Source of book: I own this.
It has been quite a few years since I read Du Bois’ most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, which was definitely influential on my thinking.
This book, like the other, is a Black History Month selection. You can find the entire list here, and my thoughts on Black History Month here.
Dusk of Dawn is an interesting book in that it combines autobiography - it tells the story of Du Bois’ life up until the period immediately before World War Two - with philosophy - his evolving ideas about race and racism in America.
For a book 85 years old, it feels shockingly relevant. We are still dealing with the same issues, the same arguments, the same everything. And I will be clear here: MAGA is the “same old serpent,” as Lincoln put it. It is nothing less than White Supremacy, the new KKK, and Nazism come to life again.
It literally feels like everything in Dusk of Dawn was written today. I am not kidding about that. This is both affirming and discouraging. It is good to read someone who saw it all as clearly as Du Bois did. It is a reminder that the fight is nothing new. Indeed, the economic issues which lead to the Great Depression have re-emerged, and demand a more thorough solution this time around. (Including the full confiscation of the plunder perpetrated by the predator-billionaire class of the working classes, and the prosecution of the plunderers.)
In so many ways, W. E. B. du Bois is the black writer I identify with most in a personal way. We have a lot in common.
Both of us grew up in working-to-lower-middle-class families who valued our education. Both of us surpassed most of our peers academically through hard work, family support, and innate intelligence. Both of us believe in the value of education and knowledge in changing the world. Both of us were initially naive, thinking that racism was mostly a lack of education or a few bad actors, rather than an entire social system of exploitation - aka “CRT,” even if it wasn’t called that back then.
Even in terms of personality, I think there are similarities. We are both introverts, who think better when writing than when giving speeches, who prefer educating to leading. I also find his command of the semicolon to warm my heart.
While I greatly admire so many of the various civil rights advocates, and love reading them, I think W. E. B. du Bois is the one that I would most want to invite to dinner. I feel we would naturally get along and have a lot in common. Oh, and we would both enjoy discussing the ideas of William James, who is mentioned often in this book.
I wrote down a whole bunch of quotes, but it would be impossible to capture the true essence of the book, particularly Du Bois’ theories of economics and race that evolve slowly throughout his story of his life. It’s worth reading, particularly for understanding our times and the national sin of white supremacy which is currently destroying our country.
The introduction really lays out the issue, then and now.
My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a Problem; but that problem was, as I continue to think, the central problem of the greatest of the world’s democracies and so the Problem of the future world. The problem of the future world is the charting, by means of intelligent reason, of a path not simply through the resistances of physical force, but through the vaster and far more intricate jungle of ideas condition on unconscious and subconscious reflexes of living things; on blind unreason and often irresistible urges of sensitive matter; of which the concept of race is today one of the most unyielding and threatening.
Unlike today’s right wing, which has embraced an Ayn Rand idea of radical individuality, and thus missing the interconnections which underlie society and the economy and make wealth possible, Du Bois understood the connections. I found this line perceptive.
In the folds of this European civilization I was born and shall die, imprisoned, conditioned, depressed, exalted and inspired. Integrally a part of it and yet, much more significant, one of its rejected parts; one who expressed in life and action and made vocal to many, a single whirlpool of social entanglement and inner psychological paradox, which always seem to me more significant for the meaning of the world today than other similar and related problems.
He goes on to note that even through the rise of the scientific method, and the discovery that race is a social fiction, racism continued to be a root facet of society.
But the mind clung desperately to the idea that basic racial differences between human beings had suffered no change; and it clung to this idea not simply from inertia and unconscious action but from the fact that because of the modern African slave trade a tremendous economic structure and eventually an industrial revolution had been based upon racial differences between men; and this racial difference had now been rationalized into a difference mainly of skin color.
After a basic introduction to these ideas, he continues with his boyhood as a free black in New England. I was surprised to find that he and his family were about the same kind of lower-middle-class conservatives me and mine were. I swear I was literally taught this next line as gospel truth. And, I suppose it was at least somewhat true for my dad - a white male Boomer, aka, the most privileged form of human in American history.
My general attitude toward property and income was that all who were willing to work could easily earn a living; that those who had property had earned it and deserved it and could use it as they wished; that poverty was the shadow of crime and connoted lack of thrift and shiftlessness. These were the current patterns of thought of the town in my boyhood.
