William Du Bois, born in 1868, was raised by his mother, a domestic and washerwoman and grew up like may black children in the shadow cast by American slavery. His m0ther died when he was 16. The only black child in an all-white school, he determined to make good a promise once made to his mother to build for himself a future in defiance of the ubiquitous racism of the day. He went on to study at Fisk, Harvard and Berlin (where he encountered Max Weber), becoming the first African American to gain a Ph.D at Harvard in 1895. In 1899 he published The Philadelphia Negro, a major founding work of urban and race sociology, an acknowledged masterpiece that was, sadly but predictably, largely ignored for many decades. He was a key founder of American empirical sociology. He established ‘the first American School of Sociology’, with the Atlanta University School of Sociology (1895-1925), which predated Chicago’s School of Sociology (1915-30) by two decades.
Reiland Rabaka, on whose work I draw here, argues thet Du Bois’ work was focused mainly on American issues like slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws and anti-black racism, extending to the racial colonisation of the likes of class, education and poverty. Prior to the publication of The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois immersed himself in the black community of Farmville. He focused on the ways that Farmville’s black citizens adapted to life in an historic slave state at the turn of the 20th century. Alongside his in-depth and wide-ranging empirical investigations he developed a vigorous critique of the anti-black racist grand theorising commonplace in sociological circles at that time. He attacked the likes of Herbert Spencer, Charles Ellwood and Lester Ward ‘for confusing their own racial hierarchical and racial colonial (mis)understandings of society with empirical observation of human behaviour, especially African and African American cultures and practices’ (Rabaka). His The Negroes of Farmville was an early model of both empirical enquiry and critique.
The Philadelphia Negro built on and extended Du Bois’ preliminary studies. He looked at morbidity and mortality rates as well as rates of alcoholism and pauperism, electoral politics and religious beliefs and practices of ‘city’ as well as ‘rural’ negroes. Of particular note, however, was his consideration of class formation (a mere three decades after the Emancipation Proclamation). As well as covering the roles of education, employment, property ownership and moral and social norms, he singled out racialisation, prejudice and assimilation for special attention. He described the ostracism and ‘othering’ of the negro as a telling but ‘silent’ policy. His account acknowledged those of Marx and Weber but, critically, added another dimension. He pioneered a political economy of race and anti-black racism in a white supremacist society: this political economy, he insisted, dictated and determined that social classes among African Americans must be seen as racial classes. His text is a reminder of just how Marxian and Weberian approaches to and concepts of class were a product of the needs and greeds of Europeans and not ‘enslaved’ and racially colonised African Americans. It is a thesis which still has considerable bite a century later of course.
In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois introduced several new concepts to the emergent sociology of race. Stand out among these are those of double-consciousness, colour-line and the ‘Veiled’ visibility and invisibility of blacks. The notion of the colour-line calls to mind the ‘Jim Crowed’ separate and unequal white and black worlds of Du Bois’ days. The idea of the Veil rests in the assertion that racial colonisation does not take agency away from the racially oppressed. Rather, it blinds whites to black agency. Rabaka writes:
‘the Veil’s sociological significance is dual or, rather, doubled, and although both whites and blacks’ life-worlds and lived-experiences revolve around the very same colour-line, it is their divergent relationship to the Veil, and the ways in which the Veil racially (re)structures their psychological, social and cultural worlds that determines their self-conceptions and, quite literally, the quality of their ‘soul-lives’.’
Du Bois’ book was a genuinely ground breaking critical social theory of race. Racial oppression, exploitation and violence, he averred (in Rabaka’s words again):
‘(i) racially divides and socially separates (the colour-line); (ii) distorts cultural communications and human relations between those it racially divides along the colour-line (the Veil); and (iii) as a result of the aforementioned, causes blacks to suffer from a severe inferiority complex that insidiously induces them to constantly view themselves from whites’ supposed ‘superior’ points of view (double consciousness).’
Blacks often internalise the diabolical dialectic of white superiority and black inferiority.
Nor did Du Bois neglect gender. He developed a discernibly pro-feminist sociology of ‘racially gendered classes’ (nowadays think ‘intersectionalism’). He was in addition a problem-solver, forever seeking solutions to the social conundrums he identified and explicated. In this context he turned to the sociology of education. Education for him involved a critical interrogation of the knowledge/s of the past (unsurprisingly encompassing, not neglecting, African history); what has since come to be known – via Stuart Hall – as ‘cultural studies’; and a grasp of the present and future ‘needs’ of humanity as a whole, together with those of our fragile ecology. As with education, so with crime. Du Bois managed a number of seminal studies and texts on the ‘Negro criminal’, with an explicit focus on the underlying social causes of offending.
Rabaka makes the point that Du Bois’ sociological investigations and policy-oriented interventions – he founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for example – still resonate a century later. Black people, Rabaka suggests, continue to be approached as ‘problems’ rather than ‘persons’ in 21st century USA. Life is still blunted by the colour-line, black people still live behind a Veil.
So why has Du Bois even now not been accorded his rightful place in the pantheon of founding sociologists? The survival of a deep and widespread racism in and beyond the Occident is clearly an important part of the answer, as is testified not only be the re-emergence of late of ‘white supremacist’ thinking and politics. But so tardy has been sociology’s readiness to challenge its own discernible disciplinary and institutional racism that it has ceded both the challenge and the resultant critiques and investigations to autonomous groupings around the likes of ‘post-colonial studies’. My personal view is that sociology should/must reach out to and learn from these colleagues and allies and reform its way towards the kind of sociology of race epitomised by the contribution of Du Bois.
Reference
Rabaka,R (2017) W.E.B. Du Bois. In Ed Stones,R: Key Sociological Thinkers (3rd edition). London; Palgrave.