Remembering the Gift: W.E.B. Du Bois on the Unconscious and Economic Operations of Racism

Remembering the Gift: W.E.B. Du Bois on the Unconscious and Economic Operations ofRacismAuthor(s): Shannon SullivanSource: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Spring, 2003), pp. 205-225Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320931 .

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Shannon Sullivan

Remembering the Gift: WJE.B. Du Bois on the

Unconscious and Economic Operations of Racism

W.E.B. Du Bois perhaps is best known for his 1903 analysis of the souls of black folk, who suffer from a "double consciousness" in which one has a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of [white] others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (1994, 2). His early essay "The Conservation of Races" (1970a) also has received considerable attention from philosophers who debate whether racial categories should be preserved.1 Less often discussed is his 1924 analysis of the gifts of black folk, which, according to Du Bois, have been overlooked but were crucial to the making of America. As I read it, The Gift of Black Folk (1970b) participates in an important shift in Du Bois's distinctive brand of pragmatism in which the naive liberalism he mixed with it was replaced by the insights of Freud and Marx. This shift marks a transformation in Du Bois's understanding of what motivates and what might effectively challenge white privilege. While Du Bois's early work tended to assume that white people were racist only because of their ignorance of black people and culture, his later work acknowledged that white people often unconsciously and tenaciously held on to their white privilege because of the psychological and economic benefits it afforded them. Du Bois thus came to believe that the main task when fighting racism was not merely to generate and distribute accurate information about racially oppressed groups, but more importantly to analyze, so as to transform the white racist unconscious, especially in its economic commitments.

In what follows, I begin by examining the shift in Du Bois's thought concerning the motivations for and strategies against white racism. I then turn to Du Bois's work on the gifts of black folk to show how white privilege operates through the intertwining issues of property, capitalist exploitation, and repression. As I do so, an issue I hope to address is that a major problem when combating white racism - perhaps even more today than in Du Bois's day - is that many white people often do not see racism as a problem. That is to say, they

Transactions of the Charles S, Peirce Society Spring, 2003, Vol. XXXIX, No. 2



206 Shannon Sullivan

do not even see it at all. As Du Bois suggests, this "meta" problem of unconscious white resistance to recognizing white racism and white privilege must be addressed if attempts to solve specific problems of racism are to be maximally effective. In Du Bois's day as well as our own, subtle, transformative forays into white unconscious habits are a crucial step in the process of challenging white racism and dismantling white privilege.

From a Naive Liberal to a Freudian-Marxist Analysis of Racism The shift in Du Bois's ideas about racism did not take place all at once, and

continuities across Du Bois's entire career certainly exist. Nonetheless, Du Bois's approach to racism in roughly the first two decades of the twentieth century is noticeably different from that of the next four decades before Du Bois's death in 1963. Prior to World War I, Du Bois's pragmatism was mixed with what he called a "liberal" understanding of the human psyche (1984, 295). In this period of his work, Du Bois thought that the main cause of racism was white ignorance about black people and therefore that the fight for racial justice should be conducted by means of scientific production and distribution of the truth about them, including the distribution effected through law, art, fiction, and poetry. Beginning in the late 1910s, Du Bois became increasingly critical of this understanding of and response to racism. Gradually turning to Marx and Freud in the 1920s, he began to believe, and explicitly argued from around 1930 on, that to effectively fight white racist habits, one must focus on the transactional relationship of their unconscious and economic aspects.

In his 1948 autobiography, Du Bois reports that when he taught at Atlanta University (from 1897-1910), he operated as a scientist who was concerned about accuracy and the search for truth (Du Bois 1984, 54, 64; see also 1968, 228). While much of his work during that time does not appear standardly scientific, it does represent ua careful search for truth" that would "make the Truth clear" to all (1984, 64). The fiction, musical scores, and poetry found in The Souls of Black Folk, for example, share with its sociological descriptions and data the goal of lifting up the veil that covers over the black world, preventing the white world from seeing it as it truly is. The Souls of Black Folk counters the assessments of the "car-window sociologist" and others who think that they can quickly understand the lives of black people as they drive by black laborers "irresponsibly" neglecting their work (1994, 94). To "unrave[l] the snarl of centuries" (1994, 94), much more careful and detailed scientific analyses are needed, including the "scientific" truths that the arts and humanities can provide. Du Bois's scientific work thus was not concerned with abstract and eternal laws (as, in his view, most other social scientists of his day were), but rather focused on a concrete set of human beings - black people - who had been isolated from others due to race. By bringing scientific tools of investigation (broadly understood) to the issue of race, Du Bois hoped to transform the vague "Negro problem" into a collection of specific, context-sensitive facts. Du Bois largely



Remembering the Gift 207

fulfilled this goal, producing the first systematic studies of black mortality, crime, social betterment, churches, business, education, and health.

Du Bois's pursuit of truth worked hand-in-hand with what he called a "liberal" approach to the elimination of racism. Du Bois's liberalism naively posited human beings as always wishing to do good and as failing to do so only because they did not know what the good was. On this Socratic view of human nature, if human beings perform racist acts or hold racist beliefs, they do so only because they do not have accurate information about, for example, the black people that they discriminate against. Hence the need for sociological, artistic, and other work that shows the truth about black people. For the early Du Bois, the "moral and personal goodness of white people" could be assumed (Wilson 2002, 32). White ignorance of the lives of black people was the cause of racism, and the elimination of racial prejudice depended upon generating accurate depictions of and data about groups that are racially oppressed.