That this has ceased to be true for my children was, unfortunately, apparent years ago. And it was never true for black children. Not really. Which is Du Bois’ point, and his success and the success of the Talented Tenth didn’t change the reality for the greater masses.
Next up is another line that sure seems relevant. With this book being published during the last surge of fascism, some things seem very familiar.
Today both youth and age look upon a world whose foundations seem to be tottering. They are not sure what the morrow will bring; perhaps the complete overthrow of European civilization, of that great enveloping mass of culture into which they were born. Everything in their environment is a meet subject for criticism. They can dispassionately evaluate the past and speculate upon the future. It is a day of fundamental change.
Du Bois contrasts this with his own younger years, when things seemed more fixed, and progress more sure. Another thing that I feel we have in common. Oh, and here is another one. Du Bois had a complicated relationship with religion. He was, as most Americans of the time were, raised Protestant Christian. He later deconverted, mostly following the Baha’i Faith with some Hindu influences. However, he continued to write and use prayers that would be at home in most Protestant churches. Although presumably not as much these days, as white Evangelicalism has been co-opted by a supremacist political movement, and has no further use for Christ.
Anyway, Du Bois recounts how he had his first real challenge to his faith - something that happened to me as well.
But the book on “Christian Evidences” which we were compelled to read, affronted my logic. It was to my mind, then and since, a cheap piece of special pleading.
While the most damaging challenge to my faith is and remains the embrace of Trump by Evangelicalism and bigotry and hate by my parents, the second most challenging discovery was that apologetics is just utter and pure shite. “Special Pleading” is a generous way of putting it. Nothing made me question specific claims more than seeing how flimsy the defense was. If that is all ya got? In contrast, other college studies resonated more with him in the same way they did for me.
Our course in general philosophy under the serious and entirely loveable president was different. It opened vistas. It made me determine to go further in this probing for truth. Eventually it landed me squarely in the arms of William James of Harvard, for which God be praised.
I too wish to seek truth. To have my vistas opened, not narrowed. And William James is perhaps the closest writer to my own philosophy.
Of course, Du Bois got to take classes from James personally, which makes me jealous. The list he gives of luminaries at Harvard of that era too, wow. Santayana, Palmer, Shaler, and so many more. Du Bois got an education worthy of envy, and he really made the most of it.
He also continued to learn throughout life. His years as a teacher are filled with his continuing growth in thought. Here is another line that I think matches my own journey.
I was interested in evolution, geology, and the new psychology. I began to conceive of the world as a continuing growth rather than a finished product.
Along with this knowledge, he came to understand the new imperialism of America, starting with our overthrow of the Hawaiian government.
At this time, he also started to disagree with the established black leaders, primarily Booker T. Washington. This feud is well known, although it is to my mind a bit overblown. They both respected each other - this was no rapper feud but a disagreement about means, not ends.
Succinctly put, Washington thought that black folk would advance through working in the trades and accumulating property. Du Bois thought that black folk needed education first, or they would always be led by - and exploited by - whites.
Later in the book, he talks about his parting of ways with the NAACP, for similar reasons. Du Bois increasingly saw racism in terms of economic exploitation, and advocated for the elimination of the economic system that oppressed black and white. In this, he foresaw both the effects of the Depression, and our current oligarchy. More on that later. But even in this early disagreement, he correctly noted that the white oligarchy would always prevent the working class, and particularly the black working class, from earning enough to accumulate wealth.
Oh, and Du Bois also took issue with Washington’s tendency to victim-blame.
I was increasingly uncomfortable under the statements of Mr. Washington’s position: his depreciation of the value of the vote; his evident dislike of Negro colleges; and his general attitude which seemed to place the onus of blame for the status of Negroes upon the Negroes themselves rather than upon the whites.
For an excellent rebuttal of this position, I recommend another of my Black History Month selections, The Omni-Americans by Alfred Murray.
During his academic years, Du Bois was a lead part of a survey of rural blacks in a particular part of the South. It gathered all kinds of information about labor, landlord-tenant relationships, family life, demographics, and more. The government accepted it and paid the costs, but then buried it, claiming it “touched on political matters.”
In other words, it told the truth.
Which, then as now, white supremacists do not want to be spoken.
