SOC 168 Test Three (DuBois)

DuBois (1868-1963)

• Father was “restless and unhappy” , had a wide variety of occupations, and abandoned family.

• Mother was “silent” and “repressed” struggled to make ends meet employed as a domestic worker

• Mother has a stroke and DuBois takes on a larger domestic role. 

• Excellent student

Biographical Background

• Recognized that race set him apart from school mates, and this kindled a “great bitterness” as well as “great ambition”

• Early on he recognized how the color line was different from class-based inequality.

• First black graduate in his high school’s history. 

• Starts out his academic career conservative, then moves closer to marxism towards the end of his career. 

Biographical Background

• Attended Fisk University (HBCU) and later transferred to Harvard. First African American PhD from Harvard.

  • Wildly conservative; they do not change

  • Change is glacial 

  • First person to graduate has to be perfect 

• Goes off to University of Berlin- where the sociologists were at the time (Weber for example was there).

• In Europe he experienced white people who were not racially prejudiced. He saw there that white folks simply became just folks.

• The race stuff was just not a thing (although he did clearly recognize how German anti-Semitism was linked to racial questions in the U.S).

• Returned to the U.S. in 1894 and taught at a small African Methodist college in Ohio.

• Married in 1896, had a child a year later who allegedly died from pollution poisoning in the city’s water system.

  • Losing child to a structural issue animates/informs his ideas 

• Moves to Atlanta in 1897, gets involved in political activism and begins teaching at Atlanta University in Georgia. While in Atlanta:

  • Helped found the Niagara movement (devoted to freedom of speech and criticism, suffrage, the abolition of caste distinctions based on race, and human brotherhood).

    • Early vestiges that becomes NAACP 

    • Structural change 

    • Eventual civil rights movement 

    • Equal voting, equal participation under the law 

    • Under Jim Crow, there is simply no legal recognition or laws to allow for racial equality 

• Moved to NY; Worked full time at the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

• The NAACP evolved out of the Niagara movement.

Contextual & Intellectual Background

• Twentieth century biological racism unfortunately led to a weak and misguided social theory of race.

• For instance, brains of Black persons weighed less than other races, had prefrontal discrepancies, leading to weak logical and reason faculties, self control...etc.

• Basically, biological bases to a slew of problems that were, in actuality, social.

  • Allow people to not change; if it is biological— how can I change?

    • Designed to allow us to keep the status quo going 

• As he got older, moved more and more to the political left.

  • Draws on Marxist-Leninism, and the program of the Communist party. 

  • Expands understanding of the world and changes theories as he goes… 

• Also wrote about colonialism and imperialism.

  • This the result of his growing recognition that science (and the “benevolent capitalist despot”) was incapable of changing people’s racial ignorance

• Very critical of the “neutral” position of white value-free science, since it misses the lived experiences of Black persons and other minority groups.

• Embraces standpoint (as did some of the women theorists we will discuss).

• Moved to Ghana in his 90s. 

• Officially joined the Communist Party (prevents him from moving back to the U.S.) 

• Racial violence, Jim Crow laws, legal segregation, vigilantism, lynching

• Many scholars and activists were writing about these issues (Booker T. Washington, Fredrick Douglass, Sojourner Truth...etc.). Anna Julia Cooper & Ida Wells-Barnett were among the first to treat race as a central problem in sociology

• But DuBois wrote about them from a sociological perspective. “Consequently, DuBois set the early theoretical and empirical parameters in the field of sociology of race.

Methodology

•  In the early years, he is more of an empiricist (consistent with Max Weber)

  • Rejects invariant laws of human action

  • Accepts that agency drives many unanticipated outcomes

  • Embraces quantitative analysis

  • Embraces “value-free” study

• Much of his work is informed by historical sociological understanding applied to race and colonialism.

• As his work progresses through the ages and he sees the continuing problems of racism, his work becomes less value-free and much more polemic and opinionated (consistent with Marx)

Selected Theoretical Contributions

• The Talented Tenth

• The Color Line

• Double Consciousness

• The Veil

• The Philadelphia Negro (1899)

• The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

• “The Souls of White Folk” (1920. Chapter 2 of Dark Water: Voices from the Veil)

The Talented Tenth

• The Talented Tenth: the elite classes of Black persons should recognize their duty to the masses.

  • Steeped in idea of essential characteristics of humans

    • Females and men do this, black folks do this, white folks do this

    • Has to do with biology or some kind of essential nature 

• These better classes are those who have the burden on their shoulders of getting freedom for all black persons.

  • The others are just not educated… a bit of elitism 

• Who are these persons? Those who were the best prepared educationally and economically.

• They were to lead the fight against racial discrimination. 

The Color Line

• The Color Line: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea”

• The color line is both macro- and micro-sociological for DuBois

  • Macro: existing social structure that imposes itself on us.

  • Micro: the subjective internalization of these structures. “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house”

The Veil

• The Veil: emerges early on when he realizes as a boy that being black is very different from white, and being black was considered a problem.

  • Both subjective and objective 

• Several dimensions:

  • The veil is symbolic of the objective demarcation of skin color as different than white

    • You are different than those without the veil!

  • The veil allows people to see in and out, but white people cannot see Black people as clearly as they can see other white people (for example as “true” or “regular” Americans)

    • Black face metaphorically is masked here 

  • Black people cannot see themselves as something beyond what white America prescribes for them because of the way our self concept is created (Looking Glass Self)

  • Indeed, Black people see white people better than white people see them because of “double consciousness”

  • Our identities of persons of color  is forged by symbolic gestures done by others 

    • We interpret and internalize these ideas; then we start to see ourselves in the ways that whites do 

    • See self as an outsider in the place you live 

Double Consciousness

• This is a “two-ness” felt and lived by black persons: a black America and a white one. Makes singular/cohesive identity difficult

• How to be both a black person (as they see themselves) AND a black-American (how white people see them)?

• Black persons have to learn how to move between these consciousness as needed based on context

• Unfortunately, Black people tend to see themselves through the eyes of white people.

• “It is a peculiar sensation, 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”