WEB Dubois Exhibits Higher Calling - Assignment Example

WEB Dubois exhibits higher calling Throughout his books and other writings, William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) DuBois focused on presenting well-written, fair-handed arguments for the fair treatment of African-Americans in this country. In citing the mistakes of the white leaders of his day and throughout history, DuBois’ literary style and content doesn’t attack as much as insinuates these leaders were simply not well informed to begin with. Acknowledging their accomplishments with sincere language and forthright structure, he also denounces them for their failure to see the logistical error of their thinking. Alternating between personal and scientific writing, DuBois successfully appeals to the white majority on the basis of facts, evidence and sound logic even while he presents emotional outbursts at the failure of this same community to recognize the many benefits his heritage has to offer. Several of his writings strive to bring attention to the fact that the causes for certain attitudes regarding black people are directly traced to the actions of white people attempting to suppress the black community. As time progressed with little or no change in the status quo, DuBois drifted more and more toward the political left in his political life and his writings, finally crossing over to communist ideology in his later years. As he became more and more disillusioned with the American system and more impressed with the actions of countries such as Russia in trying to overcome social injustice, DuBois became more emotional in his texts and articles. This drift as well as the differences in writing styles can be seen by comparing some of his works such as “The Negro” published in 1915 with “Gift of Black Folk” published in 1924 and looking at some of the critical commentary regarding Dubois’ work. DuBois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868 as a happy and outgoing child, but the attitudes of the townspeople in his predominantly white neighborhood quickly soured him and he became withdrawn and sullen.1 His attitude was reinforced throughout his life as the result of real discrimination against his race. By the time he reached high school, he was interested in trying to help black people in America achieve something better and became a writer for the New York Globe at the age of 15. He used his earnings from distributing the paper to purchase a set of volumes written by Thomas Babington McCauley, one of his earliest influences “whose phrases, spliced by commas, would swell in his inner ear decades after GBHS.”2 After high school, he received help from family and friends as well as a scholarship that enabled him to attend Fisk College in Nashville, which was his first experience of the south and further enlightened him regarding the race issues. After three years in the south, where he both attended and taught school, he finally gained admission, through scholarships, to Harvard where he focused on philosophy, history, economics and social problems. He took a bachelor’s degree in 1890 and a master’s in 1891 before challenging Rutherford B. Hayes, who had stated that he could not find a black person worthy for a scholarship to study abroad. DuBois received the scholarship and spent two years studying in Berlin before his scholarship was revoked and he was obliged to return to Harvard to finish his doctoral degree. After college, he worked as a teacher and researcher, becoming known as the father of social science because of his scientific approach to studying the problems faced by his race. During his career, he helped found the NAACP, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, wrote numerous articles regarding the black race and held stupendous and often very public disagreements with such notable figures as Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington. Years of writing, advocating and traveling finally took their toll on DuBois, who finally concluded that he could not settle his differences with the American public and he emigrated to Ghana where he died in 1963. By his own admission, DuBois felt his writing style in his earlier education was lacking in some fundamental way that would prevent him from being taken seriously by the educated white male public he wished to sway. “I realized that while style is subordinate to content, and that no real literature can be composed simply of meticulous and fastidious phrases, nevertheless that solid content with literary style carries a message further than poor grammar and muddled syntax.”3 It was for this reason he enrolled in the toughest English classes available at Harvard at a time when the focus on proper English usage was especially strict. “I had unwittingly arrived at Harvard in the midst of a violent controversy about poor English among students. A number of fastidious Englishmen like Barrett Wendell had come to Harvard about this time; moreover New England itself was getting sensitive over Western slang and Southern drawls and general ignorance of grammar. Freshmen at this time could elect nearly all their courses except English; that was compulsory, with theses, daily themes and tough examinations.”4 However, it was precisely because of this very strict training that DuBois was able to reach the literati of his age at close to equal status as an intellectual worth listening to. (Equal status was not possible due to the color of his skin.) With his entrance in this class, DuBois said he “was at the point in my intellectual development when the content rather than the form of my writing was to me of prime importance. Words and ideas surged in my mind and spilled out with disregard of exact accuracy in grammar, taste in word or restraint in style. I knew the Negro problem and this was more important to me than literary form. I knew grammar fairly well, and I