On a related note, how about this quote from a speech Du Bois gave? It sure seems relevant now as then. And also, it is what I say to the fake-ass “christians” of our time.
"Never before in the modern age has a great and civilized folk threatened to adopt so cowardly a creed in the treatment of its fellow-citizens, born and bred on its soil. Stripped of verbiage and subterfuge and in its naked nastiness, the new American creed says: fear to let black men even try to rise lest they become the equals of the white. And this is the land that professes to follow Jesus Christ. The blasphemy of such a course is only matched by its cowardice."
Here is another passage that I saw myself in, about his transition from teaching to advocacy:
My career as a scientist was to be swallowed up in my role as a master of propaganda. This was not wholly to my liking. I was no natural leader of men. I could not slap people on the back and make friends of strangers. I could not easily break down an inherited reserve; or at all times curb a biting, critical tongue. Nevertheless, having put my hand to the plow, I had to go on.
Later, he got the chance to study in Berlin. This was a mixed experience. He had some great teachers. But he also got Heinrich von Treitschke, who was not only a bully but an inveterate racist.
Du Bois comments at length about the problems posed by “scientific racism,” which was popular at the time, but, as he notes, kept moving the goalposts.
The first thing which brought me to my senses in all this racial discussion was the continuous change in the proofs and arguments advanced. I could accept evolution and the survival of the fittest, provided the interval between advanced and backward races was not made too impossible. I balked at the usual “thousand years.” But no sooner had I settled into scientific security here, than the basis of the race distinction was changed without explanation, without apology. I was skeptical about brain weight; surely much depended on what brains were weighed. I was not sure about physical measurements and social inquiries.
As he comes to realize, the racism drove the interpretation of dubious “distinctions,” not the other way around. It was, at its core, a caste system, created for exploitation. This next paragraph is fascinating.
It is hard under such circumstances to be philosophical and calm, and to think through a method of approach and accommodation between castes. The entombed find themselves not simply trying to make the outer world understand their essential and common humanity but even more, as they become inured to their experience, they have to keep reminding themselves that the great and oppressing world outside is also real and human and in its essence honest. All my life I have had continually to haul my soul back and say, “All white folk are not scoundrels nor murderers. They are, even as I am, painfully human.”
The chapter on The White World has an incredible opening, which is worth quoting.
The majority of men resent and always have resented the idea of equality with most of their fellow men. This has had physical, economic, and cultural reasons: the physical fear of attack; the economic strive to avert starvation and secure protection and shelter; but more especially I presume the cultural and spiritual desire to be one’s self without interference from others; to enjoy that anarchy of the spirit which is inevitably the goal of all consciousness. It is only in highly civilized times and places that the conception arises of an individual freedom and development, and even that was conceived of as the right of a privileged minority, and was based on the degradation, the exclusion, the slavery of most others. The history of tribes and clans, of social classes and all nations, and of race antipathies in our own world, is an exemplification of this fight against equality and inability even to picture its possibility.
This is, unfortunately, all too true. If I were to pick one human trait that I think exemplifies our capacity for evil, it is our lust for supremacy. We have to be able to look down on other people, even if it harms us too. (In contrast, our capacity to love and cooperate with each other is our greatest capacity for good.)
Du Bois also talks about the problem of white guilt. For someone like me, whose ancestors weren’t even Americans during slavery, yet who has benefited from white privilege, this really makes sense. I wish more people were open to this knowledge.
It may be objected here that so general a statement is not fair; that there are many white folk who feel the unfairness and crime of color and race prejudice and have toiled and sacrificed to counteract it. This brings up the whole question of social guilt. When, for instance, one says that the action of England toward the darker races has been a course of hypocrisy, force and greed covering four hundred years it does not mean to include in that guilt many persons of the type of William Wilberforce and Granville Sharpe. On the other hand because British history has not involved the guilt of all Britons we cannot jump to the opposite and equally fallacious conclusion that there has been no guilt; that the development of the British Empire is a sort of cosmic process with no individual human being at fault.
He goes on:
In the history of England, France, America, Germany and Italy, we have villains who have selfishly and criminally desired and accomplished what made for the suffering and degradation of mankind. We have had others who desired the uplift and worked for the uplift of all men. And we have had a middle class of people who sometimes ignorantly and sometimes consciously shifted the balance now here, and now there; and when, in the end, this balance of public opinion, this effective social action, has made for the degradation of mankind or in so far as it has done this, that part of England which has allowed this or made it possible is blood-guilty of the result.
