Adolph Reed, Jr.'s W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
Montas, Fred
WE. B. DU BOIS ' S productive use of his ninety-five years on earth casts a vigilant shadow over anyone who thinks about the political dimensions of the black experience. Few observations made...
...As a work of art however, it is not void of political content or intention...
...Moreover, given Washington's status as the unrivaled heir to Frederick Douglass as the leader of black America, this essay, as Du Bois's biographer David Levering Lewis puts it, "made Souls a contemporary bombshell...
...As neo-Lamarckism fell into disrepute, Reed argues, Du Bois ceased to refer to double consciousness...
...IN SEEKING to excavate the sources and ramifications of Du Bois's politics, Reed places undue emphasis on Du Bois's commitment to science as the basis of his political thought...
...Typical of these is a review of Du Bois's Darkwater entitled "Phases of Du Bois" from the April-May 1920 issue of the Messenger...
...Reed also simplifies Du Bois's consideration of double consciousness...
...Furthermore, Reed persuasively argues that criticizing state programs and policies and organizing to change them is more important, politically, than writing about the values and lifestyles of social groups as the sources of their politics...
...student in political theory at Cornell...
...Who bought and sold their crime, and waxed fat and rich on public iniquity?/ Thou knowest, good God...
...This is significant for Reed, because it allows him to offer a model of political thought as policy-rooted in contrast to the recent academic obsession with politics as interpretation and culture...
...For Reed, "Political ideas function pragmatically, as instruments of real world objectives tied to historically specific debates and struggles...
...In this sense, Du Bois had the political disposition of a sensual pessimist, one whose faith in the possibility of social improvement led him to write and struggle against despairing conditions without the optimist's or scientist's faith in the inevitability of progress...
...Since his death in 1963, no black intellectual has acquired the authoritative stature of Du Bois...
...Moreover, such blacks experience a marginality among both whites and blacks but typically understand this "double marginality" as "a marker of elevated status and an artifact of the racial burden borne uniquely by elite nonwhites...
...Having established elitism and collectivism as the foundations of Du Bois's political thought, Reed turns his attention to Du Bois's use of the idea of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk...
...two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings...
...The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain selfconscious manhood, to merge his double self into a truer and better self...
...Few observations made during our century have been so prescient as Du Bois's well-known 1903 declaration, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line...
...In a study of his political thought, Du Bois's Pan-Africanism and socialism deserve to receive more attention than they do here...
...But in his own time, Du Bois was not always seen in this light...
...This lionized Du Bois is as flat and iconic as Gates et al.'s dandy Du Bois, and both must be laid to rest...
...the point is to change it...
...Du Bois's advocacy of social and political engagement appears forcefully here because of its contrast to Washington's plan to ensure that blacks would not disrupt the political balance of the South...
...Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it...
...It is unnecessary for Reed to dig out the scientific roots of double consciousness in order to assert its political salience...
...Reed correctly describes a Du Bois who was steadfastly collectivist, but Du Bois was also politically oceanic...
...122 DISSENT / Winter 1999...
...This argument is valuable because it sets aside the debate about which intellectual period expressed the ideas of the authentic Du Bois...
...Few monographs have challenged and redirected American historical inquiry as did Black Reconstruction in 1935...
...In it, William Colson chided Du Bois for emphasizing "the moral and esthetic . . . to the detriment of the scientific and the radical...
...With Reed's analysis, arguments about which Du Bois was most interesting or most effective politically are now merely parlor games...
...Who ravished and debauched their mothers and grandmothers...
...Within a few years, Du Bois became less concerned with manipulating black communities, but these same principles formed his "state-centered" critique of the political status of African Americans...
...Even as he did so, however, his work remained in the service of racial uplift...
...Therefore, it was the responsibility of the "better classes" of blacks to organize the community...
...In many respects, Du Bois was suspicious of science, which could not explain or change the typically irrational behavior of whites toward blacks...
...Collectivism, in Reed's view, "entails typically an emphasis on expertise as a legitimate, decisive social force, notions of the impartiality or neutrality of the state and resonant assumptions of the neutral guiding role of technology...
...Perhaps this is why Reed, who once wrote that music is politically mute, ignores this important book...
...Using a method he calls the "generativist" approach to the history of American political thought, by which he "anchor [s] inquiry overtly to contemporary concerns while requiring thick historical grounding," Reed carries out four tasks, each of which makes a contribution to our understanding of Du Bois...
