shame the narrator remembers to confess—that the violence incarnates blackness, given birth as expulsion from the protection of the law—is what transforms him into the ex-colored man, driving him into whiteness. But because he confesses it, first in private, prior to marrying a beloved white woman who bears him two white children, and then, after her death, in the pages of his book, he lays open his shame to expose what Harryette Mullen explains is whiteness’s own shared secret. Following Goldsby, you might read the novel as the author’s own exposure of that same shame, the secret of Johnson’s encounter with lynching, laid open to advance a race’s transformation into race men dedicated to Negro uplift. In sum, if something in the ending leaves present-day readers uneasy, it cannot be attributed to the repression of a racialized shame. Rather, it’s how easily the narrator toggles between his dream of uplift and his assumption of whiteness that is striking, now that uplift is no longer the dominant form of racial justice. The distinction between Negro uplift ideology and racial passing, on which the novel turns, proves troublingly difficult to maintain, and if this might seem bizarre to Johnson, it would be the very theme of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing.
This uncanny doubling becomes easier to understand if you recall the confession that the ex-colored man forgets to remember, the shame of membership in a political body constituted by the violence, of belonging to a state exceptionalized by lynching. This shame does not derive from an identification with whiteness, but with a civilization constituted and regenerated in the devolution of violence upon blackness. This is the shame of the American Negro as civilized subject, as the token of benevolent tutelage, which must be forgotten once his mind is made up to pass. It risks revealing, among other things, that what passes for freedom across the color line, the mastery of civilization white status entails, which Negro uplift would contest, is merely the illusory privilege of standing on the lee side of the violence, a trick of perception that can be maintained only by separating oneself from what the violence bears away. For the violence has no master, only servants who hope to redirect its force onto others further down its course. Here you may recast the tradition of the passing novel, running through Johnson and Larsen, to understand its continuing salience as a challenge for reading. It asks, How is it possible to perceive the difference between whiteness, or racialized privilege, and freedom?
In short, Negro uplift ideology comes to seem indistinguishable from passing because of this second shame—because it is a manifestation of U.S. civilization’s gospel of violence. The unbearable encounter between the tokens of uplift’s benevolence and its violence reveals, beyond the author’s intention, that the protagonist’s dream of catching the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state is homologous with both passing and lynching. Each posits the internalization of a black essence—refined, consumed, secreted, but at all costs mastered—in producing a reconstituted racial subject fit for modern civilization. Lynching exposes the logic of the violence that extends uplift’s loving embrace. Following Goldsby’s insight that “lynching’s narrative force … compels the narrator to tell his story backward, with the result that the novel develops according to a process akin to that of photography” (217), you may understand the relation of passing to lynching as that of a negative to a photograph: one fabricates a white body, and the other fabricates its black essence, but the process they comprise together establishes the perception of the racial image.
Returning to Du Bois, you may recognize what lies before him as the scene of perceptual training in an aesthetics of racial terror, which he evades in the movement of an improvised countertraining. In the close encounter between two varieties of the racial token, each is empowered to speak only by silencing the other; each draws power by reference to the other but can express that power only in the other’s absence. But Du Bois does not risk actually coming into the presence of the lynching trophy; instead, silenced, he turns away. This is not merely prudence, the justifiable fear of being overwhelmed by the violence and mistaken for its proper target, but the unsettling premonition, on its way to surfacing as (double) consciousness, that he is already implicated in it, prior to intention or will, in his very constitution as a civilized American Negro subject. This is why he does not reschedule his appointments at the Constitution or submit his statement by post—why his modernizing scientific project is unsettled at its very core.
The U-turn down Mitchell Street may seem a retreat—repairing to the security of the university to theorize a response to unforeseen conditions—but retrospection identifies the detour as the opening of Du Bois’s journey, an ongoing improvisation whose narration is itself the theorization it demands. The text, recall, is not an autobiography of the development of its historical subject, but an essay toward an autobiography of a race concept—a literary exercise marshaling the empirical facts of personal history in the service of a conceptualization. The turn away from the presence of the lynching trophy may therefore be understood as a narrative theorization of hesitation and detour. The text refuses to witness the token of lynching’s violence, to represent the overwhelming sensory experience of the blackened knuckles, the char and stench, so as not to reproduce and reenact the lynching form.
This is in some sense, illusory, for Du Bois swerves away from the trophy only to run right back to and through it,32 but the narrative introduces a kind of lag in this movement, tearing at the discrepancy in the doubled vision of uplift’s twinned tokens at the site where they would be fused, in order to disrupt uplift’s aesthetic protocols. An extemporaneous motion, the swerve opens Du Bois to an agency arriving from outside all that his knowledge and training has prepared him to perceive—which is to say, the act is prophetic. This is the strange red ray, cutting across his scientific blueprints, by which the narrative improvises the retraining of attention not on the lynching trophy but on that felt condition of insufficiency, shared by protagonist and narrator and reader, down all the decades of the violence’s repetition and across the unbroken moment stretching back to the killing of the man known as Sam Hose, a problem of perception before it is ethics or epistemology.
This red ray, put simply, is a figure for what transforms Du Bois from a scholar to a political activist. But his activism continues to involve the production of knowledge and of writing. In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde describes a “quality of light” that has “direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes we hope to bring about through those lives,” defining poetry as a practice that “forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change” (36). In this sense, the figure of the red ray captures something of the quality of light that shapes and is shaped by Du Bois’s developing poetic method, his epistemology and his aesthetics, in his relentlessly polygeneric, interdisciplinary, multimedia writings from Souls onward. The optic is just one aspect of this, of his ongoing improvisational orchestration of what Fred Moten calls “the ensemble of the senses”—Souls, for example, combines not only autobiography, sociology, history, biography, and fiction, but concludes with and is constantly interrupted by inscriptions of music.
With that in mind, I want to shift from reading the red ray as a strictly visual metaphor to think of this quality of light as having a sound, and to consider how it resounds or is re-sounded, not just in the sense of an echo but of a transformation or translation, as it moves along a global color line. It may be set to work, as in Du Bois’s case, on the apparently impossible task of imagining racial justice beyond the terms laid down by imperialism’s own justifications, which determine what can be perceived even before they dominate what can be known and represented. For Du Bois in this period, and arguably throughout his career, the agenda remains a form of uplift, but the sound of this red ray begins to bend his vision of black modernity onto a different course.
The red ray may be perceived at any number of locations along the color line—the site where modern racial subjects were incarnated and incorporated, where uplift and violence, logically incommensurable but regularly indistinguishable in practice, converged in a kind of blind spot of racialized perception, the occasion of aesthetic training and countertraining. As preparation to hear a quality of light, you may turn to the resources of black aesthetic traditions, following the guidance of poet-theorists like Lorde, Moten, Brent Edwards, Nathaniel Mackey, and others. Attending to the ways black cultural practices work