had a pretty wide vocabulary; but I was bitter, angry and intemperate in my first thesis.”5 With correction in style from his instructors, DuBois was finally able to include the restraint and poise necessary for his later works to be recognized as the feats of science they were, but lost some of his emotional connection to the work. As can be seen in his later works, this style gradually loosened, allowing more of this early emotion to shine through while still maintaining the strict discipline learned at Harvard. In his writing, DuBois expresses himself in very educated, scientific terms to address common societal issues within the black community as it connected with (and was suppressed by) the white communities and stereotypes of the nation at large. Each novel he wrote and every article published addressed an issue that had been used as an arguing point to facilitate keeping the black man in his prescribed place in society rather than providing him with the means to escape the situations in which he found himself. At every step of the way, DuBois worked to make sure public figures and representatives answered to any sleight upon his people, including the ideas that a black man cannot be educated or that a black man cannot be intellectual. He did this by presenting logical arguments, tactile proof and sound theories that still managed to appeal to the senses and explaining why more black men weren’t found in more intellectual positions. He created a literary context that allowed him to educate and explain more than entertain, but retained the interest of his readers with occasional slips of sensuality and other appeals to the senses in his writing style. In doing so, he invented an entirely new science we now call sociology that linked the study of history with the study of philosophy as it applied to mankind. In “The Negro”6, DuBois presents what is commonly recognized as the first comprehensive history of African people, including those who trace their ancestry to Africa. Beginning with the lines “Africa is at once the most romantic and the most tragic of continents,”7 the author examines the history of Africa from the earliest cultures into his own time. In discussing early Africa before the influence of Western cultures, DuBois clearly demonstrates how the communities there demonstrated all the classic signs of development, including extensive agriculture, intellectual writing, iron working and other modern advances. However, he argues the devastation of the slave trade interrupted this progress, leading outside nations to assume the people who lived there were incapable of such knowledge. Through his examination, readers are given insights of the slave trade that have only recently been echoed in other works. Africans’ participation in the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves is also examined, with the advantage of a first-hand observation of how new legislation in the American south was functioning to ensure former slaves remained suppressed. This portion of the work also somewhat sets the stage for later writings of DuBois following World War I in which he calls on African-Americans to keep fighting for equality after having fought in defense of liberty, a common theme in many of his works. Leading into the close of the book, DuBois further discusses the idea that segregation is a matter of social class instead of having anything to do with a particular race: “In fact it is generally recognized today that no scientific definition of race is possible. Differences, and striking differences, there are between men and groups of men, but they fade into each other so insensibly that we can only indicate the main divisions of men in broad outlines.”8 Prior to having any knowledge of genetics, DuBois made the argument that segregation has absolutely no foundation in biology by enumerating the many accomplishments made by black people when they are provided the opportunity and the education necessary to achieve the goals often pursued by others. Finally, through his discussion regarding the link between all people, DuBois seems to foresee the present day globalization effect simply through his deductions regarding sociology, human nature and the historical context. His style echoes this focus on the integration of science and history. He sentences are clear, simple and contain a large amount of information with very little detail. However, with phrases such as “four great rivers and many lesser streams water the continent”9, DuBois inserts touches of imagery in the primarily instructional sentences of this novel. Although the image of rivers “watering” the continent is a pleasant one, DuBois’ underlying goal here is to educate his readers about the physical characteristics of Africa that make the continent unique. Elsewhere, “the movements of prehistoric man can be seen as yet but dimly in the uncertain mists of time”10 conjures up compelling images in the mind’s eye even while remaining true to the facts available. His style is concise, informative and straight forward in most areas, such as “west of Yoruba on the lower courses of the Niger is Benin, an ancient state which in 1847 traced its twenty-three kings back one thousand years; some legends even named a line of sixty kings.”11 Not only has he told us where the country is and given us a large landmark to follow, he’s included the information that here is a great nation that has been in existence for at least one thousand years with a presumably successful monarchy. With average reigns of 43.5 years per monarch and legends that trace sixty kings, DuBois also informs the reader that this kingdom could possibly be even older than twenty-five hundred years. All of this information is contained in a single innocuous-seeming sentence that speaks volumes of racial pride, accomplishment, prosperity and competence if one reads beneath the surface, yet these emotions