The Souls of Black Folk (By W.E.B Dubois)
(Reviewed by Reggie Williams)
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois invites Americans, at the turn of the twentieth century, to uncover the life of a hidden segment of the American population. For white Americans, the information they would find in this collection of fourteen essays would be discovery. But for blacks, Souls is a masterful articulation of their unique American experience. For Dubois, the hermeneutical key to black American life is what he calls “double consciousness” (5). It is both a gift and a curse given to African Americans at birth, Dubois describes, wherein blacks are “born with a veil, and gifted with second sight” (5). What is this “second sight” or “double consciousness?” It is a barrier, and survival skill, by which blacks see themselves through the eyes of the dominant, white, society “measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” To be an American/Negro is to be torn by two competing identities. And Dubois argued that “Negro” history is one of struggle, in which blacks have sought to merge the two identities into one truer identity. Hence, we may describe Dubois’ Souls as an argument for black agency without using the word.
Conversely, Booker T. Washington was an adversary who wrestled with the veil. He was a latent opponent throughout Souls, but directly addressed in chapter three. Washington did not seek black agency. He embraced the veil, seeking to keep it in place, and pressed blacks to conform to life behind it. His rhetoric was oppressive, which was startling and ironic since Washington was a fellow “Negro” and a former slave. Indeed, his “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895, in which he claimed “In all things that are purely social we [blacks and whites] can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” was perhaps instrumental in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Jim Crow segregation in the landmark case of Plessy vs. Ferguson one year later. Washington was a prominent black leader, considered the voice of black America, replete with political power and financial backing. And with such a powerful black voice lowering the veil over his own people, the prospects for justice appeared bleak.
In the face of white racist oppression, Dubois claimed that Washington asked blacks to give up at least three important things: political power, insistence on civil rights, and higher education of “Negro” youth (44) in order to concentrate on industry and making money. This was a lowering of the veil, as it conformed to a white, racist comfort level. Dubois claims that the result of this concession resulted in; the disenfranchisement of the Negro, the legal creation of a distinct status of black inferiority, and the steady withdrawal of financial support from black institutions of higher learning (44). Washington’s propaganda was nothing short of lethal for black folk. He claimed “that the South is justified in its present (1906) attitude towards the Negro…that the prime reason for the Negro’s failure to rise was due to his poor early education (no doubt a responsibility of an inferior black community), thirdly, that the future rise of black folk depends primarily on the efforts of black folk. This last nugget is indicative of a “bootstrap” mentality that Dubois found particularly loathsome. For, unless the strivings of Negro’s was met with equal vigor from the sources of social and economic power, Dubois argued, Washington was doing nothing more than blaming the victim (49). And by doing so, Washington forced the veil over black America.
Dubois sought to lift it. Indeed, he moved within and without the veil discussing Negro’s as a “problem” in Democratic America, the struggle of the freedman’s association in the post-bellum south, his own struggles with the irony of black “progress” as he sought to educate poor oppressed blacks. In another direct rebuttal of Booker T. Washington, Dubois argued that leadership in the black community is not a push from behind, but a pull from the front by the leadership of educated blacks. Washington did not favor black higher learning, but instead argued that blacks should be taught trades, learning to work with their hands, and make money prior to any education. Any sort of higher education they would receive should follow the accumulation of wealth. Dubois claimed that colleges and institutions of higher learning provide black schools with black teachers and the dissemination of culture within black society.
Yet, beyond the conversation about cultural uplift, Souls is a conversation that is meant to challenge the a priori assumptions of black inferiority by appealing to rational white folk. Even the most racist white Christian, if he/she were rational, could agree that black folk had a soul. Does that soul conform to the typical dominant, racist perspective that is validated by the rhetoric of Booker T. Washington, or is there something more that rational-minded whites should know? Dubois raised the veil, that was his intent, in order to expose the souls of black folk and challenge the white racist a priori of blackness.
