on the rise of China (175). A longer piece relates the Zionist Max Nordau to A.M.E. bishop Henry M. Turner’s support for African emigration, offering a sympathetic critique of both (179).
Another item puts the promise of imperialism’s racial justice in stark terms. Analytically linking three ongoing imperial wars in China, South Africa, and the Philippines, it condemns the “motives” of the Western powers as “undeniably and declaredly selfish and sordid,” while upholding their core justification: “the rape of Africa, Asia and the islands will open them up to Western progressiveness, invention, comfort, personal liberty and the Christian religion.” The logic of uplift detaches itself from white corruption, operating providentially, for “beyond” and “in very antagonism to” their reprehensible intentions “will come the elevation and equalizing of the protesting semi-savage that is despoiled.” Following the occidented logic of imperialism to the same end predicted by Du Bois, he imagines that colonial violence will leave this semisavage “fresher from the fount of rejuvenation than his late master,” eventually to achieve “domination in things commercial, literary, artistic, and economic, over the Western world” (177). The bluntness of Kealing’s assessment strains against the resignation of its conclusions, illustrating the severe constraints he faces as a political actor. Indeed, the next item proclaims imperialism to be the highest moral issue in the upcoming presidential election, one the incumbent gets wrong and his challenger gets right, then endorses President McKinley anyway, citing his opponent’s damning reliance on anti-black Southern Democrats.
In the end, what’s the difference between Du Bois’s and Kealing’s analytical responses to U.S. imperialism? Read together, it seems largely rhetorical, a matter of tone rather than substantive effect: the prophecy of a coming Afro-Asian world collapses into an affirmation of imperialism’s own justifications, fully recognizing that its actualization is indistinguishable from violence. The limitations of their responses trace the constrained and compromised structural condition of the American Negro intellectual, whose capacity for action is given within relations of empire. But to identify the difference between them as rhetorical is merely to say that Du Bois’s great contribution, again, is poetic. Its originality and genius lies in the unexpected way it reads, or learns to read, the positionality of the American Negro intellectual within imperial competition. Where Kealing endorses imperialism’s principle of racial justice with a curse, Du Bois offers an inspirational exhortation. Both draw on rhetorical traditions of prophecy, yet only Du Bois articulates his insight in a singing phrase that would become a great watchword of antiracist and anticolonial struggle.
Yet on the far side of that prophecy, as a century’s visions of Afro-Asian liberation recede in disenchanted dusk—the long-awaited rise of China, the election of an African American commander in chief—you might recover a more apposite rhetorical formulation in one additional item from Kealing’s editorials. It reads: “If Aguinaldo were the statesman he is reputed to be, he would form an alliance with King Menel[i]k of Abyssinia and do something worth while” (175). Here, the fantasy of Afro-Asian liberation, joining the leader of the Philippine resistance to the hero of African opposition to Italian imperialism, can be expressed only as a sarcastic counterfactual—it comes into view only after it is deemed impossible. Kealing’s conception of racial justice cannot be extricated from the imperialism against which he would turn it, and the best rhetorical figure he can find to evoke the volatility of this paradox is a bitter joke.
To appreciate the operation of this joke, I borrow a term sometimes used in English language teaching to describe the grammar of conditional sentences. In the so-called first conditional, the relation between a condition and its consequence foretells a possible future (if X occurs, Y will occur), whereas in the “second conditional,” a condition represented as unfulfilled determines a potential consequence as unreal (if X were true, Y would occur). Du Bois’s exhortations follow the logic of the first conditional—if you take up the black man’s burden, white supremacy will fall; Kealing’s joke takes the form of the second—if Aguinaldo were the hero advertised, he and Menelik would form the Afro-Asian alliance you desire. But Kealing’s tone and his other editorials make it clear that he has abandoned any fantasy of a Filipino-Ethiopian alliance, and is left unable to foresee any Afro-Asian future but what is bequeathed by uplift: that the semisavage could one day ascend to the position of the master.
In other words, Kealing already occupies the place where you now stand, on the far side of despair, gazing out at an unreal possibility already consigned to the past. This is the structure of the “third conditional”: if the antiracist and anticolonial movements of the twentieth century hadn’t fallen short of the extravagant hopes invested in them, they would have achieved another world. Just as this bitter-mouthed joke is the sole rhetorical figure through which Kealing can express a desire excluded by the terms of racial uplift, it may be that this negated image of a future lost to history, this third-conditional world, offers you an apposite structure for expressing those desires for freedom that elude the epistemological and aesthetic constraints of imperialism’s racial justice.
For his part, Kealing can go no further in expressing this desire, at least not in words, for what words he can find are capable only of betraying it. But where the words leave off, if there could still be music, that music would come to be called the blues.
resounding a red ray
If the color line serves as a tool for mapping the geopolitics of race and projecting its destiny across centuries, it also marks the site where race is produced, where bodies are given coherence and torn asunder. This is not a line to be crossed in triumph; to be crossed by it is to feel the violence of imperial incorporation extending itself as justice. The anecdote that began this chapter invokes such a crossing in order to evade it, in what I propose below is an improvised theoretical gesture of a radical poetics, out of which unfolded that enormous history of action—aesthetic, intellectual, political—which travels under the name Du Bois. So let me return to April 1899, to the earnest young man making his way up Mitchell Street. Eight months away from the speech in D.C., he is on the other side of a vast divide: over ten days in May, his son, Burghardt, age two, will take ill and die, in a city where white doctors would not treat black patients, and black doctors were in short supply (Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois 227–28). For now, carrying his reasoned statement and his letter of introduction to the newspaper, he may still imagine that the violence he hopes to address reaches toward someone else.
This is a story about imperialism’s racial justice and its tokens. In it, the ambitious young scientist recognizes his own tokenization: all his hard-won achievements suddenly seem meaningless before the evidence of overwhelming violence. If he’s been endowed with the power to speak as a representative of his race, which he’d planned to use with the editor of the Constitution, it is because his achievements, his person, could be taken to justify a civilizing mission. He appears, in autobiographical caricature, as what would later be called a model minority.
This is racial incorporation in a mode of sponsored uplift, whereby the nation guides the education of its nonwhite wards in the ways of white civilization—a mode pioneered in the metropole before its extension to the Philippine colony. If this process engineers a kind of model nonwhite racial subject hybridized by internalizing white civilization, it also secures the nation’s claim to whiteness via the demonstration of a racial capacity for benevolent mastery. Further, the scientific efficiency by which the United States performs the civilizing mission proliferates racial distinctions within whiteness, engineering a modern, hybridized yet pure variety that could be heir and successor to European empires.
But I find another form of racial token here, manufactured by another mode of racial incarnation. I refer to the gruesome trophy said to be on display at the grocer’s, the dismembered knuckles of the lynched body of Sam Hose. I argue that lynching is one manifestation of a mode of imperial incorporation through overwhelming violence, and that the lynching form may be understood as a communal, narrative act of sexual violence—a sex act, whose performance establishes and secures whiteness, as well as blackness, as racial categories of violent mastery and conquest. A racialized, sexualized, invasive violence
