With a Black president in the White House, the question arose as to what this meant for the Black prophetic tradition. Was it possible that Black people would mistake this symbolic achievement for a wholesale victory? Could it be that, overjoyed by the iconic recognition of Blackness, they would ignore—notwithstanding the undeniable effects of the financial crisis—the continuing or rather growing inequality between whites and Blacks, rich and poor in terms of decent income, housing, education, health care, jobs? In this situation, the incorruptible voices of the Black prophetic tradition needed to be heard. We decided to continue our dialogue, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as undeniably the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century, was the obvious choice. We agreed to explore the more radical facets of his thinking and expose his uncompromising critique of the United States, which has often been considered too painful to become part of the American (or even African American) collective memory. The title of this chapter, “The Black Flame,” refers to Du Bois’s little-known trilogy of historical novels, which he wrote in the last decade of his life.1
CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: Given W. E. B. Du Bois’s long and eminent career, his versatility and productivity, any assessment of his life work is a challenging, if not daunting, undertaking. It seems to be appropriate to start out by evoking some of the points you have made in your own writings on Du Bois. You have written extensively on Du Bois. In your study on American pragmatism, you characterized Du Bois as “the Jamesian organic intellectual,”2 and in your essay “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” you called him “the towering black scholar of the twentieth century”3 and “the brook of fire through which we all must pass in order to gain access to the intellectual and political weaponry needed to sustain the radical democratic tradition in our time.”4 In addition, you put forth an extended critique of some of Du Bois’s basic tenets.
CORNEL WEST: Absolutely. Let me start off by saying that W. E. B. Du Bois, alongside John Dewey, is the towering public intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century in the American empire. And when looked at through the international lens, he is even more important than Dewey, because Du Bois understood the centrality of empire, and he understood the centrality of white supremacy and the shaping of the US empire in a way that John Dewey did not. And when we look fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years from now, when the American Gibbon puts pen to paper to the “Decline and Fall of the American Empire,”5 it will be Du Bois’s work that will be seen as most insightful, as opposed to Dewey or even William James or some of the other great figures that we know. And so in that sense we may not even be yet in a position to fully appreciate the breadth and the scope and the depth of W. E. B. Du Bois as a scholar, as a public intellectual, as well as an activist, as someone who offered an astute critique of capitalism and class hierarchy and understood the latter’s intimate relation to white supremacy and racial hierarchy. And so I think we are still very much in the early stages of the kind of appreciation of Du Bois’s contribution to our understanding, especially, of a post-American world or a world in which the American empire is no longer at the center. And in that regard, I think, we have to proceed very tentatively, provisionally, and yet also firmly to try to understand the variety of different dimensions and aspects of this towering genius.
CHB: It’s interesting that it took him a while to get to the internationalization of the problem, as he mentions in his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn.6
CW: That’s true. I think it is the 1915 book The Negro where he really begins to understand the centrality of empire and again race in the US empire.7 You can just see him beginning to become awakened, and any time he becomes awakened there are two fundamental consequences. One is the radical character of what he has now to say, and the second is the problem of how to come to terms with the marginal status of such a radical perspective. After all, most of America, and especially the American academy, is just not ready. They can’t assimilate, they can’t incorporate, they can’t render intelligible the radical message that Du Bois is putting forward. I think this is going to be true for a whole subsequent slew of figures, including myself.
CHB: It certainly was true during Du Bois’s lifetime, when he was not recognized adequately in the academy, though he was one of the foremost sociologists of the time, a man who came up with a new method: interdisciplinary empirical studies.8 If he had been a white man, this breakthrough would have been celebrated, and he complains that he was not even published, and that when his book on the Negro in Philadelphia came out, there were no reviews.9
CW: Yes, the 1899 classic Philadelphia Negro, it’s true. But I think that even if Du Bois had been white, his radical view would still have been very difficult for mainstream America and most difficult for the American academy to come to terms with. Being Black made it even more difficult. There is no doubt about that. So the response has been to domesticate Du Bois, sanitize and sterilize him, and to make him part of a kind of a domesticated view about Black Nationalism on the one hand and integrationism on the other hand. And of course, there was the issue of his dispute with Booker T. Washington, especially Washington’s reluctance to promote civil rights, voting rights, and liberal education for Blacks. And those are part and parcel of who he is, but they are just small slices of what his project was, and I think in the twenty-first century, it’s up to us to begin to see what he was actually about. How is it possible for this emerging cultural freedom—that comes out of an enslaved and Jim-Crowed people—to present a challenge to an imperial power with very deep roots in white supremacy, one driven by a capitalist project or driven by capitalist forces and tendencies? For Du Bois, this becomes the central problematic, and it very much is our problematic today. I think there is a sense in which W. E. B. Du Bois is the most relevant figure from the twentieth century for us in the twenty-first century, and we ignore him at our own peril. Very much so. And in that sense, you know, we all stand on his shoulders. When I had written fifteen years ago that he is the towering Black scholar of the twentieth century, there was no doubt about that, and I’m more convinced of that fifteen years later than I was then.