...his range of concerns and willingness to explore different ways to address social problems suggest a more complex logic to his politics than that offered by Reed...
...The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the 'JimCrow' car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either of himself or of the world...
...but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautiful in the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay in far Jamaica...
...Du Bois remains a pertinent thinker because he was "one of the very most consistently and resolutely political of all twentiethcentury black intellectuals...
...At the same time, Reed ignores Du Bois's consistent references to "the veil" [through which blacks became aware of their double consciousness] for several decades following the publication of Souls...
...There is not in the world a more disgraceful denial of human brotherhood than the 'Jim-Crow' car of the southern United States...
...All this justifies the attention Du Bois's life and writings have received in recent years...
...Nevertheless, his poems, novels, stories, and prose style reveal important dimensions of his political thought...
...Du Bois understood that interpretation offers a way to confront the world in periods when we cannot change it...
...The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk...
...Who nursed them in crime and fed them on injustice...
...Just as Baker and Gates are wrong to depoliticize Du Bois in favor of his lyricism, Reed is mistaken in failing to draw connections between Du Bois's artistry and politics...
...others who assumed different political positions became conservative or irrelevant in ways Du Bois managed to avoid...
...Furthermore, Reed errs in placing all of Du Bois's intellectual adjustments and phases under the rubric of collectivism...
...To understand him politically, it is important to investigate the rationale for the ways he changed with (and in the case of his socialism, against) his times...
...rather it overflows with Du Bois's trademark condemnation of offenses committed against blacks and suggestions for rectifying them...
...But it does not explain why Du Bois remains the iconic black intellectual...
...All that Reed gains from using neo-Lamarckism to explain double consciousness is a way to justify its disappearance from Du Bois's vocabulary after Souls...
...Reed argues that Du Bois held a scientific understanding of double consciousness (consistent with his Progressive-era intellectual milieu) that expressed a dichotomy between what he believed to be the primitive nature of blacks and the civilized soul of European culture...
...The 1960s saw a renewed interest in Du Bois...
...as a recognizable term with figurative dimensions...
...Those who posit this claim, argues Reed, are especially mistaken in placing double consciousness at the center of Du DISSENT / Winter 1999 119 Bois's thought, since he did not use that term after Souls...
...Pessimism is cowardice," wrote Du Bois in Darkwater...
...Reed cites these authorities to support his depiction of Du Bois as an advocate for hard-headed, strategy-minded, progressive politics...
...Throughout his life, Du Bois confronted the often inexplicable circumstances of black existence without the optimism of a scientific 120 DISSENT / Winter 1999 man...
...The most well-known formulation of this phrase occurs in the first essay of Souls, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," where Du Bois writes, 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...
...Central to this line of thinking is the separation of politics and culture as two distinct realms of human life, recall Reed's description of politics as an "autonomous domain of social activity...
...Reed complains that Souls's interpreters of the 1980s and 1990s have gone out of their way to avoid the politics of Du Bois's critique of Washington and instead see the idea of double consciousness as a metaphor or philosophical construct...
...Throughout the 118 DISSENT / Winter 1999 book, Reed aims to explicate how Du Bois's political thought was directed toward social change...
...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...
...Du Bois was "a romanticist of the highest order...
...Instead, Reed seeks to excavate the sources and implications of Du Bois's political thought in order to make a broader statement about political criticism and activism...
...Consider "A Litany of Atlanta," a poem written in response to the 1906 Atlanta race riot, where Du Bois cried, "Who made these devils...
...From Reed's perspective, Du Bois's treatment of double consciousness is fundamentally neo-Lamarckian, following the evolutionary theory of the eighteenth-century French naturalist Jean Lamarck, who postulated that acquired characteristics can be passed down genetically...
...Du Bois, after all, claimed he had no use for art that was not propaganda...
...According to Reed, Du Bois's scientific approach to social problems guided his political thought toward the analysis of the observable facts of the state's operations...
...They are prayers and panegyrics, strangely wild and picturesque, satiric and expressive of heavy feeling...
...For twenty years, Reed has consistently argued for keeping culture out of politics and has criticized much of contemporary black thought for placing the meaning of blackness at the center of an interpretation of black politics...
...As such, double consciousness has become "the neurasthenia of the black professional-managerial class at the end of the twentieth century...
...two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder...
...Reed presents a convincing argument for a particularly important dimension of Du Bois's political thought, but he does so as he denies other equally significant sources and features of Du Bois's politics...
