Race, Freedom & Equality Poli 110J

1. Race, Freedom & EqualityPoli 110J The problem of the the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.

2. Essay 2 • 5-7 pages • Due at final exam, Friday Sept. 2nd. • Late essays will not be accepted • If you would like to receive your graded essay at the exam, hand it in no later than Wednesday, Aug. 31st. • Turnitin.com required

3. Essay 2 • 1. “’Howl’ and ‘Footnote to Howl’ perfectly illustrate Marcuse’s arguments, and he would find himself wholly in agreement with Ginsberg.” Agree, disagree, or modify this statement.

4. Essay 2 • 2. Does the Autobiography of Malcolm X support or contradict W.E.B. DuBois’ theories on the importance of education for oppressed minorities? How, and to what extent?

5. Essay 2 • 3. Using Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man as your source, critique one of the following texts. The text must air or be published between the time that this prompt was assigned and the day that you turn it in: • Front section of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal • A NFL game of your choice • Episode of Jersey Shore • Episode of Gossip Girl • Two hours of a cable news network (CNN, FOX News, MSNBC)

6. W.E.B. Du Bois • 1868-1963 • First black PhD at Harvard • Pan-Africanist • Radical (equality) • Publisher of NAACP’s The Crisis • Communist • MLK: “It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist.”

7. Du Bois gets radicalized • Sam Hose (1899) • Accused of murdering employer & raping his wife • Admits murder (over debt, possibly in self-defense), denies rape • Lynched w/2,000 witnesses outside of Atlanta • Emasculated, face skinned, tied to a tree and burned alive. Knuckles displayed for sale in shop window. • Lynching a communal activity • Du Bois comes to believe that “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.”

8. Major Themes • The Veil • Double-consciousness • Race consciousness • Racial essentialism • Education

9. Race Consciousness • “How does it feel to be a problem?” • American society consistently and irresistibly forces awareness of one’s own blackness • Blackness is not a quality of appearance, but of identity • Not just what the individual looks like, but who the individual is • Blackness is a “problem”

10. The Problem of the Color Line • The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” • Not geographical, but a “line” nonetheless. • A notably American (and to a lesser extent, European) way of looking at the world.

11. The color line • “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.” • Parallel worlds • Restrictive only to blacks, who cannot move beyond the veil, while whites can move back and forth. • Privilege.

12. The color line • The American world “yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”

13. The color line • “One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” • Internal division on the color line • Partly self, partly not-self • Constant internal conflict

14. The color line • Blacks exist in some sense on both sides of the color line • “He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.” • Essentialism • Partly inherent, partly historical

15. The color line • “He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed in his face. • “to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”

16. The Color Line • Three parties in Civil War: North, South, Blacks • Freedman’s Bureau constitutes a separate government for liberated slaves • Du Bois on Imperial Japan vs. China • The “blighted, ruined form” of the post-War white “with hate in his eyes” vs. the “form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries” who had raised his children, buried his wives, and slaked his lust • Metaphor: male & female • “The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro”

17. What is to be done From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed unmanned! . . . . Hereditary bondsman! Know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? -Byron (epigraph to III)

18. Booker T. Washington • 1856-1915 • Support from white establishment in North & South • Some support from black leaders • “Leader not of one race but of two” (38) • Advocated assimilation (as does Du Bois), recognition of political & social realities of the South, modus vivendi w/Southern whites • After the War, North & South looked to re-join as a single nation, diminishing patience for the question & fate of blacks in both Sections

19. Booker T. Washington • Washington insists that to advance, blacks must give up hopes for • Political power • Insistence on civil rights • Higher education • In return for • Peace • Industrial schooling • An issue of practicality: believed blacks would benefit most from trade school rather than liberal education • Example: disapproval of poor black boy trying to learn French • Long-term assimilation & advancement

20. Booker T. Washington • In short order, he gets • Black disenfranchisement • Jim Crow laws • Legal inferiority • Example, OK: literacy requirement, unless you were eligible to vote before 1866 • Abandonment of blacks by institutions of higher learning

21. Du Bois’ Criticisms • Washington wants to advance black business, but how can this be done without the right to vote in your own interests? • Insists on thrift & self-respect, but also on “unmanly” submission to whites • Advocates elementary & industrial school, but who will teach at black schools if blacks can’t get higher education? • Imagining a different world

22. 3 bad consequences • 1. South is justified in despising blacks because of blacks’ current degradation • They are in Washington’s depiction ignorant and slothful, not quite up to par with whites & have to catch up

23. 3 bad consequences • 2. Cause of this degradation is the wrong education in the past

24. 3 bad consequences • 3. Idea that the future of blacks in America depends primarily on their own efforts

25. These are “Dangerous half-truths” for Du Bois • 1. What about slavery and systematic exclusion from politics, economy, society? • 2. black schooling lagged because it had to wait for first generation of black teachers • 3.While blacks must work for their own improvement, Du Bois argues that they must be assisted and encouraged “by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group” (whites) • Is this problematic?