That sounds harsh, but he is right. A society that goes along with this is complicit. Full stop.
Another line in this chapter stood out to me, in part because I literally blogged about the idea back when our relationship with religion was starting to crumble, as we slowly figured out that it wasn’t about God at all, but about a supremacist political movement.
Why, man of mine, you would not have the courage to live one hour as a black man in America, or as a Negro in the whole wide world. Ah, yes, I know what you whisper to such accusation. You say dryly that if we had good sense, we would not live either; and that the fact that we do submit to life as it is and yet laugh and dance and dream, is but another proof that we are idiots.
Seriously. White evangelicals wouldn’t last one freaking day as black people. They would utterly lose their shit. Instead, they act like being called out on the most hateful things they say is somehow “persecution.” Yep. I had a relative try to claim it was worse that I called her out on her racism than that she was saying racist stuff. And my dad literally said he cut me out of his life because I called him a racist for saying Nazi-level shit.
There is also a great passage in which Du Bois takes on the reality that “race” is a social construct. He and a not-entirely-imaginary arguer discuss that yes, most black people in the United States have significant white ancestry, for, well, reasons rather unsavory. And likewise, plenty of white people have black ancestry.
So, if we are pretty much “brown and beige,” how do we know who is black?
I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man is a person who must ride “Jim Crow” in Georgia.
And here is yet another prescient passage:
The democracy which the white world seeks to defend does not exist. It has been splendidly conceived and discussed, but not realized. If it ever is to grow strong enough for self-defence and for embracing the world and developing human culture to its highest, it must include not simply the lower classes among whites now excluded from voice in the control of industry; but in addition to that it must include the colored peoples of Asia and Africa, now hopelessly imprisoned by poverty and ignorance. Unless these latter are included and in so far as they are not, democracy is a mockery and contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
This hints at his next point, which is at the root of our current political upheaval. Democracy cannot be mere political equality - the right to vote, as important as it is. It must include social and economic equality, or the vote is meaningless.
Many assume that an upper social class maintains its status mainly by reason of its superior culture. It may, however, maintain its status because of its wealth and political power and in that case its ranks can be successfully invaded only by the wealthy. In white America, it is in this direction that we have undoubtedly changed the older pattern of social hierarchy. Birth and culture still count, but the main avenue to social power and class domination is wealth: income and oligarchic economic power, the consequent political power and the prestige of those who own and control capital and distribute credit. This makes a less logical social hierarchy and one that can only be penetrated by the will and permission of the ruling oligarchy or the chances of gambling. Education, thrift, hard work and character undoubtedly are influential, but they are implemented with power only as they gain wealth; and as land, natural resources, credit and capital are increasingly monopolized, they gain wealth by permission of the dominating wealthy class.
This is, unfortunately, the case. Even with my mostly self-taught education, I can guarantee that I have more thrift and character, and have worked harder than people like Trump can imagine. But those born with money get to pilfer even more.
Du Bois also looks at black culture, and, unsurprisingly, he has some criticism. (Anyone who has read The Souls of Black Folk already knows that he, like all thoughtful members of any group, wishes to improve that group.) I didn’t take any particular notes here, in part because it is like sticking one’s nose in a place it doesn’t belong.
After that comes a chapter on World War One and propaganda. He again notes that his earlier naivete has been replaced with a more systemic and economic understanding of the problem.
I had come to the place where I was convinced that science, the careful social study of the Negro problems, was not sufficient to settle them; that they were not basically, as I had assumed, difficulties due to ignorance but rather difficulties due to the determination of certain people to suppress and mistreat the darker races.
He goes on to note that even suppression of evil men isn’t enough. There needs to be a complete reworking of systems and the subconscious stories we tell ourselves.
Another fascinating idea in this chapter is Du Bois understanding that the causes of World War One were not exactly what we were taught in school. Underrated was Germany’s desire to join the list of imperialist nations, with colonies to match.
(Actually, I read a book recently which does take a look at this: George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm by Miranda Carter. It’s a good read.)
As part of his advocacy efforts, Du Bois wrote a resolution that was adopted by a conference of black organizations during the war.