CHB: You have just remarked that it is from the position of an outsider, or, as he himself calls it, a “group imprisonment within a group,”10 that he could analyze the empire, and actually, I think he is of the conviction that it is only from the margin that one can criticize society because of the distance one necessarily has from it.11 One does not fully identify with it. So that though, in general, there is a great disadvantage in being at the margin, in this one respect there is an advantage in marginality, and I would think that you have that view on your own condition as well.
CW: Yes, I think that’s true. Of course, you can be marginal and an outsider and still get it wrong. But in terms of those who are willing to tell some of the most painful truths about the emergence and sustenance of the American empire alongside the precious American democratic experiment within the American empire and the tension between those two, certainly being on the margins or an outsider is almost a precondition. I think he is right about that. The problem is when it comes to solidarity and its preconditions, which is to say the conditions under which collective insurgency can emerge, the conditions under which agency among the oppressed can emerge, oftentimes it becomes a rather depressing matter because, you see, it seems as if there is a relative impotence or relative powerlessness. The emergent agency is so often pacified, and folks suffer generation after generation with unjust treatment, unattended to, and then layers of suffering begin to mount, just like in the ninth thesis of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” that history of catastrophe, the piling of wreckage, generation after generation, all of those precious lives lost, wasted potential, witnessed generation after generation.12
One wonders how Du Bois, who lived ninety-five years, was able to witness that wreckage, see the US empire shipwrecked at the very moment when it viewed itself as victorious and sailing uncontested in the sunshine. You can imagine what a tearing of the soul that must have been for him. Of course, he began as a much more naïve Enlightenment figure, naïve Victorian figure, who was initially tied to empire and tied to the West in its contemporary incarnation. He never gives up on the West; he never gives up on the Enlightenment; he never gives up on the Greeks; so the legacy of Athens, the legacy of Jerusalem, the legacy of the Enlightenment mean much to him. But once he really discovers the Marxist critique of capitalism, once he discovers the variety of critiques of empire and weds it to his profound resistance and critique of white supremacy, he’s in a different space. I think he began to realize that after the lynching of Sam Hose.
CHB: He acknowledges himself that he was naïve and that he had to go through stages.13 In the beginning, he thought you just have to teach people; you just have to tell them the truth, and they will accept it and they will change. But then he acknowledged that there was irrationality, that there was habit you have to cope with.14
CW: Absolutely, the cake of custom and the gravitas of habit. I think in a certain sense the early Du Bois had a naïve conception of evil—evil as ignorance, evil as not knowing the facts—as opposed to the later Du Bois, who saw evil being tied to interest, evil being tied to power and privilege within various social structures that have to be contested politically, organizationally, collectively. And, you know, that Du Bois is the Du Bois that remains our Du Bois; he is a figure of our times. I mean, it’s amazing that it has taken American history fifty, seventy-five years to begin to catch up with Du Bois in terms of this problematic of the US empire that will decline as political system, will be broken as culture, will decay, if it does not come to terms with the kind of very deep democratic reforms and structural transformations required for that empire to revive and become something that’s worthy of affirmation.
CHB: One of his ideas of how to try to accomplish that was that he believed in a special role for African Americans. He believed, maybe idealistically, naïvely—I wonder what you think about that?—that due to their tradition, due to roots in Africa and the communal spirit that he thought derived from that African culture and was in a way transposed to the New World, that African Americans could and actually should be a counterforce to American capitalism by forming communal and economic projects by deliberate separatism—a controversial word, of course. His ideas remind me of Malcolm X’s notions of how African Americans should create their own businesses and keep them separate so that whites would not be able to further exploit and profit from their labor, suggesting that anti-capitalist forces might be based on the African American community, something not often taken up, I think.
