Race, Power, & Equality Poli 110J 7.2

Race, Power, & EqualityPoli 110J 7.2 “Wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil”

Du Bois gets radicalized • Sam Hose • Accused of murdering employer & raping his wife • Admits murder (over debt), denies rape • Lynched w/2,000 witnesses outside of Atlanta • Barbecued & dismembered, knuckles displayed in shop window • Du Bois comes to believe that “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.” • The purpose of science

Education • Can blacks be educated? • “Most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do is listen to evidence.” (70) • Note: not most white Americans • Basic assumptions as part of the Veil

Why is education necessary? • Systematic injustice: “The police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves….” After Emancipation, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of reenslaving the blacks. (120-121) • This mockery of law means that “daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression.” (119) • Alienation from law & politics

Why is education necessary? • Social segregation (parallel worlds) reinforced by mutual mistrust and misunderstanding between races. This segregation is backed by the force of society and of law, “as when the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested for talking together on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.” (123)

Why is education necessary? • This segregation is reinforced the places that blacks & whites live • Either they live in proximity, encountering one another at their worst, or whites own black homes but never encounter their tenants • “…the family of the [former] master has dwindled to two lone women, who live in Macon and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom.” (86)

Why is education necessary? • Relatedly, uneducated blacks are often victimized in business by outsiders. They can own nothing themselves. • Debt: repossession and exploitation • Deeper and deeper year by year • Whites, Yankees, Jews • Antisemitism

Permanent Alienation • Thus, two attitudes come to the forefront: • Disengagement: “Happy?—Well, yes; he laughed and flipped pebbles, and thought the world was as it was. He had worked here twelve years and has nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes, seven; but they hadn’t been to school this year,--couldn’t afford books and clothes, and couldn’t spare their work.”

Resentment: “Let a white man touch me, and he dies; I don’t boast this,--I don’t say it around loud, or before the children,--but I mean it. I’ve seen them whip my father and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood ran”

“Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate & vindictiveness there;--these are the extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew which we preferred.” (89)

Why is education necessary? • 3 possibilities and dangers at the turn of the 20th Century: • 1. “The multiplying of human wants in culture-lands calls for world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying them.” • Globalizing markets serve to bring people into contact and commerce with one another, presenting the possibility for equal exchange

Why is education necessary? • “Behind this thought lurks the afterthought of force and dominion,--the making of brown men to delve when the temptation of beads and red calico cloys.” (63) • Color line • Exploitation

Why is education necessary? • 2. “The thought of the older South,--the sincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro,--a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil.” • A tolerance based in hierarchy

Why is education necessary? • Within this, “the afterthought,--some of them with favoring chance might become men, but in sheer self-defence we dare not let them, and we build walls about them so high, and hang between them and the light a veil so thick, that they shall not even think of breaking through.” (64-65) • Become men = access to the spheres of life reserved for whites • But privileges of whites are based in the exclusion of blacks

Why is education necessary? • “The thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying, ‘Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity—Vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!’” • Assimilationist • Demand/plea for equality • Asking to be treated as humans • To have one’s rights respected is to be acknowledged and be treated as fully human

Why is education necessary? • “To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,--suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?” (64) • Double consciousness • Awareness of the hostility of the wider society

Who is to be educated? • Men • “The Talented Tenth” • “The rule of inequality:--that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig” (59) • Individualistic • Leadership • Serve to raise other blacks “out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them.” (71)

What is the goal of education? • “we almost fear to question if the end of racing is not gold, if the aim of man is not rightly to be rich.” (55) • Some negative social changes result from “the sudden transformation of a fair far-off ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the consequent deification of Bread.” (57) • Vs. Booker T. Washington’s industrial schooling • Vs. the view of advancement as referring only to money

What is the goal of education? • The post-war South has forgotten “the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,--that new-world heir of the grace and courtliness of the patrician, knight, and noble…” in favor of sharp & unscrupulous businessmen. (56) • An odd kind of valorization of the antebellum white Southern elite culture • Non-capitalist

What is the goal of education? • Du Bois fears that wealth will become the goal of politics, the fuel of law, and even replace “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” as the ideal of the Public School. (56) • Why is this a problem? Who doesn’t like money? • Regards “human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends.” (67) • Slavery in fact after slavery in law

The goal of education • The purpose of education for Du Bois is not to train men (by which he means men) for business, but to train them for life, which is to say confront the whole of the world. (64) • What is the utility of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness for this project?

The goal of education • Generates the “breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture.” (64) • Character • To overcome the problem of the color line will require “broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph.” (73) • Belief in American telos of equality

The goal of education • “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. … • So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? … Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?” (76) • Transcending power of truth

Race, Power, & Equality Poli 110J 7.2