“We trace the real cause of this World War to the despising of the darker races by the dominant groups of men, and the consequent fierce rivalry among European nations in their effort to use darker and backward people for purposes of selfish gain regardless of the ultimate good of the oppressed. We see permanent peace only in the extension of the principle of government by the consent of the governed, not simply among the smaller nations of Europe, but among the natives of Asia and Africa, the Western Indies and the Negroes of the United States.”
And also, this description of a certain person:
William Taft, fat, genial and mediocre, had no grasp of world affairs nor international trends.
True that. He also describes how Taft pretty much threw black southerners under the bus in his federal appointments.
Another interesting passage in the book is Du Bois’ contrast of his experiences in England - where he made friends including H. G. Wells - and the way white people tended to avoid him in America.
I early assumed that most Americans did not wish my personal acquaintance or contact with me except in purely business relations, and that many of them would repay any approach on my part with deliberate insult, while most of them would be at least embarrassed. Probably I was often wrong in this assumption, but I was right often enough to prove to myself that my rule was wise and a great help to my own peace and quiet.
I get his introversion here, and he admits he could have been more outgoing. But it is true that constant rejection isn’t conducive to risk-taking. The fact that Brits, hardly known for extroversion as a culture, were more open to his friendship says a lot.
Want another bit in which this book sounds like the present? He literally mentions 1619. This is nearly a century before the 1619 Project became a thing. So, this is nothing new. This isn’t some 21st Century “woke” invention at all. Black people have been saying it for centuries.
The final chapter - nearly 50 pages long - is entitled “Revolution,” and it gets into a lot of the history of how and why Du Bois left the NAACP after years of service. He had some involvement with the Communist Party in the United States before becoming frustrated with the Russian leaders completely misunderstanding the role of race in American politics.
The stupidest example of this was the leaders’ approach to a case in which black men was falsely accused of assaulting white prostitutes on a train. The NAACP had hired Clarence Darrow (who knew a few things about trying cases…), and expected to get the case quietly dismissed.
The Russian ideologues, on the other hand, decided that it would be better to sacrifice the accused in the hopes of stirring up a revolution.
All this was based on abysmal ignorance of the pattern of race prejudice in the United States. About the last thing calculated to arouse the white workers of America would be the defense of a Negro accused of attacking a white woman, even though the Negro was probably innocent and the woman a prostitute.
Yeah, that was a terrible idea.
He did, however, take from these experiences a deeper understanding of how democracy was failing in the United States in the 1920s and 30s.
I had been brought up with the democratic idea that this general welfare was the object of democratic action in the state, of allowing the governed a voice in government. But through the crimson illumination of war, I realized and, afterward by travel around the world, saw even more clearly that so-called democracy today was allowing the mass of people to have only limited voice in government; that democratic control of what are at present the most important functions of men: work and earning an living and distributing goods and services; that here we did not have a democracy; we had oligarchy, and oligarchy based on monopoly and income; and this oligarchy was as determined to deny democracy in industry as it had once been determined do deny democracy in legislation and choice of officials.
You don’t say. And there’s more that sounds like today:
During the nineteenth century the overwhelming influence of the economic activities of men upon their thought and action was, as Marx insisted, clear; but it was not until the twentieth century that the industrial situation called not only for understanding but for action. Modern business enterprise organized for private profit was throttling democratic government, choking art and literature and leading work and industry into a dangerous paradox by increasing the production of things for sale and yet decreasing even more rapidly the number of persons able to buy and the amount of money they could spend; thus throwing industry into periodic convulsions.
Yep, here we are today. Let’s just replace workers with AI, and hope “someone” still has any income to buy the things produced. We are headed for another depression, and for the same stupid reasons as the first.
Despite his admiration for Marx (who I agree was pretty brilliant in identifying the problems of industrialized capitalism even if his proposals were more utopian than pragmatic), Du Bois was not much of a revolutionary. He preferred reform - yet another way he and I are similar.
I was not and am not a communist. I do not believe in the dogma of inevitable revolution in order to right economic wrong. I think war is worse than hell, and that it seldom or never forwards the advance of the world.
Those are my thoughts on this book. Du Bois really is one of my favorite thinkers, and definitely on my guest list for my all-time dinner party. I’d definitely recommend this book for understanding our national sin and its ongoing reverberations.
