 (July 16, 1901).
The Souls of Black Folk. 1999. ISBN 0-393-97393-X.
The Talented Tenth, second chapter of The Negro Problem, a collection of articles by African Americans (September 1903).
Voice of the Negro II (September 1905)
John Brown: A Biography (1909)
Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans (1909)
Atlanta University's Studies of the Negro Problem (1897-1910)
The Quest of the Silver Fleece 1911
The Negro (1915)
Darkwater (1920)
The Gift of Black Folk (1924)
Dark Princess: A Romance (1928)
Africa, Its Geography, People and Products (1930)
Africa: Its Place in Modern History (1930)
Black Reconstruction: An Essay
toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played
in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935)
What the Negro Has Done for the United States and Texas (1936)
Black Folk, Then and Now (1939)
Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940)
Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace ( 1945)
The Encyclopedia of the Negro ( 1946)
The World and Africa (1946)
Peace Is Dangerous (1951)
I Take My Stand for Peace (1951)
In Battle for Peace (1952)
The Black Flame: A Trilogy
The Ordeal of Mansart ( 1957)
Mansart Builds a School ( 1959)
Africa in Battle Against Colonialism, Racialism, Imperialism (1960)
Worlds of Color ( 1961)
An ABC of Color: Selections from Over a Half Century of the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois ( 1963)
The World and Africa, an Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History ( 1965)
The Autobiography of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (International publishers, 1968)
