The trophy is a token of this act, condensing its narrative into a magical object, whose display reenacts the ritual. The token on display serves as a warning to black people in its vicinity, to fix them in place in the local racial order—not to expel them, not to exterminate them, but to fix them, in intimate bondage, in relation to whites. It serves, too, as a celebration and a commemoration for local white audiences. But it also addresses other white audiences, who may or may not be present, who may provisionally hold a superior position in a social order, and thereby deign to condescend to the community of lynchers. It defiantly proclaims a racial difference within whiteness, between higher but decadent strains of whiteness whose capacity for rejuvenating violence has degraded, and a lower but more vigorous, youthful, potent, rising racial strain. At issue here is a perceived threat of overcivilization, giving rise to moral and sexual perversion, feminized men and masculinized women, and the inevitable decline of a great race in the cyclical rhythms of world-historical progress—that orientation to civilization I have been calling occidented.31
Lynching is commonly misunderstood as a strictly Southern phenomenon, exemplifying the conflict between a subordinated regional white community and a disapproving nation. I contend instead that lynching is just one of the manifestations of racial incorporation through sexualized violence crucial to the ways the United States, as a rising world power, claimed the imperial legitimacy of whiteness while asserting the exceptionality of its white racial character. Thus, one response to the spectacle of lynching, a condemnation from the perspective of some Northern or European elites, which would become dominant and shape subsequent histories of racism, takes it as evidence of the backwardness and debasement of white lynchers, of their savage or uncivilized ways—that the process, in effect, made them less than white, contaminated or blackened. Yet the danger of contamination is the necessary risk of a procedure to inoculate whiteness from overcivilized decline by infusing a sexualized, racialized savage essence, of the engineering of a hybrid modern whiteness that projects primal nature onto a nonwhite body in order to abstract and consume it in an act of sacrificial communion. As I argued in my reading of King Kong, this act makes white people more white, white men more manly and potent, white women more feminine and sexually desirable. Another analogy appears in the “Optic White” episode of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the secret ingredient of a superior white paint turns out to be ten drops of “dead black” liquid (163). In an influential analysis of this “remarkably astute parable of the production of whiteness” (74), Harryette Mullen reads it as an analogy, not to lynching, but to passing, taken as a model for fabricating “pure” whiteness from racial difference (72). If the social phenomenon of passing unveils the “formula” of whiteness’s manufacture—not as an exception to the general rule of white reproduction, but as the exemplary case revealing the underlying principle—then the lynching form is one of its instances.
It would be tempting to narrate Du Bois’s decision to turn back down Mitchell Street as a deferral or postponement, to say he reverses course because he has not yet prepared the theoretical formulation sufficient for the scene he is on the way to witnessing. For the color line, as he would shortly define it, is first and foremost the natal site of whiteness, even as Du Bois’s intervention seeks to overturn this priority to herald the emergence of modern nonwhite subjects. But the lynching form does not merely instantiate the color line—it seeks to collapse that line into a single, fixed point. Du Bois is justifiably less concerned, in this instance, with elaborating the multiple strains of whiteness lynching nourishes than with its propensity to reduce all varieties of nonwhiteness to the same fate. One might say that Du Bois hesitates before or evades the embodied experience of being crossed by the color line—except that, as I will argue, you may take his deferral or hesitation, the swerve or detour from the scene of lynching that necessarily returns him to it, as itself the crucial theoretical gesture of his narrative, improvised on the spot.
What happens in the encounter that Du Bois quite prudently avoids? Something of an analogue can be found in chapter 10 of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The unnamed protagonist, whose New England boyhood is closer to Du Bois’s biography than Johnson’s, has come to the South after a series of adventures across the United States and Europe, determined to become a great composer by transforming the raw materials of black popular culture into a refined, concert-hall music. Following classic European models of modernizing nationalism—to reconstitute the collective accomplishments of the peasantry first into folk culture and then into the product of individual genius—his ambitions are fully worthy of Du Bois’s vision of uplift. Arriving in the poor communities of the Black Belt, he begins “jotting down in my note-book themes and melodies, and trying to catch the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state” (Johnson, Writings 105), but he is compelled to abort his initial research when he finds himself observing a lynching bee.
Jacqueline Goldsby persuasively argues for a reading of the book as a novel of lynching rather than passing, shaped by Johnson’s own traumatic encounters with the violence. Indeed, it is the experience of lynching that transforms the protagonist into an ex-colored man. His representation of his decision appears disingenuous—“I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race,” he says, and merely “change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would” (115), though subsequent events reveal he must actively hide his past. He rationalizes the decision as an impossible attempt to distinguish between the putatively biological inheritance of race and its function to mark social inferiority, while leaving privilege disingenuously unmarked—“it was not necessary,” he tells himself, “to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead” (115).
It is not clear, however, that there is a decision at all; already passing “incognegro” as a witness to the lynching bee, he becomes trapped in this condition, looking for reasons after the fact: “It was not discouragement, or fear, or search for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals. For certainly the law would restrain and punish the malicious burning alive of animals” (115). From within his new racial status, he distances himself from a shame he attributes to blackness, due less to the denial of its humanity than its expulsion from the protection of the law. But a few paragraphs earlier, before he’s “made up his mind” (115), this shame appears first in a notably different form. Coming out of the fugue state he’d passed into during the lynching, he comes to consciousness before its material remains—“a scorched post, a smoldering fire, blackened bones, charred fragments sifting down through coils of chain, and the smell of flesh—human flesh”—and walks off to sit and “clear [his] dazed mind”: “A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive” (113). Consciously or not, Johnson is unmistakably reproducing the structure of Du Bois’s famous formulation of double consciousness, that narrative subjectivity split in two along the contradiction of nation and race, American/Negro (Du Bois, Writings 364–65).
In the post-multicultural present, in which the grammar and lexicon of cultural diversity supply the dominant language of racial justice, the celebration of identity abstracted from historical and social analyses of racial inequality provides affirmative pathways for inequality’s continuation and expansion. Following the logic of his own rationalization, then, it is easy for present-day readers to accept the ex-colored man’s severing of this formulation of doubled shame, forgetting his initial emphasis on his ethical implication as a member of a national body marked by exceptional violence, and condemn him for the sin of racial self-hatred. Yet the agony of the ex-colored man’s passing, that joke which turns back onto him as tragedy, is that he never ceases to love and value black culture, even as his belief in uplift abstracts that love from the experiences of any particular black people he might know. In the logic of the narrative, the project of uplift is aborted only to be aggrandized, for the novel is a cautionary tale, staged to encourage readers to affirm the narrator’s famous conclusion that he “sold [his]
