Du Bois is super popular in the last 20 years; he is black.
Popular partially since the Black lives matter movement.
Since it, there has been a reemergance of interest in black, postcolonial figures in the last 10 years.
(also figures like Frantz Fanon).
Currently in the US there are waves of academics choosing entirely new fields of study, which is also partially why Du Bois has become very interesting.
Perhaps there has been a kind of overcompensation at the time, but this isn’t really problematic.
Born in the north during reconstruction
First african american with a PHD from Harvard
Hopes were incredibly high that the position of black people would get significantly better, which in the end did not become the case; it is important for how Du Bois works. His disappointment is inherent to his work.
The abolition of slavery is a story of revolution and counter revolution.
After the juridicial emancipation of slaves, it did not mean that black people were properly free. Only formally so. Being poor and marginalised black people became peons instead of proper slaves. Not much changed.
Started from better conditions and was generally quite gifted.
Important also in his trajectory to sociology is his exposure to German sociology. He went to Berlin to study.
Du Bois would get a lot of intellectual baggage from that.
He is more or less the pioneer of sociology in the United States.
Was the first to establish a research group in Atlanta, The Atlanta school of sociology.
It is a common idea that the first was in Chicago, but Du Bois was 20 years earlier.
Du Bois family was already free before emancipation.
Du Bois engaged in sociological studies in order to describe the conditions of black people in the US.
He engages in mainly empirical research, where he gathered general data as to the living conditions of black people. Is probably one of the first extensive large scale sociological studies in the US.
Du Bois was also incredibly politically active; founder of the NAACP (1909). [They are quite non-radical today though at the time it was an incredibly radical group of people].
Writes a lot of popular texts, such as The Souls of Black Folk. Which is a kind of personal reflection inspired by sociological investigations, which gave him general renown outside of academia. He wrote both academically and socially, in order to reach a broader audience.
He increasingly begins to understand that you cannot understand race outside of class and economy; he makes a sort of shift towards Marxism-ish ideas.
He thinks race is deeply connected with labour, exploitation and division of labour.
Black Reconstruction in America is his most important work of academic sociology.
Played an active role in the creation of the Pan-African movement of the 20:th century who sought to raise political awareness of colonisation in Africa and America.
After WWII the pan-african movement led to the decolonisation of Africa.
Advised Nkruma in Ghana.
Participated in the ’March on Washington’, where he also died ”the old man died” as everyone said. He was the theoretical backbone of the entire civil rights movement.
Before Du Bois, there was a kind of sociological approach in America; generally rooted in social darwinism that was entirely deductive and entirely speculative.
What was recognised as sociology was supposed to be entirely made up of abstract theorising.
About the evolution of society, very similar to Herbert Spencer, Simple to differentiated.
[Spencer was inspired by social darwinism too]
Du Bois was strongly opposed to this.
This approach generally only led to incrdibly racist theories, as it was assumed that different people’s had gone through an inherently different evolution, and so have different inherent capabilities.
Du Bois therefore needed to find an alternative approach; which he found in Germany.
Developed ideas on what sociology is:
- We need to stop speculating about the entity of society.
Critical of speculative thought on social life
Through empirical research make visible what is not yet visible
- Get rid of any analogy between social science and natural science
They are entirely different, as society does not hold any natural laws
These two movements at least characterise his initial studies:
uses an empirical inductive method, completely opposite to the speculative deductive method before him.
However, he is not entirely against theory, but thinks that theory has a different role → it needs to be rooted in empirical material and be directly about something concrete. Eg. He would be very critical of Parson’s systems theory because you cannot observe facts like systems.
In the Chicago school middle range theories were developed, which was a kind of mixture of the inductive method and a deductive method.
Du Bois thinks that in this case, sociology can play an emancipatory role. Through the study of black people scientifically, we can contribute to the understanding of the condition of black people and therefore the desire to have them emancipated. If we explain how the condition of black people comes about, and that they are social, we can prove that emancipating black people can never be bad.
Du Bois on race:
Today it is generally accepted to say that race is a social construction, people against racism have often showed that biological conceptions of race are false, and thus only social. But that doesn’t mean that race doesn’t exist as a real social phenomena. It’s through such actual mechanisms that they are racialised; you become part of a racial category through social mechanisms.
Thus you have to explain these mechanisms.
Du Bois does not speak of social construction, but is generally portrayed as a pioneer of a kind of social construction regarding race. We can observe social facts that being racialised has real observable effects despite not being biological.
The fact that there is a group of black people who live differently from white people, needs additional explanation deeper than physical differences. The differences can be sociological, though somehow be based on the physical.
Critique of Du Bois: Gives in to biology too much, trying to remove certain sign posts of the debate but stays in an intellectual context where speaking of the physical difference is important. He seems to express quite a wide range of stereotypes; such as the low grade of culture of black people.
