Marianne Weber
gracecanigbata
WEBDuBois2021revisionpowerpoint.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.”
The Man
1868 Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts
1884 Graduates from Great Barrington High School as class valedictorian.
1885-1888 Attends Fisk University, Nashville, TN, graduates in three years.
1888-1892 Attends Harvard University. Receives A.B. in philosophy, cum laude, 1890, M.A. in History, 1892
1892-1894 Travels in Europe, studies at University of Berlin.
1895 Receives Ph.D. in History, Harvard University.
Doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade.
Talking about coming back to US after Berlin
W.E.B. DuBois was the first African-American to earn a PhD. & from Harvard no less!
1896 The year he publishes his dissertation on the Supreme Court rules in Plessy v Ferguson that "Separate but equal" facilities for African-Americans do not violate that 14th Amendment guarantees of equal protection of the law. Discrimination in educational institutions across the US continues as a result of this decision.
1896 He is appointed Professor of History and Economics, Atlanta University. Editor of Atlanta University Publications on the Study of Negro Problems (1898-1913).
1899 Publishes The Philadelphia Negro.
1903 Publishes The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches.
1905 Organizes the Niagara Movement, demands social and political rights for African-Americans. Challenges Booker T. Washington's leadership. Resigns from Atlanta University.
1910 Co-founds National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Appointed director of publicity and research. Publishes NAACP monthly magazine, The Crisis (1910-1934).
1904 Max Weber visit US meets Du Bois. Is impressed with Souls of Black Folk publishes an article in his journal. Weber reports being shocked at the racism in the US.
1917 World War I breaks out. Du Bois urges African-Americans to participate. Campaigns against maltreatment of black soldiers. Leads silent protest parade in New York City against lynching and "Jim Crow" laws.
1920 Publishes Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil, his first autobiography.
1930 Publishes Africa--Its Place in Modern History. Publishes Africa--Its Geography, People and Products
1934 Resigns from NAACP. Returns to Atlanta University, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Sociology.
1940-1944 Editor Phylon.
1944 Forcibly retired from Atlanta University (due to age). Returns to NAACP as Director of Special Research.
1950 Chair of the Peace Information Center, leads campaign to ban the atomic bomb. Candidate for U.S. Senate from New York, American Labor Party.
The Harlem Renaissance, originally named the New Negro Movement, was a time of spiritual, intellectual, and literary awakening with an explosion of art, poetry and social thought. Between 1920 and 1930, almost 750,000 African Americans left the South, and many of them migrated to urban areas in the North to take advantage of the prosperity—and the more racially tolerant environment. The neighborhoods of Harlem drew nearly 175,000 African Americans, turning the area into one of the largest concentrations of Blacks in the world. This instant community of determined, open minded people proved to be the perfect context for new thought proving the opportunity for group expression. It has been characterized as a time when social disillusionment was transformed into race pride. Out of this environment came such influential people as poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen wrote the first critically acclaimed novels by African-American women. They paved the way for giants such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison and many others among a new generation of African-American novelists, poets and playwrights.
Social Forces of the 1920’s & 30’s
Du Bois started Crisis—became a major outlet for Black scholarship, art, creative expression and political discourse!
For example, Langston Hughes poetry published in this journal—a very special place for some of the best American poetry and literature ever produced.
DREAM DEFERRED
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
THE WEARY BLUES
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I danced in the Nile when I was old I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Langston Hughes 1902-1967
1961 Greatly disillusioned, Du Bois applies for membership in the Communist Party of the United States. Emigrates to Ghana. Frustrated and angry he leaves the US in protest and give s up his citizenship.
Was excited about the 1960’s as a hopeful age-pleased with student involvement in politics. McCarthy era.
Warned before his death in having African countries take investment capital from the US—avoid dependence. Be smart he said about capital—get lowest rates possible.
Called the stock market a gambling organization. Was optimistic for Africans—thought that with slavery as the backdrop to the moral dealings with industrialized nations that they would be careful about their dealing in capitalism with those same countries. Unfortunately, he was wrong.
Dies, August 27, 1963
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 the discipline.
Du Bois was the most prominent intellectual leader and political activist on behalf of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century.
DuBois was naturally gifted intellectually and took pleasurable pride in surpassing his fellow students in academic and other pursuits. Upon graduation from high school, he, like many other New England students of his caliber, desired to attend Harvard.
A contemporary of Booker T. Washington, he carried on a conflictual dialogue with the educator about segregation, political disfranchisement, and ways to improve African American life. He was labeled "The Father of Pan-Africanism."
More on Du Bois!
The Sociology of Race—invented it!
A genius, labeled as a radical, he was ignored by those who hoped that his massive contributions would be buried along side of him.
But, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, "history cannot ignore W.E.B. DuBois because history has to reflect truth and Dr. DuBois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths.”
Their weak wings beat against their barriers -- barriers of caste, of youth, of life.
-- W.E.B. DuBois
His politics and theory radicalized over time. After traveling and spending time
working as both a scholar and an activist Du Bois realized that for Africans
to be free anywhere, they must be free everywhere.
At the turn of the century Dubois had been a supporter of
black capitalism. Throughout his career he moved steadily to the political left.
By 1905 he had been drawn to socialist ideas and remained sympathetic
to Marxism throughout his life.
The WOrk
BETWEEN me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
Souls of Black Folk
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taconic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, 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.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is 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, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
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 and easily become triple, quadruple consciousness:
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
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2bGUeDnqPY
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. “
Chris Rock speaks of his experience:
http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/node/186
“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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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)