CW: Yes, I’ve never been convinced of that aspect of Du Bois or Malcolm in that regard. It seems to me that these Black businessmen and -women tended to be just as deferential to capitalist forces and just as ready to embrace the market forces on the capitalist conditions as anybody else.
CHB: But maybe there is a difference between Malcolm X and Du Bois in that the latter really means no compliance with the capitalist system but introducing a communist—Du Bois didn’t call it that—but a communist way of doing business, without profit; you know, oriented toward the community and its needs without giving in to capitalism.15
CW: Yes, at the normative level I can see Du Bois putting that forward. It reminds me in some ways of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, whose economic cooperatives were going to be different than the competitive capitalist models. And yet, when you actually look at the practice of Black businessmen and -women, some of whom may have partly even been influenced by Du Bois—very few probably, but those few who are—they still find themselves caught within the ravages of the capitalist market. And therefore, at the aspirational utopian level it may make sense, but it’s just hard to see how that’s translated on the ground. I do think that one of the most important texts Du Bois ever wrote is The Gift of Black Folk [1924]. It’s a classic that tends to be overlooked and underappreciated like so much of Du Bois’s magisterial corpus, and there, I think, he is on to something. He talks about the gift of Black folk to America and the world as being a reconstruction of the notion of democracy looked at from the vantage point of enslaved or Jim Crowed people, or a reconstruction of the notion of freedom from that vantage, and then a cultural gift as well, in song and story and tradition and art. Each one of those contributions is quite powerful, and they certainly constitute counter-hegemonic forces in making American capitalist democracy a more fully inclusive capitalist democracy; there is no doubt about that. The question is how these gifts did become counter-hegemonic in a more radical way, you see.
Now one of the things that has always fascinated me about Du Bois—and I have been quite insistent in my critique of Du Bois—is that when it comes to popular culture, he was in love with the “sorrow songs,” to use his wonderful phrase in the last chapter of The Souls of Black Folk. He was in love with the spirituals. But I’ve never been convinced that he had an appreciation, let alone a deep comprehension, of the blues and jazz. We know he was very, very suspicious of blues and jazz; he distanced himself from them. And yet, for me, they constitute crucial, indispensable counter-hegemonic forces in terms of keeping alive ideals of humanity, ideals of equality, ideals of humility, ideals of resistance and endurance in the face of the catastrophe that the US empire has always been for the masses of Black people, be it slavery, Jim Crow, or be it the new hyper-ghetto that our dear brother Loïc Wacquant has written about better than anybody else,16 or the hyper-incarceration that has targeted poor people, specifically Black men. When you look at the forms of agency of those particular brothers and sisters, the music has been central, and it’s not spirituals for the most part, because they are unchurched, most of them; most of them are un-mosqued and un-synagogued; they don’t have any ties to religious institutions at all. So it’s fascinating to me that there is still a certain relic of cultural elitism in the radical democratic, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist project of Du Bois, and this creates a tension for me.
CHB: The reason I see for why he was so distanced from that part of the African American tradition is that he was so much afraid of hedonism, of entertainment as something that is just distraction, part of capitalist consumer culture, distracting people from what they should try to become, and he probably didn’t see the serious contribution to cultural work that jazz and blues ultimately makes.
CW: I think that’s a very good point. There is an irony here, because you know the great August Wilson used to say that Black people authorize reality by performance, that performance in a communal context, where call and response is central, creates a form of agency, creates a form of self-confidence and self-respect that are preconditions for the creation of new realities. You see that in churches in the past under slavery. We’ve seen it in communal artistic practices under Jim Crow, and we see it today in hip-hop. They are not revolutionary forces, but they do constitute spaces, spaces that are very rare, because most of the spaces in the US empire are already colonized. But to have certain spaces by means of performance can provide a view of a different sense of who you are: You’re human as opposed to subhuman. You’re human as opposed to being a commodity. You’re human as opposed to being an object. You’re human as opposed to being an entity to be manipulated. And that’s, again, the profound role of Black music, especially within those communal contexts. I’m not sure Du Bois understood that because of his fear of hedonism and cheap entertainment and the stereotype of Black people as, you know, born singing, born dancing, born moving, and so forth and so on.