Du Bois would later call his time at Atlanta University one of isolation in an ivory tower of statistics and information on race (1984, 54, 222). He saw himself as stepping down from that tower when he left Atlanta for New York to work as an editor of the Crisis, a job that marked for him the end of his work as a scientist and the beginning of his work as a "propagandist." No longer in charge of generating accurate statistics on black life, Du Bois was now responsible for speaking out against prejudice against black people and thereby advancing their social and political situation. Although Du Bois somewhat mournfully spoke of his career as a scientist as being lost when "swallowed up in [his] role as master of propaganda" (1968, 253), the two jobs were not as different as Du Bois claims. In part, this is because Du Bois was already engaged in "propaganda" in earlier work such as that found in The Souls of Black Folk. Additionally, to the extent that Du Bois had focused more on science in the years before than after 1910, the scientific truth about black people that this work provided was the weapon he needed to fight racist error in his new position. The move from science to "propaganda," therefore, was more of a shift in emphasis than a complete relocation of Du Bois's work against racism.

While the move from Atlanta University to the NAACP did not mark a sharp change in Du Bois's overall perspective on racism, it did begin a subtle transformation in the liberal elements of Du Bois's pragmatism that foreshadowed his later, more substantial shift beyond them. Du Bois explains that in the years shortly after leaving Atlanta, he "had come to the place where [he] was convinced that science, the careful social study of the Negro problems, was not sufficient to settle them; that they were not basically, as [he] had assumed, difficulties due to ignorance but rather difficulties due to the determination of certain people to suppress and mistreat the darker races" (1984, 221). At this point in Du Bois's thinking, evil, not ignorance was posited as the real cause of racism, and Du Bois declared that his earlier assumption that the world was eagerly waiting to hear the truth about black people was false (1968,




222). Merely generating and distributing accurate information about black people thus would not end racism; a new approach was needed. The strategy Du Bois turned to in the early 1910s, however, was not substantially different from that of the 1900s. This is because until the late 1910s, Du Bois tended to hold that evil people were in the minority and that the majority of people, who were good-hearted, would put an end to racist evil once they realized that a small group of people was perpetuating it (1984, 221-22). In other words, ignorance was still the problem; only now Du Bois conceived it as the majority's ignorance of the activities of a small minority who were hostile to the truth about black people. Du Bois's overall liberal strategy thus remained in place: spread the truth about black people and use organs of propaganda, such as the Crisis, legal action, and artistic productions, to alert well-meaning people to the injustice of the evil.

All this began to change around the time of World War I. In 1920, Du Bois published Darkwater, which, as the title suggests, presents a much murkier picture of white people. In his biting essay "The Souls of White Folk" (1999, 17), for example, Du Bois describes himself as sitting high in a tower peering down into the "souls" of white people that sound remarkably similar to the unconscious: the "stripped, ugly" insides or "entrails" of white people that usually are hidden away.2 Having stripped whiteness bare, Du Bois then proceeds to display its ugly core: it is ownership of other things and people. Demonstrating the white attitude of propriety through an examination of World War I, he explains the war as a struggle between white nations over who will be allowed to exploit darker nations. Moreover, according to Du Bois, colonial expansion summarizes not only the war, but also the entire relationship of white European and Euro-aligned nations to the rest of the non-white world. "Bluntly put," Du Bois argues, the theory with which Euro-white nations operate is that "[i]t is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe's good" (1999, 23). If exploitation of others for their own gain is the fundamental principle of white nations, then the atrocities of World War I should come as no surprise. As Du Bois views it, the judgment of the world's "darker men" about World War I is right on target: "this is not Europe gone mad, this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture - back of all culture - stripped and visible today. . .these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted" (1999, 22, emphasis in original).

By 1920, Du Bois thus had abandoned his belief that the majority of white people were good-hearted. He claims that sometimes for the world's "salvation," the lie that white people are honest and can be trusted needs to be told but that he himself no longer believes it (1999, 47). This change in Du Bois's opinion about white people helps explain his shift away from liberalism, as well as his departure from the NAACP. Looking back in 1940 at the two decades of work he did for the organization, Du Bois praised it for coordinating "one of the most effective assaults of liberalism upon prejudice and reaction that the modern world




has seen" (1984, 227). Nonetheless, he had been convinced since at least 1930 that its policies should be changed because "a mere appeal based on the old liberalism, a mere appeal to justice and further effort at legal decision, was missing the essential need" (1984, 295). The "essential need" was for a stronger economic foundation for black people due to the entrenched unconscious operations of racism. Du Bois had come to believe that the only strategies for fighting racism that would be successful were the ones that addressed the "founding stones of race antagonisms," which were "other and stronger and more threatening forces" than mere ignorance or deliberate malice (1984, 283). The NAACP's refusal to do so meant, in Du Bois's view, that it risked becoming ineffective in the struggle against racial prejudice. Legal and scientific attacks on white racism had been crucial to improving black people's attitudes about themselves, but white racism nonetheless presented just as strong, if not stronger a barrier to black people in 1930 as it had in 1910 (1984, 283, 303).3

Du Bois's new strategy for fighting racism was distinctive in that it confronted the unconscious workings of racism.4 Combining Freudian psychoanalysis with a pragmatist understanding of habit, this strategy understands much of human behavior as guided by irrational and unconscious habits. Criticizing his earlier liberal approach to racism, Du Bois states, "I was not at the time sufficiently Freudian to understand how litde human action is based on reason" (1968, 228). While Du Bois never indicates which texts and how much of Freud's work he read, he clearly credits Freud's "new psychology" for changing his thinking about race. Moreover, as Du Bois implies, his understanding of Freud was not a break with the pragmatist side of his earlier thought, but rather a deepened development of it:

[Around 1930] the meaning and implications of the new psychology had begun slowly to penetrate my thought. My own study of psychology under William James had pre-dated the Freudian era, but it had prepared me for it. I now began to realize that in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determination of white folk to oppress us; we were facing age-long complexes sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge. (1984,296)