can be easily ignored by the reader if one chooses not to acknowledge them. In addressing such a sensitive topic as slavery at the beginning of the twentieth century, DuBois characteristically removes emotion from the issue by looking at it from a scientific viewpoint. “The slave codes at first were really labor codes based on an attempt to reestablish in America the waning feudalism of Europe. The laborers were mainly black and were held for life”12 shows no sign of the anger and resentment DuBois no doubt felt regarding the subject. A trace of pride can be seen in “the launching of the ‘Niagara Movement’ by twenty-nine daring colored men in 1905, followed by the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910, marked an epoch in the advance of the Negro”13 with the use of such language as “daring” and “epoch” but otherwise merely states fact. In “Gift of Black Folk” (1924), DuBois continues several of the thoughts and themes of his earlier work “Souls of Black Folk” (1903) as well as several strongly felt essays written during the course of his years as editor for “The Crisis,” the African-American newspaper affiliated with the NAACP following its formation in 1910. Because these writings are more personal in nature, rather than addressed to a specific newspaper- or journal-reading public, the author allowed more of his own rage, sadness and frustration toward the white-dominated world around him to show through as well as demonstrated more pride of race, joy in culture and richness in character. In this novel, he argues that the black man’s biggest gift to the nation was the act of freeing himself from the bonds of slavery. The chapter entitled “The Reconstruction of Freedom” even picks up where an earlier article left off, further arguing against the prevailing attitude of the white community that African-Americans only fought in the war for economic reasons even though slavery had been the cause of the war: More than just speaking on a physical level, in this novel DuBois said it is the psychology of the black man that will help make Americans happy. It was this race of man that continued to keep their heads held high in their own minds even while suffering the disadvantages heaped on them by the dominating system. The songs and stories of the field, sung as spiritual reminders to have faith in a brighter future, were discussed by DuBois as evidence that the spirit of the black man cannot be broken in even the most trying times. Moreover, he claimed the black man has an unique perspective on life thanks primarily to the environment in which his ancestors thrived. “… [O]nly the race which has held at bay the life destroying forces of the tropics, has gained there from in some slight compensation a sense of beauty, particularly for sound and color, which characterizes the race.”14 One of the few writers to acknowledge the importance of women as viable members of the society rather than the bane of a community, DuBois advocated forgiveness of the black slave concubines and enumerated ways in which the black woman should be proud of her heritage as well. With a loosening of the strings that bound his words to such formal writing as works like “The Negro,” DuBois demonstrates much more emotion and expression in his writing style in “Gift of Black Folk.” Discussing the spirit of black people, DuBois claims their inherent nature “has breathed the soul of humility and forgiveness into the formalism and cant of American religion,”15 allowing his pride of the spiritual wherewithal of the African-American community to shine through the language and meter of his lines. With typical brevity, he also includes a slight slap to the white religion by using such terms as “formalism” and “cant” to suggest the essential emotional connection between the white individual and his or her religion did not exist, somehow making the white religion seem to offer less than the religion within the black churches could provide. Further, he shows he is not immune to the emotional levels of his predecessors in his explanation of how the black slaves differed from laborers brought in from other lands: As a tropical product with a sensuous receptivity to the beauty of the world, he [the slave] was not as easily reduced to be the mechanical draft-horse which the northern European laborer became. He was not easily brought to recognize any ethical sanctions in work as such but tended to work as the results pleased him and refused to work or sought to refuse when he did not find the spiritual returns adequate; thus he was easily accused of laziness and driven as a slave when in truth he brought to modern manual labor a renewed valuation of life.16 The sensuality being discussed almost reaches off the page through his language to touch the reader already primed with the word “tropical” and not surprised by the “beauty of the world.” By using key terms such as “draft horse” to describe white laborers from other parts of the world, he subtly hints that the black slaves were somehow more human than their white counterparts simply because they could not be made into a mechanical creature, but remained attuned to their own spiritual natures. While “The Negro” presents DuBois’ historical arguments in cogent, well-outlined detail, “Gift of Black Folk” brings in a more conversational, loose grammatical style that served to bring the topics at hand to a more personal, feeling level. Perhaps, in relaxing the rigid rules of the text, DuBois was less able to restrain his emotional reaction to the subject, but the effect of this difference presents another face of DuBois – that of the frustrated black man proud of his heritage and tired of hiding it behind fancy words and well-turned phrases. By contrast, “The Negro,” perhaps because of its structure and rigidity, presents a highly praised and widely read (in its day) Africanized history book for the masses of people who