Booker T. Washington received a congratulatory telegram from W. E. B. Du Bois shortly after he delivered his speech at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton Exposition. The young sociologist who had considered joining the Tuskegee faculty praised the college president's words as "fitly spoken" and "the basis of a real settlement between whites and blacks in the South." Yet in the 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois dubbed the famous oration the "Atlanta Compromise" and upbraided Washington for both his politics and his commitment to industrial education. In critiquing Washington's program for the South, Du Bois lamented, "It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force."
Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures)
Harvard University Press
240 pages
$36.05
Narrow Du Bois was not. His life spanned almost a century, from 1868 until 1963, and his longevity gave him ample opportunity to change his views on race politics. The mathematician and sociologist Kelly Miller marveled at Du Bois's philosophical shifts, which allowed him to change his opinion of Washington so dramatically: "It is almost impossible to conceive how the author of The Philadelphia Negro could have penned the second Niagara Movement Manifesto, without mental and moral metamorphosis." The transformation that Miller observed reflects Du Bois's untiring reassessment of black American existence. Kwame Appiah's Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity examines Du Bois's evolving thought and probes the contradictions at the heart of his conception of black identity. Seeking "to capture the ferment of the mind" that gave rise to Du Bois's ideas, which remain pivotal to current discussions of race and culture, Appiah casts his subject as both scientist and romantic, a man whose education pushed him beyond answers bound by logic alone.
Du Bois's 1958 return to Berlin to receive an honorary Doctor of Economics degree sets the stage for Appiah's approach to piecing together Du Bois's philosophical heritage. Portraying Du Bois's political and personal contradictions in ways that heighten his humanity, Appiah introduces him as a black man who was tried by Senator Joseph McCarthy at the age of eighty-three, became a citizen of Ghana when he was ninety-five, and sent a telegram of support to the March on Washington in 1963 before going to sleep on the night he died. The world-renowned sociologist from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, emerges as difficult to pin down yet impossible not to admire. Appiah gracefully renders Du Bois's intellectual formation in a study that is a pleasure to traverse for both the scholar and the casual reader.
Du Bois's first love was Germany. His embarkation to study in Berlin marked his maiden voyage away from U.S. racism. He brought a deep respect for the German academic system to his studies. Many of his most respected instructors at Harvard boasted a German degree, so Du Bois viewed this accomplishment as necessary to establishing his intellectual bona fides. His Berlin professors' vigorous political careers provided a template for the active engagement of the intellectual with the most pressing issues of the contemporary world. Issues such as the inequality of wealth and the class struggle received thorough examination from instructors like Max Lenz and August Meitzen, while his studies with Gustav von Schmoller challenged him to consider the moral and ethical aspects of his methodological approach. In fact, the abiding concern with the "Social Question" that the historical school probed equipped Du Bois with foundational principles for examining the Negro question. Even as he became aware of the racism articulated by professors such as Heinrich von Treitschke, Du Bois cherished the potent understanding of culture that held such promise for his work on Negro identity.
Appiah is at his best when explaining the impact of individual thinkers on Du Bois's complicated views of black America. He compellingly demonstrates Du Bois's determination to bring his German studies to bear on his study of the U.S. color line, and he helpfully describes how Du Bois found new inspiration in Johann Gottfried Herder's idea of individuality and the spiritual life of a nation. Herder's conception of a nation's Volksgeist—its national soul—acknowledged the importance of its intellectual achievements as well as its folklore. This basis for romantic nationalism spoke deeply to Du Bois, and he infused his best-known work with its abiding idea. In the literature of romanticism, with its emphasis on striving, Du Bois discovered the threads of a philosophical theory that enabled him to position the Negro as "a Folk among Folks" in such a way that "presupposes a reference to a global perspective." Pausing to elucidate the roots of Du Bois's passion for personal individuality alongside his deep belief in race groups, Appiah contrasts his ideas against the real-life practices of Booker T. Washington. Du Bois ultimately determined that individualist and collectivist strains needed savvy integration, and the struggle to achieve such a balance absorbed much of his life.
His efforts to redefine black identity were challenged by the scientific racism raging around him. Balancing his historical and sociological impulses, Du Bois joined the pseudoscientific discussions of the day by identifying eight distinct races that allowed him to move between the physical and spiritual attributes of different peoples. Ultimately, the idea of "striving" remained central as he hewed closely to the Hegelian philosophy that the Idea best defined a people. Du Bois's search for the Negro Idea led him back to his deep belief in the necessity that black Americans share their gifts with the world, a point he makes movingly in one of the best-known passages of Souls. Appiah details the many thinkers whose work aided Du Bois's evolving views on race, noting the importance of Hermann Lotze's skepticism about classification as Du Bois strove to "replace the biological conception with a historical and sociological" explanation of race. Franz Boas also assisted his project as he offered new ways to consider the relationship between biology and culture. Even as Du Bois denied the existence of a single Negro type, he sought to explain the distinctions that make racial belonging so important. Ultimately, he determined that people are bound by race by their recognition of belonging to the same group rather than by any discernible shared features. His pithy definition of blackness as "a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia" explained race as a social construction in terms that would form the foundation of contemporary cultural studies.
Just as Du Bois struggled to align his personal depth of racial feeling with the scientific theories he studied, he strove to come to terms with the implications of the African past for black racial identity. Not until he heard Boas' 1906 commencement speech at Atlanta University did Du Bois begin to question the accepted notion that Africa lacked a legitimate history. Although he had written sporadically on the subject since 1903, it was only with the 1915 publication of The Negro that he began to consider African history in earnest. By 1939, Black Folk, Then and Now gave readers a more expansive picture of African history, which he extended still further in The World and Africa (1947).
These texts, Appiah observes, are informed by Du Bois's growing belief that Africa offered the "second front in his struggle to define the Negro." His sweeping overview of African history includes a detailed survey of slavery in sync with his cultural nationalism. Thus, in his most expansive work on Africa, Du Bois writes, "It may well be that Africa … was the birthplace of the human family and ancient Negro blood the basis of the blood of all men." Africa, Appiah concludes, ends up marking the limits of the idea of the Negro for Du Bois.
The very notion of black identity having limits raises the question of whether the Negro should persist indefinitely. If the idea of American blackness was defined by the effect of social practices, Du Bois required new methods for understanding race. Theories imbibed from his Berlin instructors gave way to the more malleable ideas of earlier mentors like Josiah Royce and William James. To clarify the relationship between Du Bois's work and philosophies of identity today, Appiah returns to the emergence of the modern idea of identity during Du Bois's formative years and beyond, casting a wide net that takes in James, George Herbert Mead, and others. Du Bois, Appiah concludes, drew on them to advocate a shift "from thinking of the Negro race as a natural, biological kind to thinking of it as composed of people who share a socially made identity." Although "until the end of his life [Du Bois] spoke of the Negro as a category that worked across societies, in ways that seem to ignore his own insight," Appiah leaves us with the image of Du Bois as a Moses leading the way to a social contructionist understanding of identity.
As compelling and elegant as Appiah's account is, his insistence upon Du Bois's cosmopolitanism feels a bit forced at times. But his mastery of the philosophical heritage from which Du Bois hails—together with the light touch of his own biography that he weaves throughout his study—mitigates against the feeling of an ideological push that detracts from an honest, rigorous exploration of one of the most important figures of African American thought. If Appiah's personal admiration for Du Bois leads to a somewhat romanticized view of the man's education, there can be no doubt about the impressive complexity of the life that unfolds in Lines of Descent.
Lena Hill is associate professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa.
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