Du Bois's use of the term "unconscious habit" suggests a return taken by means of psychoanalysis to an element of pragmatism neglected in the beginning of his career. Having been trained by James while an undergraduate at Harvard University, Du Bois must have been exposed to the concept of habit found in James's The Principles of Psychology (1955; originally published in 1890), and yet it is largely absent in Du Bois's early work. James operated with a "thick"




understanding of habit as deeply constitutive of who a person is and thus as difficult and slow (though not impossible) to change. By contrast, the rare times Du Bois mentions habit prior to 1930, he dismissively uses a very thin, non- Jamesian version of it. In 1920, for example, he claims that "our modern contempt of Negroes rests upon no scientific foundation worth a moment's attention. It is nothing more than a vicious habit of mind. It could as easily be overthrown as our belief in war, as our international hatreds, as our old conception of the status of women, as our fear of educating the masses, and as our belief in the necessity of poverty" (1999, 41). The comparisons made by Du Bois might make it appear that his claim about the ease of overthrowing racism is meant sarcastically - who today, after all, thinks that any of these things can be easily eliminated? Du Bois, however, intends the comparisons to have the opposite effect of reassuring his reader that racism, like other social ills, can be overcome if only we will it so. This is evident in the continuation of his remarks, in which he claims that u[w]e can, if we will, inaugurate on the Dark Continent a last great crusade for humanity" (1999, 41 ).5

Although the early Du Bois either misunderstood or ignored a key concept in James's psychology, he later declares that it was James's work that prepared him to accept Freud's concept of the unconscious. A circular influence appears to have operated in which James's psychology paved the way for Du Bois's appropriation of Freud's psychoanalysis, which in turn enabled Du Bois to appreciate James's thick understanding of habit.6 Du Bois's concept of unconscious habit combines a Freudian idea of the unconscious with a pragmatist understanding of habit to posit an unconscious formed by socially inherited customs and attitudes that cannot be transformed through a quick change of mind. As such, the concept broadens Freud's idea of the unconscious beyond its focus on the Oedipalized nuclear family and deepens James's (and, more generally, pragmatism's) concept of habit by connecting it with activities of repression and resistance to change that often are employed by the psyche. For Du Bois, a significant part of the constitution of unconscious habits involves active mechanisms and strategies for blocking their transformation (an aspect of habit rarely, if ever, addressed by James or Dewey). That habits are dynamically constituted through transaction with the socio-cultural world rather than fixed by biology or psychology does not change the fact that transforming them will take a great deal of patience and time (1984, 194).

Given the amount of time needed for the transformation of white unconscious habits to take place, Du Bois argued that it was vital that black America have a sound economic foundation that would allow it to survive without the help of white people. In other words, the psychological revolution in Du Bois's pragmatism necessitated an economic one as well.7 Enter Karl Marx, "a beam of new light" glimpsed by Du Bois sometime in the 1920s (1968, 289). Marx gave Du Bois an appreciation of the role that economics plays in the shaping of human history (1968, 228; 1984, 303). For example, Marx's work




helped Du Bois deepen his understanding of World War I as a crystallization of the problem of his time, which was "the widespread effort of white Europe to use the labor and material of the colored world for its own wealth and power" (1984, 261; see also 1984, 248 and 1999, 17-29). It is worth noting that this new focus upon economics was not a rejection of Du Bois's 1903 pronouncement that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line" (1994, v). It instead was a further development of it: the color line could be understood only if one appreciated the economic factors that helped draw it. Du Bois's emphasis upon the economic aspects of oppression gave him a more sophisticated and internationalist account of the operations of racism than that provided by his earlier analyses of racism, which largely omitted economics.

Moreover, Du Bois's new account of racism was more complex than simply calling for economic revolution because of the entrenchment of racism in the white psyche. Du Bois held that the economic and psychological aspects of racism were reciprocally dynamic rather than merely linear. According to Du Bois, not only did the unconscious life of racism necessitate a plan for black economic strength, but economic issues also were partially responsible for bringing about unconscious racism in the first place. To varying degrees, white people's "race prejudice was built and increasingly built on the basis of the income which they enjoyed and their anti-Negro bias consciously or unconsciously formulated in order to project their wealth and power" (1984, 296). Du Bois does not claim that economic issues were the only factors that helped produce white people's unconscious urges, nor does he say that the racist protection of white wealth operates solely on an unconscious level. He does, however, indicate a transactional circle between the economic and the psychological in which each feeds into and off of the other. The economic exploitation of non-white people creates conditions for the flourishing of unconscious (as well as conscious) racist bias against them, and unconscious racism in particular operates in subtle ways to justify further exploitation of non- white resources, wealth, and labor.

To break this cycle, according to Du Bois, "[t]he first point of attack is undoubtedly the economic" (1984, 171). In implicit agreement with Dewey's (1988a and 1988b) criticisms of "intellectualist psychology," Du Bois argued that directly attacking the conscious beliefs of white people would not work to change them.8 The inadequacy of this strategy is evidenced by the failure of liberal attempts (including his own) to "[call] on white folk to desist from certain practices and give up certain beliefs" (1984, 284). Du Bois argues that instead of this "merely negative" program, constructive activity on the part of black people is needed. While he does not explicitly refer to the unconscious in his call for positive economic action, he does suggest that one of the reasons such action is needed is that it offers the only way that the white unconscious might be modified. If black people can develop a sound, relatively independent economic foundation, then not only would the economic exploitation of black people be




reduced, but the reduction of such exploitation also would help eliminate some of the conditions that support unconscious racism. The economic uplift of black people thus can help improve white people's unconscious (and conscious) perceptions of them, and in turn the resulting reduction of unconscious racism likely will translate into less psychological justification for economic exploitation.

According to Du Bois, economic stability and independence for black people thus is necessary both to transform white people's unconscious racist habits and to survive during the long period of time that such transformation inevitably will take. Du Bois clearly borrows from Marx the term "revolution" to describe this transformation, but his particular use of the concept demonstrates his pragmatist revisions of it. First, as we have seen, a Du Boisian revolution will not be a quick, sudden overthrow of an oppressive race. Du Bois indicates time and again that the program he calls for will take many decades, if not longer. As he says in 1940 about the segregation of black people, "[w]hat was true in 1910 was still true in 1940 and will be true in 1970" (1984, 310).9 Du Bois thus would agree with Dewey that quick revolutions must fail because they inevitably leave deeply rooted habits in place (Dewey 1988b, 77). Second, Du Bois's concept of revolution rejects the use of violence endorsed by a Marxist notion of revolution. In part, this is because Du Bois did not think that black Americans had the political and industrial power needed for a violent revolution to succeed (1984, 192). It also is because even if black people could overthrow white people, the carnage and disruption of human culture generated by World War I had made the idea of violence disagreeable to Du Bois (1984, 286, 289). Violent force, therefore, was not the answer for Du Bois. Revolution must proceed in more subtle and sustained ways that dig deep into the white American psyche.