did not always agree that the black man’s heritage should be celebrated, but who would presumably be forced to re-evaluate their position upon finishing the final page thanks to the evidence presented. In each novel, DuBois’ arguments are logical, well-presented and educated, but the subject matter of each is different. While “The Negro” focuses mainly on scientific, provable details, “Gift of Black Folk” is more subjective, intuitive and emotional. While “The Negro” shows the restraint in literary form he’d learned in college, it lacked some of the emotional content he buried in syntax and polite objectivity. By the time “Gift of Black Folk” was published, he’d found a way of letting some of that emotion out of the box while still retaining the literary restraint he’d struggled with early on. As this comparison shows, DuBois’ work centered upon the question of the sociological problems faced by black people primarily in America, but also in other countries as well. Throughout his large body of works, he continuously presented the black individual as more capable of a greater level of depth, creativity and intelligence than they were given credit for, sometimes even claiming they could excel over white people if only given a chance. However, he kept his ideas formulated along scientific lines shaped by his experiences. Francis Broderick17 illustrates the influence of DuBois’ German experience by highlighting the differences seen in the mostly historical work of DuBois’ Harvard dissertation and the mostly social work of The Philadelphia Negro.18 “It [The Philadelphia Negro] contained an historical section, but the bulk of the work was a systematic inquiry about the forty-five thousand Negroes centered in the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia, a door-to-door inquiry on family status, morality, occupations, religion, social intercourse. The historican had turned to sociology.”19 Through his work, DuBois illustrated the interconnectedness that occurred between scientific inquiry, sociology, psychology, philosophy and politics. DuBois’ Philadelphia study also indicates the level of science that he employed to make his point, which is the focus of Werner Lange.20 While it is recognized as a scientific study, with investigations into just about every aspect of the lives of the participants, it is also recognized that DuBois, as a member of the black community and having suffered from some of the effects of discrimination and racism himself, could not present the impartial and objective viewpoint frequently considered necessary. “The mass of data, charts and graphs contained in the text certainly qualify it as an empirical work, but DuBois himself acknowledged the impossibility of convictionless objectivity.”21 In addition to the work he conducted in Philadelphia, DuBois conducted what are more generally characterized as anthropological studies in Virginia in which he looked into the aspects of the lives of entire towns full of people, examining the vestiges of tribal life among them, the community atmosphere, their levels of interaction with other races and the effects of their environment upon their overall well-being in a variety of life indices. This scientific approach, Lange argues, was the only means by which DuBois could have hoped to circumvent the rampant racism fostered by perceptions that the black race was somehow fundamentally biologically different from and deficient to the white race. Lange points out that DuBois’ excellence in statistical management and assessment and anthropological measurement would have been basis enough for bringing to the forefront a new mode of studying his race, but that the genius of DuBois was in his ability to bring together other disciplines in making his assessments and interpretations. By presenting his early findings in such scientific detail, however, he was able to circumvent the objections of other scientists, refuting claims that had been made based purely on racist supposition and eventually brought his findings together into a book that changed the way people viewed Africans, at least to some extent, in The Negro. “This historic confrontation left both the society and its scientific study fundamentally and irrevocably changed.”22 Without this scientific approach, however, many of DuBois’ other ideas may have gone unnoticed, lumped casually under the ravings of one of those ‘unthinking’ black men considered incapable of the level of thought brought about through white men’s educations. Adolph Reed23 points out DuBois’ political agenda as it is expressed through his writings as being primarily concerned with three basic ideas. The first of these ideas is presented as interracialism, which is described as an almost separatist concept in which black people governed black people and white people governed white people. However, this is not to be confused with segregation as DuBois felt the two races should be able to mix and mingle, each recognizing the other as different yet equal and capable of reaching the same heights of human accomplishment. The second idea that Reed illustrates is that of pan-Africanism, which was characterized by the decolonization of Africa and the rise of the ‘civilized’ nations as leaders over all. Western Africans were expected to help guide the true Africans toward civilization without usurping their right to participate in their own government structure, eventually creating an international African community. This concept of Pan-Africanism was tied to the third political concept Reed saw in DuBois’ work, that of socialism. “Socialism, defined as ‘the assertion by the community of its right to control business and industry; the denial of the old assumption that public business can ever be a private enterprise,’ stands as the unequivocal long-term goal of social development.”24 This is how DuBois defined it in The Crisis25 and is a manifestation