“But
what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?”
Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly,
I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership
of the earth forever and ever, Amen!
—W.E.B.
Dubois, from “The Souls of White Folk”
I am not sure what led me back to it. I had read W.E.B.
Dubois’s The Souls of White Folk (originally published
in Darkwater:
Voices from Within the Veil,
1920) years ago. At the time I was moved by this often
ignored essay but simply filed it away in the recesses of
my memory.
Yet I returned to it. I had been thinking about right-wing
populism and white nationalism in the USA and at some point
I found myself Googling this piece. There were three things
that immediately struck me: (1) by coincidence, it was
published exactly 90 years ago, (2) it read, in many respects,
as if it had been written yesterday, and (3) it was both
passionate and poetic in its style, but equally biting in
its critique of white supremacy and imperialism.
“The
Souls of White Folk”
was an essay written in the aftermath of World War I and
the despicable Versailles Treaty of 1919 which formally
ended the war. Mainstream historians often focus on the
mean-spirited punishment that the Allied Powers brought
upon Germany, thereby laying the foundation for World War
II. Little attention is given, however, to the hypocritical
attitude of the Allied Powers with respect to the colonial
world, the ‘darker races,’ to borrow from the title of Vijay
Prashad’s excellent book. Representatives of the colonial
world (including from Black America) gathered in Versailles
to ascertain whether the Allied Powers (USA, Britain, France,
Italy) would be true to their commitment to support the
right of national self-determination. The future leader
of the Vietnamese Revolution, Ho Chi Minh, was one such
person who made the trek to Versailles, hoping that Vietnam,
and the rest of Indochina, would secure self-determination.
Instead of receiving justice, the colored peoples of the
world were ignored. The former colonies of Germany were
either handed over outright to other colonial powers or
they were placed into a League of Nations trusteeship, but
in neither case were they able to secure independence.
Dubois observed this first hand, having attended the Versailles
conference. He subsequently helped to convene a Pan African
Congress in order to address the fact that the African world
had been so overlooked.
“The
Souls of White Folk”
takes as its starting point an analysis of the origins of
World War I. Rather than accepting the established notion
that it was a war for democracy and self-determination,
Dubois embraces the assessment that it was an imperialist
war focused on the objective of gaining greater portions
of the colonial world for this or that imperialist power.
This was an analysis advanced by Russia’s V.I. Lenin at
the start of World War I and for much of the Left it has
subsequently become a basic truism.
“The
Souls of White Folk”
would be a powerful document if it simply stopped there,
but Dubois goes further and in doing so makes this document
one that cannot be read simply as an historical piece, but
one that remains critically important today. Dubois turns
to the question of race and, in fact, white privilege, and
demonstrates the linkages between race and imperialism.
Dubois notes, for example: “Behold little Belgium and her
pitiable plight, but has the world forgotten Congo?” For
those not up on their World War I history (and no criticism
is implied), much was made of the German subjugation of
Belgium. Yet Dubois asks about the Congo, and this is not
simply a throw-away line. Belgium, through King Leopold,
controlled the Congo during which time it put to death ten
to twelve million people. Dubois, of course, could not
know what was soon to be facing European Jews and the annihilation
of six million of them at the hands of the Nazis (who in
1920 were just getting organized), but that Holocaust received
international attention, whereas the holocaust inflicted
on the Congolese people was all but ignored at the time
that it happened, in the aftermath of World War I, and,
indeed, in the aftermath of World War II. For Dubois, imperialism
was not racially blind.
Dubois situates the matter of race directly with modern imperialism.
He makes the point that the degrading of this or that part
of humanity has been with us for thousands of years, but
that it is with the rise of modern Europe that we see the
rise of what he terms “the eternal world-wide mark of meanness,--color!”
Race (or racist oppression) becomes a process of dehumanizing
the targets of colonial oppression, turning them into something
less than men and women and thereby making it easier to
overlook their suffering. This is what was powerful in
his example of Belgium. It was not that Dubois was ignoring
the suffering of the people of Belgium. Rather he was focusing
on the fact that the so-called civilized world could so
easily ignore the suffering and murder of so many millions
of people in the Congo and elsewhere, people who happened
to be black, brown, yellow and red.
There is another piece to race that Dubois suggests, i.e.,
that it also dehumanizes so-called whites. Over the years
this concept has gained greater scholarly attention, though
for the ‘darker races’ of the world it was a piece of common
sense. We grew up with our parents suggesting “…in order
to keep someone in the sewer you have to stay there with
them…” and other such aphorisms.
As part of his critique of imperialism and racism, Dubois
holds a mirror to the USA and says, much as Dr. M. L. King
would say slightly more than forty years later: “It
is curious to see America, the United States, looking on
herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as
a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is
less fitted for this role.” In reading this I found
myself thinking about the role of the USA in the talks between
the Israeli government and the Palestine National Authority,
claiming to be the honest broker while ignoring Israel’s
further aggression, most recently in the form of the expansion
of the illegal settlements. But it is more fundamental
than that: the actions of the Israelis represent a replication
of those taken by US settlers as they expanded West, taking
lands from the Native Americans and the Mexicans.
“The
Souls of White Folk”
riveted me because of its continued relevance. At a moment,
in the aftermath of the November 2010 elections and the
victories (albeit complicated) by the political Right, I
found myself thinking about the ‘souls’ that inhabit so
many white folk in the USA, souls that have been shaped
by a perception of their own alleged superiority and infallibility
as white Americans in comparison to the entirety of humanity.
These souls, however, resemble ghouls rather than angels
as they haunt not only the victims of centuries of white
supremacist terror, but also haunt the owners themselves,
disfiguring them and, as Dubois so poetically puts it, rendering
them less than human.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with
the Institute for
Policy Studies, the immediate past president ofTransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path
toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines
the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.
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