Du Bois's insights into the racist unconscious are not just appropriate for the mid^O* century; they remain extremely valuable today. While rational, conscious argumentation certainly can have a role to play in the fight against racism, anti- racist struggle ultimately will not be successful if the unconscious operations of white racism are ignored. White unconscious resistance to understanding racism as a problem must be tackled if inroads against specific problems of racism are to be made. Not only can white people not help challenge racism if they do not see it, but non-white people's attempts to combat racism cannot be maximally successful if white people's unconscious commitments thwart such work. Contemporary critical race theory, including pragmatists who wish to contribute to it, thus cannot proceed effectively by assuming either that logical arguments against racism will convince racists to change their beliefs or that racism can be ended by conscious fiat.10 Put another way, even though logical arguments about race might lead a person to consciously decide to endorse non-racist ideas, such a decision does not necessarily have much, if any, of an impact on his or her unconscious habits of thought. Here then is a place where consciously calculated judgments of praise and blame alone are insufficient. The unconscious, as Du Bois tells us, is "an area where we must apply other remedies and judgments...,




surveying] these vague and uncharted lands and measuring] their limits" (1984, 171). Du Bois provides one such remedy with his program of economic revolution but also cautions that additional solutions and more extensive charting are needed.

The Forgotten Gifts of Black Folk Where then can we turn for additional help measuring and charting the

white racist unconscious? In my view, Du Bois's 1924 The Gift of Black Folk can be read as providing precisely such assistance. The book is positioned in the midst of the transformation in Du Bois's ideas about how to combat racism: it was written after he became disillusioned with white people and as his interest in communism and the Soviet Union was blossoming, and before he began to explicitly incorporate Freudian insights into his work. As such, it offers an interesting mixture of his old, liberal approach to racism and early signs of his new Freudian-Marxist views. While neither Freud's name nor the concept of the unconscious is explicitly invoked, in The Gift of Black Folk Du Bois indirectly addresses the role of the unconscious in racism and is implicitly concerned with the way that economic factors intertwine with the white psyche. As we will see, in this book Du Bois not only offers conscious arguments for the recognition of black gifts to America but also subtly targets the unconscious sense of whiteness as ownership.11

Du Bois thought that African Americans had made and would continue to make distinct contributions to American culture. His claims to this effect trace back to Darkwater (1999, chapter 9), The Souls of Black Folk (1994, chapter 14), and even "Conservation of Races" (1970a), but it is not until The Gift of Black Folk (1970b) that Du Bois devotes an entire book to the topic. Published in 1924, one year after Alain Locke's edited collection The New Negro (1925), The Gift of Black Folk was part of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement in which black intellectuals attempted to demonstrate the distinctive value of black culture. In the nine chapters of this work, Du Bois seeks to show that black folk have given important gifts to the United States, including black exploration, black labor, black soldiers, the impetus to democracy, the emphasis on freedom, the emancipation of women, the American folk song, black art and literature, and the spiritual enrichment of religion.

Du Bois' analysis of several of these gifts is quite striking. His appreciation in 1924 of the important role that black women played in feminist struggle, for example, is something that white feminists in the United States took another sixty years to attain and continue to wrestle with today.12 Furthermore, Du Bois gives meaning to the concept of democracy that is noticeably different from that of white pragmatists such as Dewey. In Du Bois' words, tt[o]ne cannot think... of democracy in America or in the modern world without reference to the American Negro" (1970b, 67). This is because u[i]t was the Negro himself who forced the consideration of this incongruity [of democracy and slavery], who




made emancipation inevitable and made the modern world at least consider if not wholly accept the idea of a democracy including men of all races and colors" (1970b, 67). If Dewey is right that democracy is a way of life that emphasizes inclusive interaction with others and not merely a matter of voting rights and political procedures, then we must also add, with Du Bois, that such a way of life is one in which race has played and continues to play a crucial role.13

In my view, the gifts given by black folk help explain why Du Bois would disagree with the contemporary strategy of colorblindness for fighting racism. He suggests that to abandon the concept of race in an attempt to eliminate racism, as philosophers such as Naomi Zack (1993) and Kwame Anthony Appiah (1989) have argued we should do, would be to undercut the ability of black Americans to make distinctive gifts to American culture that are recognized as the product of specifically black insight, experience, and creativity. Since the erasure of positive conceptions of blackness occurs in American culture even without colorblindness, the last thing Du Bois would think is needed in struggles against racism is a strategy that reinforces this erasure. White Americans generally have failed to acknowledge the ample gifts that black Americans have made to American culture. Seeing black Americans as incapable of contributing anything positive to American society, white Americans could easily think that the elimination of black identity through colorblindness is insignificant - or significant only negatively, as a narrow, impoverishing constraint that has been overcome. Du Bois's analysis thus suggests that in the current racial context of the United States, colorblindness has little if any potential for changing white America's negative conceptions of black people.

In connection with this suggestion, Du Bois implies that once white Americans realize what contributions black Americans have made, they will recognize what a loss it would be to abandon racial identity. Du Bois's line of thought here does not necessarily hold that racial categories should be retained for all times. As Du Bois vows in his "Negro Academy Creed," "[w]e believe it is the duty of Americans of Negro descent, as a body, to maintain their race identity until this mission of the Negro is accomplished, and the ideal of human brotherhood has become a practical possibility" (1970a, 75-6). The mission in question is for black Americans to make the distinct contribution "to civilization and humanity, which no other race can make" (1970a, 75-6). Once black American gifts are recognized and valued as the product of black experience and culture, "human brotherhood" between the people of different races can become a genuine possibility. Du Bois leaves open the possibility that there could be a future in which distinct race identities no longer need to be maintained, but until that point, they must be insisted upon. Not to do so would amount to the cultural genocide of black Americans.

