And there is no event, just as there is no action, without music.
—Fred Moten, In the Break (64)
a false start
The story with which I begin you’ll have heard before, familiar in form even if its content appears as new. It’s an old-fashioned story of modernity, an abortive tale about coming of age, a parable of racial meaning as a product of world-belting mass migrations mapped onto the scale of a single body, on a walk down a city street. Well-worn by countless retellings, the story is autobiographical, if admittedly less the way something actually happened than a way to make what happened move in the eyes of those who might gather to hear it. It’s the story of a false start.
James Weldon Johnson spun a version in his Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and Ralph Ellison recorded a cover in Invisible Man; Carlos Bulosan never stops telling it in America Is in the Heart, repeating it with such frequency and dizzying speed that, by the end, you can’t tell if it’s finished or just beginning. But the book I open now is by W. E. B. Du Bois, his polygeneric 1940 volume with the teetering, ambiguous title, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept. My text is found in a chapter recounting Du Bois’s early academic career, his rivalry with Booker T. Washington, and his departure from Atlanta University for the editorship of The Crisis, as processes exemplifying the world-historical forces of the chapter’s title, “Science and Empire.” The plot of the chapter is captured, in miniature, in an anecdote of a walk down Atlanta’s Mitchell Street in April 1899—a journey much shorter than anticipated, a detour whose duration would extend beyond his long and eventful life:
At the very time when my studies were most successful, there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were, startled me to my feet: a poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam Hose, had killed his landlord’s wife. I wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to the Atlanta Constitution office, carrying in my pocket a letter of introduction to Joel Chandler Harris. I did not get there. On the way news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking. I turned back to the University. I did not meet Joel Chandler Harris nor the editor of the Constitution.
Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing, as I had confidently assumed would be easily forthcoming. I regarded it as axiomatic that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the truth was sought with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the effort. This was, of course, but a young man’s idealism, not by any means false, but also never universally true. (Writings 602–3)
Du Bois’s memory is not entirely reliable in this case. A consultation of “the evident facts,” heroically compiled by Ida B. Wells, reveals that Hose did not kill his landlord’s wife; in fact, while he admitted killing his employer, Alfred Cranford, in self-defense during a dispute over payment, he denied widespread rumors that he’d assaulted Cranford’s wife (Wells 14).1 But in this brief passage, autobiography takes the form of a fable or parable—not the science of history but the higher art of propaganda, in Du Bois’s terms.2 As the rest of Dusk makes clear, this anecdote both exaggerates the naïveté of his ambitions and telescopes his long transformation, that eventual disruption of his work, to provide his readers with the narrative kernel of an example—not quite I once was blind, but now I see, but rather: I thought I could see, but I was blind. Or, more expansively: in the arrogance of my youth, thrilled by the dawn of a modern age, I thought enlightenment would suffice to dispel racism, and that if I served the light, others would be glad to see—but they preferred to see differently.
This red ray was cast much farther than Mitchell Street. Wells, for one, made certain of it, catching and projecting it through the global circuits of modern mass media, compiling an account from Atlanta’s white newspapers and commissioning a report from a white Chicago detective for her pamphlet Lynch Law in Georgia, to spread to the world the news of the migrant laborer known as Sam Hose or Samuel Wilkes. Yet while the transatlantic circuits of Wells’s antilynching campaign are better known, news of this case also reached as far as the Philippines, where a nationalist resistance was waging war against U.S. colonial occupation. Indeed, as evidenced by the casual reference to this exceptionally American ritual in José Rizal’s incendiary 1891 novel, El Filibusterismo (360), Filipino nationalists may have been aware of lynching long before its introduction to the Philippines by the U.S. military.3 Seizing upon this news, the nationalists reflected it back upon their adversaries. By August, exiled leaders in Hong Kong had composed propaganda imploring African American soldiers to reconsider their loyalties, which appeared in placards concluding, “The blood of your brothers Sam Heose [sic] and Gray proclaim vengeance.”4 Among those who responded to this call was a young corporal of the 24th Infantry from Florida, David Fagen, whose exploits as an officer in General Emilio Aguinaldo’s forces became legendary both in the Philippines and the United States.5 Promoted from first lieutenant to captain under General José Alejandrino, he was referred to as “General Fagen” both by his own troops and by the front page of the New York Times.6 An official military investigation, spurred by wild rumors of his escape to California in 1901, revealed that an accused bicycle thief in L.A. had assumed his name in defiant tribute.7 Fagen persisted in guerrilla warfare even after Aguinaldo and Alejandrino surrendered, bedeviling the U.S. general Frederick Funston, whose vain intentions to lynch him were so well known that his own sister-in-law mocked them at a Christmas dinner, conjuring a vision of Fagen’s hanged body in a playful bit of light verse!8
shades of a world problem
Given the dizzying reflections and refractions of this red ray, how might you begin to theorize the traveling operations of race across the domains of early twentieth-century U.S. imperialism? These movements flicker across what have been historically understood as two regionally distinct racialized regimes: Negro segregation, in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South, was consolidating both in law (as in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision) and in extralegal violence, while in the Philippines, U.S. colonial governance was being established through military conquest. Further, for U.S.-based scholarship, such historical understanding passes through and is inflected by two additional settings: the industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast, like Wells’s Chicago, where small black communities would be dramatically expanded by the long process of African American urbanization known as the Great Migration, and the West Coast, where the Asiatic exclusion movement, already turning from the Chinese to the Japanese, would eventually encounter a wave of Filipino migrants, establishing the conditions for their inscription in what would one day be termed Asian American history.
To draw together these historically and geographically distant domains, you must first acknowledge that the conditions of such articulation have their genesis in acts of overwhelming violence. But while a link between black and Filipino racialization was initially forged by U.S. imperial conquest, it was quickly seized upon by Filipino nationalists, in the Sam Hose propaganda, to foresee a different destiny for both groups, surpassing the telos of inclusion within the United States, as nation or as empire. And it was not only the Filipino nationalists who saw this.
In seeking a theorization of race sufficient for this task, I turn to Du Bois’s concept of the color line. Best known from his epochal 1903 Souls of Black Folk, it appears in an earlier speech at the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London, “To the Nations of the World,”9 but its most comprehensive formulation is found in “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind,” Du Bois’s presidential address for the third annual meeting of the American Negro Academy in Washington, D.C., in December 1899.10 It is likely, if perhaps impossible to definitively prove, that this is the first text in which his oft-quoted declaration of the problem of the twentieth century appears.11 More to the point, where the others merely present this statement