of his observation of the greed of capitalism regardless of need and the irrationality of monopoly. From sociology and science to politician, DuBois demonstrated he had given significant thought to the issues facing the black man. However, he employed the power of the pen in order to get these ideas across, openly declaring himself to be the propagandist on the side of the black people as an answer to the propaganda distributed about them to the whites. This is a concept traced through his writings by Lovie Gibson.26 This is an important aspect of DuBois’ style to understand because “it is as a propaganda novelist that DuBois’ personal consciousness merges with his social consciousness and the true genius of his creativity arises; secondly, DuBois has very definite ideas as to the composition and characteristics of a ‘good black novel.’”27 It is Gibson’s contention that it was DuBois’ determination to make a name for himself in science as well as a name for himself in literature as a deliberate means of adding credence to his writings and thus to produce material that would raise his race. It was this, Gibson says, rather than any attempt to define black people as such, that led DuBois to approach his literary subject with the scientific methodology he adopted with questionnaires, interviews and other research procedures that enabled him to present his material as unemotional facts rather than emotional outbursts in reaction to white publications. Although he is known for inventing social science, Gibson argues this invention was the happy end result of a determined long-term plan designed to sway public opinion as much as possible. Unlike many young writers, Gibson indicates that even as young as 25, DuBois recognized that once he had established a respectable reputation among the scholars regardless of race, he would then be free to branch out into more conversational styles as a means of reaching a broader public. This propagandistic side of DuBois is brought into full extension as Gibson highlights the aspects of his fiction novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece that cater to his overall worldviews in much the same way that George Orwell’s novel 1984 predicts the conditions he saw developing around him, the difference being that DuBois’ world led to a grander vision for the black people than that predicted by Orwell for the Russians. Careful study of DuBois’ works as well as investigation of some of the critics writing about his works illustrate that DuBois was a man of many talents, all put to use to further a single goal – that of bringing the African American segment of the population out of the deep segregation they had experienced and into a newer and better light. Although some of his ideas fostered the concept of separation, it has been noted that the rationale behind this was simply that the black people were best led by other black people while white people should be led by white people in groups that would interact and intertwine to form a cohesive society that worked toward the best interests of all. Through an early determination to be taken seriously as well as an unwavering commitment to bring about change for his fellow Afro-Americans, DuBois set out to scientifically refute the claims that had been made regarding the inferiority of his race. Through this scientific analysis, coupled with the insights gained through biological anthropology and sociology, he gave birth to a new field of study as well as gained a level of respect even among the white community. With this success, he was then able to venture into more colloquial subjects, appealing to larger numbers of people, both black and white, and investigating some of his ideas regarding the best means of bringing the African American society, as well as the societies of all black people, into a closer approximation of the richness and diversity of opportunities afforded to white people. While it is difficult to agree with him on some of his finer points, specifically as they relate to socialism among the black race, it is impossible not to respect the man who brought his entire race out of the shadows and into the light. His work helped support the civil rights movements of the 1960s and bring about much better quality of life for blacks throughout the South. His single-minded pursuit of his goals did not restrict the employment of his talents as he sharpened each one to bring it to bear on the issue at hand. Although he eventually gave up on trying to change America, DuBois managed to change the face of social science, illustrate in no uncertain terms that black people and white people were fundamentally the same and encouraged others to explore this new field in greater detail. References Broderick, Francis L. “German Influence on the Scholarship of W. E. B. DuBois.” The Phylon Quarterly. Clark Atlanta University, 1958, pp. 367-371. DuBois, WEB. The Autobiography of WEB DuBois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York: International Publishers Co. Inc., 1968, pp. 132-153. DuBois, WEB. The Crisis. Vol. 22, (1921). DuBois, WEB. The Gift of Black Folk: Negroes in the Making of America. New York: Washington Square Press, 1924 (reprint 1970). DuBois, WEB. The Negro. New York: Wildside Press, 1915 (reprint 2005). DuBois, WEB. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899 (reprint 1995). Gibson, Lovie N. “W. E. B. Du Bois as a Propaganda Novelist.” Negro American Literature Forum. Indiana State University. 1976. St. Louis University. Lange, Werner J. “W.E.B. DuBois and the First Scientific Study of Afro-America.” Phylon. 1960 (reprint 1983). Clark Atlanta University. Lewis, David Levering. WEB DuBois: A Biography of a Race. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993. Reed, Adolph L. Jr. “W.E.B. Dubois: A Perspective on the Bases of His Political Thought.” Political Theory. Sage Publications, 1985. Read More