I want now to press further the issue of how or why exactly the gifts of black Americans have gone unrecognized as distinctively black gifts. On one level, Du Bois's strategy in The Gift of Black Folk is naively liberal: it attempts to bring




to the attention of white people something that they were ignorant of or never took the time to think about. As Du Bois says in the Prescript to the volume,

[n]ow that [America's] foundations are laid, deep but bare, there are those as always who would forget the humble builders.. .and picture America as the last reasoned blossom of mighty ancestors; of those great and glorious world builders and rulers who know and see and do all things forever and ever, amen! How singular and blind!... We who know may not forget but must forever spread the splendid sordid truth that out of the most lowly and persecuted of men, Man made America. (1970b, 1)

Here Du Bois explains that white Americans are blind to the truth of the crucial role that black people played in the formation of America. Or perhaps he might say that during the building of the foundation of America, white people saw the contributions that black people made, but now that that period is over, it is easy for them to overlook the gifts black people gave because those gifts are not immediately present to white consciousness. What is needed on this approach is to remind white Americans of what they once knew but have forgotten: that the America in which white people take pride could not exist without the enormous contributions of black folk. Presumably, once no longer blind to this truth, white people will take a step closer to universal "human brotherhood" by valuing the distinctive abilities and products of black culture and experience.

Considered apart from other strategies, this approach problematically assumes that racism operates primarily or even solely on the level of conscious belief and that a correction of false beliefs will result in non-racist actions. Even in 1924, however, Du Bois's strategy for changing white people's treatment of black people was more complex than this liberal position. At the same time that Du Bois pointed out that white people had forgotten the gifts made by black people, he understood that their forgetting was deliberate and malicious, rather than accidental and innocent. One indication of the complexity of Du Bois's analysis of white forgetting is his frequent criticism of white people's treatment of black people as property. If black folk are pieces of real estate owned by white people, then contributions made by black folk to America are the contributions of white people instead. By treating black folk as property to be bought and sold, white people are able to graft the contributions of black people onto themselves, transforming by means of a racist alchemy black contributions into that of white people instead.

Du Bois thus alerts us to capitalism's role in the white appropriation (both conscious and unconscious) of black gifts, and his warning is perhaps even more needed today than in 1924. It might seem that a type of equality between black




and white people recently has been achieved through capitalism's increasing inclusion of black people as potential consumers. But to argue, as Joel Kovel does (1970b, 218), that capitalism has produced "the greatest contemporary advances in racial justice" grossly oversimplifies the damaging complexity of the capitalism's relationship to black people. More helpful is John Shuford's use of Du Bois to analyze the intertwining of capitalism and race:

White racist capitalism involved racialized theft: the severance of racially-developed gifts from their givers, and racialized reductio[n] of gifts and givers as objects for commodity exchange. Whites participated in the treatment of African Americans and their gifts either as valuable extensions of themselves or expressions of their own culture, or as property over which whites held (explicit and implicit) arbitrary sway. (2001, 318)

It is important to add, however, that from the perspective of black folk as property, the grafting of black contributions onto white people as an extension of themselves is not theft. There is no gift stolen by white people if there is no agent to do the giving and therefore no gift. Likewise, there is no theft from black folk if white people themselves make the contribution in question through the efforts of an "extension" of themselves. Understood as people, not property, however, black folk are robbed by the grafting of their contributions to white people. From this perspective, the language of "gift," rather than the more neutral "contribution," can and should be used. Black folk are not a piece of real estate possessed by white owners but rather people with agency who can and do offer distinct gifts to American culture. Only by denying the status of black folk as property can black people's contributions be recognized as the gifts they are.

Severing the gift from its giver goes hand-in-hand with the reduction of both the gift and giver to pieces of real estate. Commodified in this way, both black folk and black contributions are made available for white exchange, profit, and - it should be added - pleasure. Black people may be more included today than in the past as potential consumers, but "blackness" simultaneously is increasingly being packaged for white middle-class consumers who long for the novel and exotic. Nowhere is this pattern more prevalent than in the recent phenomenon of urban gentrification. As Stephen Haymes (1995, 23) explains,

[i]n the context of gentrification or redevelopment, mainstream white consumer culture's exoticization of the city has meant the development of 'white pleasure spaces,' places where mainstream whites, in what were once poor black neighborhoods, indulge in the exotic consumerism of black music, dance, sports, and fashion,




with the security of police and electronic surveillance to guard against the dangerous blacks.

Black cultural gifts thus are sanitized through their commodification, retaining just enough "dangerousness" to be of interest to consumers but detached from the political and social contexts that give them a meaning and an effect beyond that of consumption.

Du Bois helps reveal that white racist capitalism depends upon the treatment of black people and gifts as property not only to provide products for consumption and profit, but also to protect the white psyche. If black folk are real estate and thus incapable of offering gifts and available for exchange on the market, then white people's racist treatment of black folk need not trouble their conscience. If black folk are people, however, then treating them as property and stealing their gifts likely would produce extreme guilt on the part of those who steal from them. The interdependent psychological and economic aspects of white privilege and anti-black racism are clear, as Kovel explains: "[w]ithout the sanctity of property, the whole defensive structure would break down: [black] things would become people again, and [black] people would make [white people] guilty, or even fight back" (1970, 187). White people can see themselves as good only if black people remain property. The end of discrimination and prejudice against black people thus entails a significant transformation of the white psyche, not just the white pocketbook, which likely is one reason why it is fought so hard by many white people.

