LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 3

      Raising the Veil: Racial Divides and Ethnographic Crossings in The Souls of Black Folk

      Objectivity, Authority, and Epistemologies of Difference

      Like Franz Boas, W. E. B. Du Bois profoundly helped shape modern American thought on race and culture. As I have already mentioned, Du Bois’s 1897 speech “The Conservation of the Races” was a landmark moment in the development of cultural pluralism. Biographer David Levering Lewis credits Du Bois with first articulating the principles of cultural pluralism in this speech to the American Negro Academy, long before the terminology to describe cultural pluralism even existed.¹ Lewis writes:

      The writings of James and Dewey would point the way for the “cultural radicals,” the pluralists of the near future, but the boldest signpost was first erected by Du Bois when he asked rhetorically of the seventeen attentive men in the Washington church: “[W]hat after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my Black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?” (172)

      In asking these questions, he began to unravel notions of citizenship and national identity, work that would contribute to a project of making America more inclusive and pluralistic. I will go on in this chapter to argue that Du Bois would prove to be a driving force in the New Negro movement, not only as a theorist of race and culture, but also as a literary figure. But in order for me to argue for his influence as a theoretician and social scientist, we must consider how the disciplines of anthropology and sociology paralleled each other at a time when both he and Boas embarked on their careers. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, sociology, like anthropology, broke with the less professional standards of writing upheld by earlier generations, by emphasizing empiricism and objectivity as proof of the disciplines’ scientific legitimacy.² Each centered on the study of “primitive” societies—abroad in the case of anthropology and at home in the case of sociology—with ethnography functioning as a privileged mode of inquiry.³

      Trained at Harvard primarily as a philosopher, historian, and political scientist, Du Bois acquired the skills and methodological approach necessary to conduct the empirical research that informed his earliest writings during his years at the University of Berlin (1892–94). Although he considered majoring in philosophy at Harvard, he eventually studied history because his professors warned him of the impracticality of the philosophy major, particularly for an individual committed to the work of racial uplift.⁴ When he turned as a graduate student more decisively to the social sciences, buoyed, in part, by his studies at Harvard with the philosopher William James, Du Bois revealed a pragmatist’s concern with the tangible application of ideas to the material world.⁵ The years he spent studying at Humboldt University reinforced this approach. Carved above the university’s entrance was the maxim, “until now philosophers have only explained the world, our task is to change it” (Lewis 142). Under the tutelage of Gustav Schmoller in Berlin, he learned to privilege inductive reasoning and analysis built on objectively accumulated historical and descriptive material. Schmoller “saw the goal of social science as the systematic, causal explanation of social phenomena, and he believed that social scientific facts, based on careful, inductive analysis, could be used as a guide to formulate social policy.”⁶ Until 1910, Du Bois’s sociological works show ample evidence of Schmoller’s influence, including his emphasis on empirical data collection, the use of facts as the basis for creating social policy, an underlying interest in social justice, and an emphasis on an historical approach, of which The Philadelphia Negro (1899) is a stellar example (Lewis 201).

      After returning to the States in 1896 and a short stint teaching classics at Wilberforce University, Du Bois was offered a temporary position at the University of Pennsylvania to study the social condition and urban problems of Philadelphia’s African American population. At that time, Philadelphia contained the largest community of African Americans in the North. Du Bois produced a 400-page monograph entitled The Philadelphia Negro, which analyzed the plight of the urban Black using survey and demographic data, much of which Du Bois collected during his stay in the city. Dan Green and Edwin Driver describe his sojourn in Philadelphia, during which he rented a room over a cafeteria in the “worst part” of the Seventh Ward, as an exercise in participant-observation, although the extent of his immersion in neighborhood life is debatable given his displeasure with the rougher element that populated the district. This fifteen-month appointment was followed by his employment at Atlanta University as a professor of economics and history, and as director of the Sociological Laboratory and the Atlanta University Conferences. Between 1897 and 1920, Du Bois took charge of this series of annual sociological conferences, which had been inaugurated in 1896 to study the effect of urban problems on African Americans. He also edited the annual volumes that issued from the conferences and taught a course on sociology. Yet by 1910 he moved away from pure sociology and toward other forms of address and redress, such as fiction, and his activism in the NAACP.⁷

      Du Bois’s early commitment to empiricism is uncontested, but the question of whether and if so, when his commitment wavered varies as critics consider the significance of his varied rhetorical strategies and methods in doing anti-racist work. Wilson Moses argues, for example, that Du Bois the scholar initially adopted the discourse of the social sciences because “as a youth Du Bois was romantically involved with the idea of social science, which he naively believed might yield a science of racial advancement.”⁸ To describe this commitment as romantic suggests that Du Bois’s faith in empiricism as a weapon against social injustice was youthfully naïve, an interpretation that resonates with other critics who note that as Du Bois matured and became more aware of the roots of racial inequality, his approach to sociological research changed. Green and Driver note, “beginning in 1901 and continuing until his public split with [Booker T.] Washington in 1903, he was apparently moving through a transition period away from academic science and sociology toward action, agitation, and writing for popular magazines” (19). The lynching of Sam Hose, a Palmetto, Georgia farmer proved especially influential to Du Bois’s diminished belief in the value of inductive reasoning as a tool for social engineering.⁹ He became convinced, they assert, that scientific investigation was not sufficient to solve the problems of Black Americans because the problems were not, as he had initially and idealistically assumed, those of ignorance, but were instead based on the conscious determination of one group to suppress and persecute another.

      In contrast, Robert Stepto argues that Du Bois adhered to a scientific language because of his desire for authentication. “He seeks nothing less than a new narrative mode and form in which empirical evidence, scientifically gathered in a literal and figurative field (for example, the Black Belt), performs the authenticating chores previously completed by white opinion.”¹⁰ And Houston Baker underscores Du Bois’s lifelong commitment to scientific observation, stating that “while studying in Berlin under Gustav Schmoller (1892–94), Du Bois came to believe that the solution to the American racial problem was a matter of systematic investigation,’ and throughout his life he was dedicated to critical objectivity—to what Mathew Arnold defined as ‘disinterestedness.’”¹¹

      Du Bois’s view of empiricism and inductive reasoning (which he never fully abandoned) is as important as his level of commitment to these methods. Even as a young scholar, his work shows that he reflected on the possibilities and limits of constructing a scientific discourse on race, even as he revealed an acute awareness of the cultural capital that science held. In 1903, when he published The Souls of Black Folk, the reader finds Du Bois wary of an unquestioning embrace of empiricism and even of the possibility of a Negro living a “life of the

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