...With this text, Reed claims, "certain core principles of Du Bois's thought . . . were set...
...Clearly Reed's is not a study of political thought in the conventional sense...
...He is not interested in how Du Bois treated concepts such as obligation, freedom, legitimacy, authority, or equality...
...Although Reed helps us understand that looking for a true Du Bois from any one of his periods is irrelevant, Du Bois's search for different approaches to the race question speaks to more than pedantic concerns...
...Reed's second task is to demonstrate that Du Bois held fast to these commitments to elitism and collectivism even as he espoused, alternately and simultaneously, interracialist, socialist, and Pan-Africanist ideas...
...Colson labels Du Bois an "idealist" and Darkwater "a work of art...
...This is not the voice of a man convinced of the progressive role of science in society...
...The book closes with Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways...
...In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost...
...Du Bois adopted new positions with changing historical contexts, but Reed argues that the timing and reasons for his changes are of interest only to pedants and were secondary to those intellectual commitments that Du Bois maintained throughout those changes...
...In W E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought, Adolph Reed, Jr., attempts to explain the logic of Du Bois's political thought and his status as a model for black intellectuals...
...REED'S INTERPRETATION Of the social-evolutionist basis of double consciousness undermines recent claims that Du Bois captured the existential truth about American blackness in his treatment of double consciousness...
...Thus, double consciousness is a compelling metaphor for them because "it expresses in the same instant celebration and complaint...
...But it is neither inconceivable nor incompatible for Du Bois to have held both literary and scientific understandings of double consciousness...
...Introductions to editions of Souls published at that time focused on the political qualities of the book, taking as its centerpiece the essay "Of Booker T. Washington and Others," which criticized Washington's tolerance for the political exclusion of blacks...
...His argument turns on his treatment of The Philadelphia Negro (1899) as a central text for understanding Du Bois's intellectual commitments to collectivism and elitism as the organizing principles of his political thought...
...Specifically, Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., offer commentaries that are "compatible . . . with the broader rhetorical tendency in the ReaganBush-Clinton era to diminish the significance of politics as a consequential endeavor in American society" Drawing on Martin Kilson's writings in these pages, Reed argues that Baker and Gates typify the ambivalence of middle-class blacks who are liberal on race but conservative on class...
...Although Reed appreciates Du Bois's artistic inclinations and stylistic gifts, he does not reflect on their significance in shaping his thought...
...With rigid boundaries separating culture from politics, Reed fails to capture the nuances of this central, if short-lived, concept of Du Bois's political thought...
...Double consciousness with a Lamarckian bent offered Du Bois a way to locate blacks in the social order and describe a path for their uplift...
...In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois declared that the "art of organization" was the "hardest for the freedman to learn...
...This charge concerns Reed's real target in the book: those black intellectuals who offer fundamentally apolitical analyses of African-American thought in general and Du Bois's work in particular...
...First, Reed argues that Du Bois's intellectual career was guided by a "scientific" approach to social inquiry, and that the interventionist orientation of late-nineteenth-century social science deeply shaped Du Bois's view of scholarship...
...B. DU BOIS and American Political Thought opens with epigrams from Marx ("All social life is essentially practical") and Hegel ("One final word about DISSENT / Winter 1999 121 giving instruction as to what the world ought to be...
...One ever feels his two-ness,— an American, a Negro...
...certainly, Du Bois did not reach the artistic heights to which he aspired in his youth...
...Reed does not consider some of the criticisms leveled at Du Bois by A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, and others writing for the Messenger in the late 1910s and early 1920s...
...Du Bois used double consciousness to ground his hope that "some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both sadly lack...
...Du Bois never defined double consciousness, which has allowed some controversy to swirl around its meaning...
...Mystic, passionate, free spirited, his essays are never mere prose...
...FRED MONTAS, JR., is a Ph.D...
...It is impossible to say if this perspective compromised the quality of Du Bois's creative pieces...
...By packaging Du Bois in the box of Progressive-era social evolutionism, Reed hopes to show that Du Bois held a practical understanding of double consciousness...
...And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither can be denied...
...Reed's command as a scholar and a polemicist holds the reader's attention throughout this compact book...
...Reed's fourth task is to demonstrate that recent accounts of Souls "trivialize the idea of the political by deploying [double consciousness] as a generic allusion . . . and by obfuscating the character of politics as an autonomous domain of social activity...
...Du Bois deployed double consciousness as a metaphor in the service of politics...
Vol. 46 • January 1999 • No. 1