From a Du Boisian perspective, colorblindness not only is a new strategy in this fight that enables the on-going theft of black gifts in the name of anti-racism. It also is a defensive device that allows white people to avoid examination of their own "souls," or their unconscious, as raced and racist. In "The Souls of White Folk," Du Bois exposes the white psyche as possessive and aggressive. Instead of representing all that is good, clean, and light, "whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and forever, Amen!" (1999, 18). As noted earlier, Du Bois explains that the vicious battles of World War I between white nations were not an exception to the rule of white benevolence and goodness. Rather, the destruction of that war is the rule itself: it "is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture - back of all culture, - stripped and visible today" (39, emphasis in original). From the perspective of those with a double consciousness, white people thus can be seen not only as they see themselves but as the "darker races" see them: as "sheer malevolence" (Du Bois 1984, 170).

With these claims about white people, Du Bois implicitly provides an ontology of race, and of whiteness in particular, that reworks the traditional meaning of ontology as static.14 Du Bois effectively insists that we cannot dismiss race as accidental or irrelevant to what it currently is to be a human being. The alternative to this view, however, does not have to be an appeal to fixed racial essences. Acknowledging that wanting "to minimize and deny the realities of




racial difference" is understandable, Du Bois forces us to face "the fact of a white world which is today dominating human culture and working for the continued subordination of the colored races" (1984, 138). For Du Bois, racial categories are historically, socially, economically, and psychologically constructed - and are nonetheless real for being so. Du Bois's reconfiguration of ontology as historical and malleable allows him to acknowledge the tremendous constitutive impact of race and racism on human life without treating them as eternal and immutable. The being of white people qua white, for example, is malicious, possessive, and destructive. These characteristics are fundamental to what it is today to be white although this fact of the white world need not always be the case in the future.15

The ontology of whiteness provided by Du Bois is a difficult gift for many white people to accept. While white people sometimes use conscious strategies to reject it, many of their strategies are unconscious. As Du Bois explains, tt[t]he present attitude and action of the white world is not based solely on rational, deliberate intent. It is a matter of conditioned reflexes; of long followed habits, customs and folkways; of subconscious trains of reasoning and unconscious nervous reflexes" (1984, 171-72). Approaching Du Bois in light of his later appeal to Freud and recalling Freud's characterization of repression as a kind of forgetting, we can read Du Bois's emphasis upon the unconscious as including repressive forgetting. Unlike non-repressive forgetting, repressive forgetting conceals something too painful to be consciously acknowledged. In the case of white forgetting of black gifts, what is repressed is that black contributions are indeed gifts and thus that black folks are indeed givers, that is, people and not things. What also is repressed is the guilt white people might feel as they dimly understand, perhaps consciously as well as unconsciously, that black people are not extensions of themselves. Recognizing the unconscious levels of white privilege and racism, Du Bois rightly urges that tt[t]o attack and better all this calls for more than appeal and argument" (1984, 172). Among other things such as economic struggle, it calls for psychological warfare at the level of the unconscious: "not sudden assault but long siege [i]s indicated; careful planning and subtle campaign with the education of growing generations" (1984, 6).16

Du Bois's The Gift of Black Folk thus operates on both the level of conscious argument and that of unconscious attack. In that it overtly instructs its readers about the role that black people have played in American history, it is an explicit appeal to white people to recognize the value of blackness. More important, however, is that by calling black contributions "gifts," The Gift of Black Folk also is a covert reclamation of black property and personhood and an implicit confrontation with white repression and guilt. It thereby subtly engages in anti- racist transformation of the white "soul." By operating on this second level in particular, Du Bois helps further chart the current limits and possible transformations of white racist unconscious habits.



Renumbering the Gift 219

Conclusion: Du Bois and Reparations for Slavery I have already indicated how Du Bois's work on the white unconscious can

contribute to a critical understanding of the commodification and exoticization of blackness involved in urban gentrification. I would like to close by suggesting another timely issue on which Du Bois's psycho-economic analysis can shed light: that of the question of whether the United States government should pay reparations for slavery. Du Bois's strategy of targeting not just consciousness, but also unconscious habits in the fight against racism both illuminates and strengthens the approach taken by proponents of reparations. On one level, reparations proponents, such as Randall Robinson (2000), are attempting the significant, but still straightforward task of getting the United States to pay for its past practice of enslaving black people. This task tends to operate on a conscious level of argumentation and includes the possibility of legal action against the U.S. government (Watson 2001). It involves providing information about the psychological, bodily, and economic injury that slavery inflicted and that its legacy continues to inflict upon African-Americans, and claiming on the basis of that data that reparations are owed.

On another level, however, proponents of reparation simultaneously have a subtler, more subversive goal in mind (which is not to dismiss the powerful effects that the first task would have if accomplished). That goal is to use economic demands to modify the psyches of black folk by transforming them into beings who see themselves as justified in claiming their due. This would be, in Charles Mills's terms (1998), for black people to see themselves as full persons rather than as the subpersons they often have been told and believed that they are. As Robinson claims, "how blacks respond to the challenge surrounding the simple demand for restitution will say a lot more about us and do a lot more for us than the demand itself would suggest" (2000, 208, emphasis in original). What it will do is reclaim black personhood for African-Americans, and it can do that whether or not reparations are ever actually made.

In his discussion of reparations, Robinson explicitly speaks of debts owed to black people, rather than gifts given by them. This difference might make it appear as if Du Bois would disagree with Robinson's claims that something is owed to black people. A gift, after all, usually is understood as given with no expectation of something in return, and the lack of this expectation is what makes it a gift and not, say, a loan. The difference between speaking of gifts versus debts does not, however, eliminate Du Bois's and Robinson's shared concerns. like the term "gift," the word "debt" implies that the issue of reparations is neither one of charity nor one of positioning African-Americans as supplicants (Robinson 2000, 231, 246). In that Du Bois worked both for the recognition of the contributions of black people to the United States and for the reclamation of black personhood through such an event, I believe he would substantially agree with the goals pursued by contemporary proponents of reparations for slavery.