CHB: And another point might be his own upbringing. He was from New England, and it’s really funny to read his account when he first came to the South and was overwhelmed by how his people—and he calls them “his people”—behaved. But he is completely alien to their traditions, for example, in church.17 It was difficult for him. This reticent gentleman, he had problems; he embraced the culture, but it never became part of his own habitus.18
CW: Absolutely. One of the great ironies of W. E. B. Du Bois is that he is the greatest—and will probably always be the greatest—Black intellectual ever to emerge out of the US empire, and the problematic that he ended up wrestling with about the US empire—the centrality of race and class and gender, but especially the capitalist core—needs to be hit head-on. But he was not the spiritual extension or the spiritual property of the very people that he was willing to give his all for, the very people he was willing to live and die for. Billie Holiday would have scared him to death; James Brown would have sent him into conniptions; and he just would not have been able to fully embrace brothers George Clinton and Bootsy Collins. And the Funkadelics would have generated a heart attack. If he had shown up at a Parliament-Funkadelic concert, with Garry in diapers and brother George and all his colors, Du Bois would have gone crazy. Or if he had listened to a Reverend C. L. Franklin sermon when the whooping began, he would have been ashamed, you see. You would want to say, “Du Bois, this is the spiritual genius and part of the very people you’re talking about.” And yet at the same time we know that there could be no Franklin, there could be no Clinton, there could be no Funkadelics without the genius of W. E. B. Du Bois, because he has given his all, his intellectual wherewithal, his political activism, his time, his energy to affirm the humanity of the Clintons and the James Browns and the C. L. Franklins and the Jasper Williams and Manuel Scotts and all of the great cultural geniuses, the Cecil Taylors, and so forth. So that’s a fascinating irony.
One of the things that I have been able to really both revel in and benefit from—and you see it probably more in Democracy Matters than in anything else19—is trying to unite this radical intellectual legacy of Du Bois that hits the issue of empire and white supremacy with the popular cultural expressions of genius and talent—be it in music, be it in dance, be it among the younger generation or older generation—so that you actually have a kind of an interplay between, on the one hand, Du Bois’s radicality and militancy when it comes to politics and economics, empire and race, and, on the other hand, the antiphonal forms of call and response, the syncopation, the rhythm, the rhyme, the tempo, the tone that you get in the best of Black cultural forms that are requisite for sustaining Black dignity and sanity, sustaining Black people as a whole.
CHB: He was so afraid of “uncivilized” behavior, he would probably have taken much of what you are talking about to be just that. And his concern with education—and maybe we could talk about his idea of the Talented Tenth—was quite different from any attempts at grassroots political socialization or education in general.
CW: Absolutely. Of course, Du Bois should consider Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey, or Bessie Smith part of the Talented Tenth, you see. Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, Aretha Franklin, they are certainly part of the Talented Tenth. Stevie Wonder is part of the Talented Tenth, but given Du Bois’s elitist conception of education, they would be considered mere entertainers. So I do resonate with his need for a conception of education that has to do with awakening from sleepwalking, with wrestling with reality to transform it so that that illuminates and liberates. I do resonate with that. But because of his conception of who would be candidates for that, it seems to be still too narrow for me. The irony is that for Du Bois, the nonliterate or illiterate slaves who created the spirituals would probably be candidates for the Talented Tenth, because when we look closely at his readings of their products, their songs, their expressions, he sees their genius. He really does!
CHB: In the expression of suffering.
CW: Yes, yes.
CHB: It is here that his empathy shows. There is a piece, a conversation Du Bois has with a white person, I think, who does not understand what Jim Crow is like, even in 1920.20 And he explains it in terms of his own daily experience and how humiliating it can be. This is his way of expressing the suffering of the people under oppression.
CW: Very much so. You could be alluding to what I consider to be one of the most powerful essays that he wrote—and he wrote so many powerful essays and texts—but “The Souls of White Folk” is probably the most militant, radical, illuminating, and counter-hegemonic text that we have.21 I know it was a favorite of the great John Henrik Clarke, who was a great Pan-Africanist and who viewed Du Bois as one of his precursors, but again fascinating that John Henrik Clarke viewed Du Bois as a precursor in the same way that William Julius Wilson, concerned about class but more about integration, would view Du Bois as a precursor. In the same way, an NAACP liberal integrationist would view Du Bois as a precursor, so that Du Bois is rich enough and his work polyvalent enough, subject to multiple interpretations enough, that he ends up with all of these different progeny. But that essay, “Souls of White Folk,” is a devastating thing. I remember the first time I read this, I said, “Oh my God, this is a Du Bois we don’t really get a chance to look at too closely.” He writes:
It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this rôle. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred,—making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,—rather a great religion, a world-war cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts!22
That’s just one moment.