Like many other sociologists, Du Bois focuses on action. He emphasise the connections between action and the conditions under which people act. This has become omni-present in current sociology; we have to understand agency in relation to structure.
Eg. the class structure, or race structure
These form the conditions under which people desire to act.
[Bourdieu also emphasises this]
Only by looking at sociology in this way, we can immediately undermine a great range of stereotypes.
Du Bois shows that general behaviour of black people which was largely seen as a kind of prejudice, was actually quite rational action, and in many cases resistance. Many stereotypes comes out of how certain forms of behaviour, such as laziness, comes out of a desire to undermine the system. It seems also that many parts of black language too show this kind of inherent resistance, as it would be created in such a way as to be able to make fun of white people without their understanding.
If we want to understand the conditions under which black people have became the way they are, we have to see that it is a result of a degraded people outside of any relation to a cultural home.
Violence: there was a lot of violence in black neighbourhoods, and Du Bois shows that this trait comes out of general cultural degradation rather than biology.
After the civil war, a lot of stereotypes were reconfirmed as black people were unable to join the working market in any way that wasn’t exploitative; they ended up mainly becoming debt peons.
White people mainly owned land, and the whites had to give away part of their property, at which the relation became horrifically exploitative as they then became stuck under relations of rent.
There was no education, they were not able to politically organise or participate in most elections. They were only formally allowed to vote, and in many areas of the south, they lost it entirely.
The emancipation of black people became insignificant.
→ there was a counter-revolution.
One of the things that Du Bois studies: how do the slaves become part of the working class; they become proletarian. How do black and white proletarians relate to each other?
Black people end up doing bad jobs for less wages than whites, and so there is a kind of race segmentation.
White workers had an inherent interest in this, because they can now get better jobs, because the black workers can take up the bad ones.
”Wage is for whiteness”.
There is a structural higher wage for white workers than the black workers.
Today there is a black bourgoisie, but still the above remains true.
Increasingly Du Bois becomes Marxist; something he was criticised for.
He had a lot of naive views of the Soviet Union. Was very impressed by the Soviet Union.
On a scholarly level too he was influenced by marxism: how race and class intertwine. He is looking for the social conditions under which black people become working class.
One thing he studies is urbanisation: how can we understand that black people live in certain neighbourhoods (book on philadelphia), often there is a deliberate choice to segregate black people. The city is a construction that chooses who gets to live where.
This means that black people who become better off, leave the black neighbourhood and gets to go to ”good” white neighbourhoods. Making social promotion means to live amoung whites, which in turn leads to black people enforcing their own segregation.
All his prior considerations come back to the concept of the ”color line” (Frederick Douglass 1881).
The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Part of Du Bois early work.
In this work he is mainly interested in cultural stereotypes which racialise people.
It is an incredibly metaphoric work. Difficulty level increased.
”The problem of the 20:th century is the problem of the color line”.
The major anti-colonial struggles were bound to become important after colonialism.
Certain contemporary scholars speak of the global color line, mechanisms of racialisation outside the US.
Who was this book for?
Most black people at the time couldn’t read, and his difficult prose is not penetratable by someone who can barely read: thus his intended audience are white people, whom we wants to introduce to the black experience, and tries to show reality ”from the other side of the Veil”.
”How does it feel to be a problem?”
The black person experiences himself to be a problem, despite looking away from it. The color line ”runs through me”.
Du Bois creates an extremely existential language. [Similar in Frantz Fanon].
The existential experience has to be interwoven into the empirical research of it, because it’s important in understanding actual blackness.
However, White poeple don’t experience the color line, so they are unaware of it. They don’t get a feeling for the stereotypes, it is asymmetrical. On one side, a problem; on the other ignorance.
Through the life of a black person, it is common to have a moment when they are directly confronted with the fact that they are an other, that they are racialised.
”The black person is racialised by how white people look at him, making visible to him his inferior status.” (Frantz Fanon).
Racialisation happens in very mundane and concrete circumstances usually, but still has incredibly overreaching effects.
Du Bois introduces the metaphor of the Veil.
There is a kind of Veil which covers and seperates two worlds, or two experiences of it. The white and the black. This is the experience of the color line.
It seperates (worlds, spaces etc.); racialises (the mechanism through which racial groups become real); it makes invisible (it keeps certain things behind the veil, the way that white people gaze on black people reifies the experience, but they themselves don’t realise it, certain things are withdrawn from our direct experience [similar to Marx: there are surface phenomena, and then the things that are hidden behind]) Our spontaneous experience of society gives us only a defracted view of what society actually is (thus a need for science). This unawareness contributes to maintaining the social relations of racialisation.