This is so, moreover, even though reparations would operate within a




capitalist context. Du Bois was sympathetic to communism from the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution and joined the Communist Party in 1961, and communism both promotes the abolition of private property and would eliminate the exchange of commodities that gave birth to the concept of money. Thus it might seem that Du Bois's appreciation of Marxist communism would entail his rejection of the idea of black people's accepting property and/or money as compensation for slavery. Du Bois makes clear, however, that since black people are not divided into opposed classes of capitalists and laborers, Marx's analysis of capitalism will have to be modified when applied to the United States, and especially to the situation of African-Americans (Du Bois 1971a, 266; 1971b, 289; 1971c, 295; see also Wilson 2002, 36). The capitalist exploitation of black people "comes not from a black capitalist class [though Du Bois recognizes that such a class exists] but from the white capitalists and equally from the white proletariat" (Du Bois 1971c, 295). For Du Bois, therefore, the response to capitalism can never be as simple as calling for black people to fight it en bloc.

More specifically, Du Bois raises the example of black people living in tenement houses in Harlem and paying exorbitant rents to the white capitalists who knew that their black tenants had no choice but to pay since white laborers would not allow them to move into their neighborhoods (Du Bois 1971a, 266). In this case, Du Bois claims that there is only one thing for black people to do: "buy Harlem" (1971a, 266). Du Bois acknowledges that "the buying of real estate calls for capital and credit, and the institutions that deal in capital and credit are capitalistic institutions" (1971a, 266). But he adds that a distinction must be made between "capital as represented by white big real estate interests" and "the accumulating capital in [the black person's] own group" (1971a, 266). The former must be fought. By contrast, the latter is crucial to the possibility of rectifying the exploitative situation of black people in Harlem and elsewhere, and thus to fight it is for the black person to "sla[p] himself in his own face" (1971a, 267). With this example, Du Bois makes clear that black people should not oppose capital as such. This is not for him to abandon his criticism of capitalism's exploitation of black people and culture, but to argue that in some cases, black people need to wield the tools of capitalism in order to undermine (white) capitalism itself (1971a, 267). I believe Du Bois would regard the award of reparations for slavery as precisely one of those cases. In a strikingly appropriate challenge to white capitalism's appropriation of the gifts of black folk, the payment of reparations would grant ownership of property and/or money to those who have been regarded as incapable of it because they themselves were seen as marketable pieces of property.

In addition to revealing the positive economic and psychological impact of reparations on black people, Du Bois's work also reveals another important end posited by the demand for reparations that is not always emphasized by its contemporary proponents. The reclamation of black personhood made possible by the demand for reparations not only has the power to affect the black psyche,



Remembering the Gift 22 1

but the ability to transform the white psyche as well. If black people conceive of themselves as full persons who are owed monetary reparations, then it will be more difficult for white people to ignore their repressed guilt about and complicity in the after-effects of slavery. This does not mean that once black people demand reparations, white people will instantly or magically become anti- racist. It means instead that a significant source of the power of the black demand for slavery reparations is that it is as much a confrontation with the white unconscious as it is an argument for economic justice.

In my view, the fact that it confronts white unconscious habits is one of the reasons why the demand for reparations often is so vehemently opposed by white people. This confrontation perhaps explains why some conservatives have even claimed that the debt that exists between black Americans and the United States is from the former to the latter, instead of the other way around.17 It is the combination of psychological and economic factors, rather than the issue of money and property alone, that produces strong negative reaction to the topic of reparations on the part of many white people. As Du Bois saw over 70 years ago, this combination is what makes white privilege so difficult to uproot. It also is what Du Bois's later work so powerfully analyzes, which is why his distinctive form of pragmatism is as valuable a gift today as ever.18

Pennsylvania State University [email protected]

REFERENCES Appiah, Kwame Anthony

1989 "The Conservation of 'Race'", in Black American Literature Forum, 23(1), pp. 37-60.

Associated Press 2001 "Ad in Brown University newspaper sparks protests", Centre Daily

Times, State College, PA: March 18, p. 9A. Bell, Bernard W., Emily & Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (eds.)

1996 W.E.B. Du Bois: On Race and Culture, New York: Routledge. Bloom, Harold (ed.)

2001 W.E.B. Du Bois, Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House. Boxili, Bernard R.

1978 "Du Bois and Fanon on Culture", Philosophical Forum 9(1 ), pp. 326- 38.

Burks, Ben 1997 "Unity and Diversity through Education: A Comparison of the

Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois and John Dewey", Journal of Thought 32 (1), pp. 99-110.

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^ampocii, james 1992 "Du Bois and James", Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society 28(3), pp.

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De Marco, Joseph P. 1972 "The Concept of Race in the Social Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois",

Philosophical Forum 3(1), pp. 227-42. Dewey, John

1988a "Racial Prejudice and Friction", in Vol. 13 of The Middle Works, 1899- 1924, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Originally published in 1922.

1988b Human Nature and Conduct. Volume 14 of John Dewey: The Middle Works: 1899-1924, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Originally published in 1922.

DuBois,W.E.B. 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, New York: The World Publishing

Company. 1968 Vie Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soltoquy on Viewing My Life

from the Last Decade of Its First Century, International Publishers. 1970a "The Conservation of Races", in W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and

Addresses, 1980-1919, Philip S. Foner (ed.), New York: Pathfinder Press. Originally published in 1897.

1970b The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America, New York: Washington Square Press. Originally published in 1924.

1971a "The Class Struggle", in Volume II of The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, Julius Lester (ed.), New York: Random House. Originally published in The Crisis, 1921, 22(4), pp. 151-52.

1971b "Karl Marx and the Negro", in Volume II of The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, Julius Lester (ed.), New York: Random House. Originally published in The Crisis, 1933, 60(3), pp. 55-56.

1971c "Marxism and the Negro Problem", in Volume II of The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, Julius Lester (ed.), New York: Random House. Originally published in The Crisis, 1933, 40(5), pp. 103ff.