CHB: There is yet another one, where there is the perspective of the daily life of Blacks and their suffering from discrimination, etc. He exposes that in a dialogue that is really powerful. Which brings me to another point, namely, that within the limits of his concept of culture, he, in principle, would have agreed with you that it is not enough to explain something scientifically but that one should also try to express it by other means, in different styles. This is what he did in his work, be it in his novels or in his very early essays in The Souls of Black Folk, where he combined scientific essayistic writing with the poetic. And the reason for this was really that he wanted to reach out. He knew he could not reach people otherwise, though one would doubt that he could reach them today with his at times lyrical Suada [German for “harangue”].
CW: No, but there would be other artists who would appropriate his work and make it more popular, because they could see the genius at the center of it. One of the things that makes me smile is Du Bois putting on these pageants, these plays, you know, thousands of Black people, trying to get them to see the greatness of African civilization, hundreds of actors and so forth. I mean, that’s popular culture at its core, and it’s, again, his attempt to reach out. I love his passion to communicate by any means relative to what he thinks are going to be the most effective means.23
CHB: True, and also, as to media, in his time he was avant-garde as an editor of the Crisis. This is what he could do as an activist.
CW: Absolutely. That was popular. Any of us who try to expand the public spheres into film and music and books and magazines and some of television and, of course, radio—I think we’re building on Du Bois, even if we have slightly different conceptions of culture. I think that in an interesting kind of way, Du Bois was an indisputable radical democrat in his ideology—though I’m not so sure he was an indisputable radical democrat in his temperament, in his personality. I think he was shaped at a time when his temperament and personality were much more rooted in a kind of elitist formation essentially, and yet he never allowed that to impede or obstruct his sensitivities and his inclusivity when it came to the suffering of other people. That is part of his greatness to me, even though I tend to accent a much more radical democratic temperament, personality, and way of being in the world.
CHB: Again, he saw the problem himself. He revised the concept of the Talented Tenth, because he wondered about it. He again admitted that he had been naïve, idealistic, because what he had counted on was character, and he had become aware of the fact that you could not count on that. So when he revised his concept of the Talented Tenth, he was contemplating how to actually realize his concepts and how to solve the problem of organization.24 And this essay shows to me that there was a certain helplessness on his part, but then, aren’t we all at a loss when it comes to organization? It is so difficult a task.
CW: Oh absolutely. Yes, I think it’s true. And I do think that at the center of his conception of the Talented Tenth was an ethos of service to the poor, service to those who have been left behind, as it were, or in the religious sense, service to the least of these—echoes of the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew—and I like that core very much. It’s just that early on in 1903, when he put forward that notion, it was deeply bourgeois and elitist. In the 1940s, when he revised it, he had been radicalized by Marxism; he had been radicalized by the Communist movement. And so he knew that that ethos of service had to be now cast in such a way that the class elitism of 1903 had to be rejected, and also the sexist elitism.
CHB: He was a nineteenth-century person in that regard, but he moved forward.
CW: Yes, he had come a long way from where he was in the early part of the twentieth century. Of course, you are absolutely right, “The Damnation of Women” from Darkwater is a good example. I was blessed to take courses with his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois. She was an intellectual powerhouse. She was on fire for justice and would not put up with any kind of patriarchal mess from anybody. She taught at Harvard in the early 1970s. She was something, and she had wonderful memories and reminiscences of her husband.25
CHB: And Du Bois then writes in Darkwater about servants, female servants.
CW: Yes, yes. Absolutely. “The Servant in the House”; that’s powerful.
CHB: What I appreciate is his self-reflexivity on his own development, his self-criticism. It is very honest.
CW: Yes. You wonder, though, whether the major reception of Du Bois’s corpus will be providing the launching pad for that American Gibbon I was talking about, i.e., a turning away from Du Bois’s challenge and the escalation of the refusal of the deliberate ignorance, the willful evasion of the realities Du Bois was talking about at the level of empire and white supremacy that will constitute the downfall of the American project. America slowly but surely moves toward a second-world, maybe even a third-world status, with ruins and relics of its great democratic past being completely trampled by the kind of neoliberal obsession with unregulated markets and indifference toward the poor and polarizing politics of scapegoating the most vulnerable. And Du Bois’s magisterial corpus sits there and says: “You should have listened. I’ve spent my whole life trying to get you to listen, to wake up, to heed the challenge that I was talking about because I was concerned both about you but first and foremost about my people that you’ve been trampling.” And there is a very, very good chance that that’s where we are headed. The irony would be that the indisputable relevance of Du Bois was not heeded: we didn’t listen; we didn’t take him seriously. Shame on you, America! Shame on you, the American academy! Shame on you, the American intelligentsia, that your narrow individualism, your truncated rapacious marketeering, your deep dedication to paradigms and frameworks that are too truncated to come to terms with the realities that were undermining your democratic experiment have led to the need for the American Gibbon. That’s very much where we are right now.