26. Du Bois & NAACP insist on more militant, though still peaceful, position, demanding • Right to vote • Civic equality • Education of youth according not to race, but ability

27. In essence, Du Bois accuses Washington of apologizing and covering over for systematic racism, making it appear as if the disadvantaged position of American blacks has nothing to do with whites and everything to do with blacks.

28. “By every civilized and peaceful method, we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’”

29. Education • Can blacks be educated? • “Most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do is listen to evidence.” • Note: not most white Americans • Basic assumptions as part of the Veil

30. Why is education necessary? • This segregation is reinforced the places that blacks & whites live • Either they live in proximity, encountering one another at their worst, or whites own black homes but never encounter their tenants • “…the family of the [former] master has dwindled to two lone women, who live in Macon and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom.”

31. Why is education necessary? • Relatedly, uneducated blacks are often victimized in business by outsiders. They can own nothing themselves. • Debt: repossession and exploitation • Deeper and deeper year by year • Whites, Yankees, Jews • Antisemitism

32. Permanent Alienation • Thus, two attitudes come to the forefront: • Disengagement: “Happy?—Well, yes; he laughed and flipped pebbles, and thought the world was as it was. He had worked here twelve years and has nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes, seven; but they hadn’t been to school this year,--couldn’t afford books and clothes, and couldn’t spare their work.”

33. Resentment: “Let a white man touch me, and he dies; I don’t boast this,--I don’t say it around loud, or before the children,--but I mean it. I’ve seen them whip my father and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood ran”

34. “Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate & vindictiveness there;--these are the extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew which we preferred.”

35. Why is education necessary? • 3 possibilities and dangers at the turn of the 20th Century: • 1. “The multiplying of human wants in culture-lands calls for world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying them.” • Globalizing markets serve to bring people into contact and commerce with one another, presenting the possibility for equal exchange

36. Why is education necessary? • “Behind this thought lurks the afterthought of force and dominion,--the making of brown men to delve when the temptation of beads and red calico cloys.” • Color line • Exploitation

37. Why is education necessary? • 2. “The thought of the older South,--the sincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro,--a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil.” • A tolerance based in hierarchy

38. Why is education necessary? • Within this, “the afterthought,--some of them with favoring chance might become men, but in sheer self-defence we dare not let them, and we build walls about them so high, and hang between them and the light a veil so thick, that they shall not even think of breaking through.” • Become men = access to the spheres of life reserved for whites • But privileges of whites are based in the exclusion of blacks

39. Why is education necessary? • “The thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying, ‘Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity—Vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!’” • Assimilationist • Demand/plea for equality • Asking to be treated as humans • To have one’s rights respected is to be acknowledged and be treated as fully human

40. Why is education necessary? • “To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,--suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?” • Double consciousness • Awareness of the hostility of the wider society

41. Who is to be educated? • Men • “The Talented Tenth” • “The rule of inequality:--that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig” • Individualistic • Leadership • Serve to raise other blacks “out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them.”

42. What is the goal of education? • “we almost fear to question if the end of racing is not gold, if the aim of man is not rightly to be rich.” • Some negative social changes result from “the sudden transformation of a fair far-off ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the consequent deification of Bread.” • Vs. Booker T. Washington’s industrial schooling • Vs. the view of advancement as referring only to money

43. What is the goal of education? • The post-war South has forgotten “the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,--that new-world heir of the grace and courtliness of the patrician, knight, and noble…” in favor of sharp & unscrupulous businessmen. • An odd kind of valorization of the antebellum white Southern elite culture • Non-capitalist

44. What is the goal of education? • Du Bois fears that wealth will become the goal of politics, the fuel of law, and even replace “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” as the ideal of the Public School. • Why is this a problem? Who doesn’t like money? • Regards “human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends.” • Slavery in fact after slavery in law

45. The goal of education • The purpose of education for Du Bois is not to train men (by which he means men) for business, but to train them for life, which is to say confront the whole of the world. • What is the utility of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness for this project?

46. The goal of education • Generates the “breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture.” • Character • To overcome the problem of the color line will require “broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph.” • Belief in American telos of equality

47. The goal of education • “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. … • So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? … Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?” • Transcending power of truth

48. The Role of the Church • “given the peculiar circumstances of the black man’s environment [his religious institutions] were the one expression of his higher life.” • Aesthetic • Spiritual • Philosophical • Economic & social

49. “Three things characterize the religion of the slave” from which the black church descends • The Preacher • The Music • The Frenzy

50. The Preacher • “A leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss’, an intriguer, an idealist.” • Descended from the Medicine Man/Priest • The chief could not survive enslavement, but the Priest could • Christianized by exposure & convenience • Center of the church organization