1984 Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, New York: Schocken Books. Originally published in 1948.

1994 The Souls of Black Folk, New York: Dover Publications. Originally published in 1903.

1999 Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company. Originally published in 1920.

Gooding-Williams, Robert (ed.) 1994 W.E.B. Du Bois: Of Cultural and Racial Identity, Special Issue of The

Massachusetts Review 35(2). Haymes, Stephen Nathan

1995 Race, Culture, and the City: A Pedagogy for Black Urban Struggle, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Hill, Jason D. 2000 Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means To Be a Human Being in the

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Home, Gerald 1986 Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the

Cold War, 1944-1963, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Home, Gerald, and Mary Young (eds.)

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life' of the Black Intellectual", Critical Inquiry 23, pp. 323-49. Robinson, Randall

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and feminism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 2001b "The Racialization of Space: Toward a Phenomenological Account of

Raced and Anti-Racist Spatiality", in The Problems of Resistance, Steve Martinot (ed.), Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Prometheus/Humanity Books.

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2003b "(Reconstruction Zone: Beware of Falling Statues", In Dewey's Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction, William Gavin (ed.), Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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York: Oxford University Press. Watson, Jamal E.

2001 "Lawyers Plan Suit for Slavery Reparations", Boston Globe, Boston, MA: April 13.

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1996 "Kinds of Souls and Souls of Kinds: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Soul of Race", International Studies in Philosophy 28(1), pp. 135-149.

Zack, Naomi 1 993 Race and Mixed Race, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

NOTES 1. Two key participants in this debate are Anthony Kwame Appiah

(1989) and Lucius Outlaw (1996). For other recent assessments of Du Bois's work, see Bell, et al (1996), Bloom (2001), Burks (1997), Campbell (1992), Gooding-Williams (1994), Home (1986), Home and Young (2001), Posnock (1997), Wilson (2002), and Wirth (1996).

2. The remainder of this paragraph is adapted from Sullivan (forthcoming).

3. Du Bois's conflict with the NAACP about the best way to fight racism explains his resignation from the Crisis and the Board of the NAACP in 1934.

4. Boxili (1978, 326, 335) has claimed that Du Bois was "imbued with the scientific spirit" such that he underplayed "the irrational element in race prejudice," but Boxili misses the shift in Du Bois's work and thus misunderstands Du Bois's early approach to racial prejudice as the only one of his career.

5. The tension between these optimistic statements and the more pessimistic ones about white people above - all from Darkwater (1999) - is a result of Du Bois's gradual shift from a naive liberal to a Freudian position on racism, which in 1920 had begun but was not yet fully made.

6. For more on the connections between Du Bois and James, see Campbell (1992) and Posnock (1997).

7. De Marco (1972) also recognizes the dual influence of Marx and Freud on Du Bois's thinking about racial prejudice.

8. Unlike Dewey's attack on "intellectualist psychology" in Human Nature and Conduct (1988b), his attack in "Racial Prejudice and Friction" (1988a) addresses race and racism. I have criticized Dewey's explicit writings on race as reductive and naive in Sullivan (20003b) and find Du Bois's notion of unconscious habits of race to be more helpful for understanding racism and white privilege.

9. Du Bois does acknowledge a positive difference between 1910, on the one hand, and 1940 and 1970, on the other: in 1940, black people, rather than white people, increasingly directed black segregation. Such segregation is an example of the independence from white people and institutions that Du Bois urged for black people and that, perhaps not surprisingly, generated a great deal of controversy in Du Bois's day. For more on pragmatism and segregation in connection with the work of Jane Addams, see Sullivan (2003a).

10. Hill (2000) is an example of misunderstanding Dewey's pragmatism as quasi-Sartrean for the purposes of arguing that race and racism can be eliminated by means of conscious will.

11. For another example of Freud's implicit impact on Du Bois's work around the same time, see chapter two of Tate (1998) for a psychoanalytic reading of Du Bois's 1928 novel Dark Princess: A Romance.

12. Du Bois also includes a chapter on the difficulties faced by black




women in his earlier Darkwater (1999). 13. Du Bois makes similar points about democracy in chapter six of his

earlier Darkwater (1999). 14. I have reworked in more detail, although not in connection with Du

Bois's philosophy, an implicitly pragmatist account of the meaning of racial ontology in Sullivan (2001b).

15. While my main interest in Du Bois does not concern the question of whether or not he was a biological essentialist (on which point, see the disagreement between Appiah 1989 and Oudaw 1996), I do not consider his inclusion of biological criteria for the establishment of racial groups to mean he necessarily thought that biology determines fixed, racial essences. I tend to agree with Oudaw (1996) that biological criteria can function as historically-produced, non-essentialist components of the transaction^ ontology of race. (For a critical assessment of Oudaw on this point, see chapter 7 of Sullivan 2001a.)

16. In addition to education, Du Bois also mentions the role of propaganda, only he now appears to use the term to indicate processes that target the unconscious, rather than those that consciously spread accurate information. I omit his reference to propaganda here to avoid confusion over which strategy he is referring to. From the context of the paragraph from which the quote is taken, Du Bois clearly is discussing strategies that address the unconscious.

17. David Horowitz's criticisms of reparations for slavery made in an ad placed in several U.S. college newspapers caused an uproar on many campuses in the spring of 2001. For more on the issue, including the full text of Horowitz's ad, sec Associated Press (2001) and hap://ww.newsnm.com/aix^ shtml.

18. Thanks to John Shuford, whose presentation on Du Bois at the 2000 annual meeting of The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophers prompted me to examine the role of gifts in Du Bois's philosophy. A much shorter version of this paper was read at that conference in response to his work. Thanks also to Phillip McReynolds for helpful discussions of the essay and to an anonymous reviewer for Transactions for very thoughtful and generous comments on it.



Remembering the Gift: W.E.B. Du Bois on the Unconscious and Economic Operations of Racism

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