[Certain scholars have argued that the color line works on differentiation: the more you look like ”us”, the closer you can come; there is a differentiation of social distance].
What can a black person do to confirm or not confirm a prejudice? This kind of thinking is central to the black experience: you always look at yourself through the white gaze; in all circumstances you try tactics to make themselves seem acceptable, whilst white people don’t have to think like this at all.
The Veil had concrete affects on Du Bois himself, his work is left behind the Veil.
On this basis, Du Bois uses the concept of Double Consciousness.
Black people see themselves not from their own perspective, but from the perspective of the white world, which becomes double consciousness: to looks at oneself through other’s eyes. The black person is internally split between being American, and a Black person. Two warring ideals in one dark body.
It means to have two consciousness. My consciousness as a person, and on top of that always comes a second consciousness: the eyes of the white majority. You are continually accompanied by the second consciousness; an experience of internal splitting and twoness.
What is problematic is that the white gaze is internalised. You know that the gaze will always be there and as such your behaviour is changed. It leads in turn to a complex of inferiority in relation to the colonial overlords.
As such, one cannot be a harmonious personality, but is rather always split.
The external conflict becomes internal.
Du Bois doesn’t cite anything about where his reflections come. Many scholars of Du Bois work is that the notion of double consciousness stands in a long tradition of thinking about consciousness. For one there is the tradition of European romanticism, there is usually an internal split consciousness (the preindustrial and the industrial consciousness, the longing back to nature and community which is lost in the modern society; we are modern but we long for non-modernity).
Another important influence is likely Hegel. Eg. the master-slave dialectic. Many scholars have connected the double consciousness with Hegel.
Another influence is likely the social psychology of eg. William James and George Herbert Mead.
William James thought about what it means to be a self. ”The I” and ”The Me”. The active Ego and the passive. The whole question is how the I and the Me can be reconciled with each other. The way in which I see myself and the way others see me.
For Mead, the Me is a social self, and the I is the action that I commit to with my sense of self.
For Du Bois there is something in the black experience that makes the split between I and Me entirely irreconcilable, as long as there is racialisation, you cannot have a stable sense of self. Which in turn leads to neuroses from an internalised sense of inferiority.
It looks as if Du Bois also sees a positive side to this split. For one it leads to personal despair, but it also seems that black people are given the Gift of second sight. They become aware of more than white people. Black people have the capacity to look at problems from different perspectives, they are given a broader awarenss of society generally. [Sartre: Loosing is winning. To be exploited comes with a form of isnight that the exploiters lack.]
Is it really a higher awarness?
Or is this second sight also a kind of false consciousness. If black people interiorise the white gaze, they will start to see themselves on the basis of their stereotypes. In turn, this second sight does not give a higher awareness but an extra layer of false consciousness.
Both can likely be true. Du Bois for one was able to see more, but many are likely able to see less.
How can Du Bois see through all these mechanisms?
It might not be that these are struggles of other people; but rather that these are his own struggles, and thus also becuase of the depth of his personal crisis, he seems to be able to recognise the general experience of black people, despite it not being something that is actually general.
In the context of the failure of post-emancipation, Du Bois held a debate with Booker T. Washington.
- He was seen as a leader of black liberation.
Du Bois radically disagreed with him. It is likely that Du Bois developed the idea of double consciousness precisely because of someone like Washington. He was someone who had interiorised the white gaze, and only served to keep black people as servile.
Washington had a different background than DuBois. He was born a slave, and so had much deeper roots with the black tradition. Compared to black people Du Bois was part of a black elite. Washington was not. He was educated, but not at Harvard like Du Bois. The project of Washington was summarised in the Atlanta compromise. There can be a compromise between whites and blacks. Black people need to be educated into industrial workers, so that they can get better jobs.
So that in the end, they can become wealthy through hard work.
However, in order to keep them in the industrial sector, civil rights and so on needs to be quieted.
This is what infuriates Du Bois. This is the attitude of someone who has interiorised the white gaze.
”Manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses”.
The initial social rights movement was very masculine, which women were kept out of. The idea was to answer the question as to how: ”black men could be respected as men”.
And so Washington formalised the Niagara movment and later the NAACP.
”Work, culture and liberty” need to become equal.
And to arrive at a kind of ”human” brotherhood.
”In order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characterisitics both so sadly lack”.
Black Americans bring ”the pure human spirit” of the declaration of independence.
A controversial aspect of his strategy is that it was entirely elite based.
There is a percentage of any group that has the ability to lead.
”The n race , like all race, is going to be saved by its exceptional men”.
However, he based this on what was likely researched facts; likely it was a sociological reality. It is difficult to see that most people will have the ability to lead the struggle.
In a sense, he was a vanguardist.