African American’s cultural assimilation would contribute to the resolution of the race problem in the United States, he was “absolutely opposed to all kinds of attempts to foster racial solidarity” (cited in Baker, “Research” 72).52 This conviction may have grown from his own experiences growing up as a secular Jew in Germany. Since the late eighteenth century, German Jews had expressed a desire for, and had achieved, social advancement and integration by assimilating economically, and to a lesser extent socially and culturally, into the larger society. The diminishment of religious tradition and observance was one consequence of this process.53 Yet the possibility for integration was not at all obvious for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction Era and early decades of the twentieth century. That period ushered in a multitude of instances of systemic racial violence and exclusion including the eruption of lynching incidents and race riots against African American communities, the institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation, and the wholesale disenfranchisement of Blacks from civic life, all of which made the goal of integration seem unlikely and the need for racial solidarity all the more necessary.
W. E. B. Du Bois, another, equally influential figure in the study of race and culture, keenly understood this. Like Boas, Du Bois was instrumental in the formation of a discipline in its modern form, namely sociology; and he made critical theoretical interventions in conceptualizations of race and culture at a pivotal point in the formation of the discipline. Unlike Boas, his influence is not always accepted as incontrovertible fact. Lee Baker, Faye V. Harrison, and Irene Diggs argue that although Boas’s institutional base in the academy afforded him the opportunity to “redirect scientific approaches to race,” other more marginalized scholars, like Du Bois, anticipated and even influenced Boas’s scholarship.54 Baker argues, for example, that Du Bois’s early understanding of the color line contributed to the culture concept by distinguishing between “the cultural aspects of race and the social relations of race.” In his 1897 paper “The Conservation of Races,” presented at the first meeting of the Negro Academy, Du Bois argued that despite the existence of racial differences, “when we thus come to inquire into the essential difference of races we find it hard to come at once to any definite conclusion.”55 The reason Du Bois gave—that more differences exist within individual racial groups than between the different races—anticipates Boas’s theory of diffusion.56 Yet Du Bois’s seminal role in modern American constructs of culture is often overlooked because he lacked the institutional power and authority that Boas possessed as a White scientist who was viewed as objective, and who held influential posts on editorial boards and in a prestigious department in the Academy.57
In the following chapter, I will discuss Du Bois’s significance as a cultural and intellectual patriarch on New Negro artists and authors. His early career illustrates the many similarities between his struggle against scientific racism and Boas’s own engagement with these issues. Yet his departure from academic discourse and engagement in social and political activism also points to the reasons why African Americans sought to cohere under a shared racial identity and illuminates the communal and cultural spaces in which they looked to find spiritual healing, political solidarity, and social justice.
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.