CHB: Yes, but it is really a question of bringing the more radical Du Bois to the fore. Before I had read more of Du Bois, I used to focus on The Souls of Black Folk. That is not to say that this is not a great work, with all the metaphors that have shaped academic discussions such as “the veil” and “double-consciousness.” But I am also deeply impressed, in Dusk of Dawn, by his metaphor of the cave, which is describing the same caste system26 but in much more radical terms; or rather, it’s darker, more pessimistic, and you hardly ever see it referenced. He plays on Plato’s cave, I think.
CW: Absolutely. Straight out of Republic. No, it is darker here. It is darker here. He writes:
No matter how successful the outside advocacy is, it remains impotent and unsuccessful until it actually succeeds in freeing and making articulate the submerged caste. [. . .] This was the race concept which has dominated my life, and the history of which I have attempted to make the leading theme of this book.27
And yet he is one of those who emerges out of the provincialism, he shatters the narrowness and becomes the grand cosmopolitan and internationalist that we know him to be. I mean, that’s one of the reasons why in my own classes I assign Souls of Black Folk, but I also have students read Reconstruction, the 1935 classic, especially the more literary, more metaphoric sections of that text alongside the analytical sections,28 because by 1935, he has become someone wrestling with the legacies of Marx and Freud, wrestling with Lenin’s conception of imperialism based on Hobson29 and others, and that is a different Du Bois. I mean, there are continuities, but it is a very different Du Bois.
CHB: When I was thinking about the issues we would be talking about, I thought your perspective might be that, in the end, he is just too dark. Where is the hope that you would insist on? But in contrast, one of your points of criticism in The Future of the Race is that you think he partakes in American optimism.30 So you probably meant a different phase. But what do you think about Du Bois’s optimism or pessimism?
CW: Remember, when he was on the boat and he looks back he says: “The Negro cannot win in America. I must go international, got to go to Ghana,” linked to China, the Soviet Union, and so forth.31 I’d have to rethink what I had in mind when I talked about American optimism. That was certainly part of his earlier phase. I think the later phase is closer to the darkness that I was talking about. One of the things that has always disturbed me about the great Du Bois is that I’ve never encountered in his grand works a substantive wrestling with Chekhov, or I would even say with Russian literary tradition as a whole: Tolstoy, Gogol, Leskov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and we could go on and on.32 And I believe that would have shattered any cheap optimism or any American optimism that informs earlier stages of his work. I’m just amazed that there is no wrestling with Kafka; there is no wrestling with even Beckett in the 1950s, from a radical democratic point of view. I want him to hold on to his militancy and radicality in terms of the talk about empire and white supremacy. But I think there is a connection between him running from the blues and him running from Chekhov and running from the Russian literary tradition and running from Kafka and from Beckett. And yet he has his own kind of darkness at which he arrives on his own.
CHB: By way of analysis, on the basis of his sociological training.
CW: Yes, exactly. When he looks at the structural and institutional forces in play vis-à-vis poor and working people, and those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,”33 I think of the Chekhovs and the blues sitting there waiting for him. And yet he arrives on his own, so in that sense I’d have to revise my critique if I was implying that American optimism actually held through all of the phases of his thinking as opposed to just the earlier phases.
CHB: I wonder what he read in terms of literature, since, he quotes in Souls of Black Folk—
CW: —A lot of Shakespeare, Balzac.
CHB: Yes. His famous quote: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.”34
CW: Oh, we know his favorite was Goethe. That’s one of the things that I hit him hard on, you see.35
CHB: Well, after all, he had spent some time in Germany.36
CW: Yes, he was deeply shaped by the German conception of Bildung, and at that time—and understandably so—the major stellar figures were Goethe and Schiller, who actually mean much to me, too.
CHB: It’s the idea of humanism, I think, that shapes him.
CW: Yes, absolutely. Yet you don’t get a serious wrestling with modernist texts at all in his work. There’s little Joyce, there’s little Proust, there’s little Kafka.
CHB: What I wonder is, did he really not read any of them, or did he choose not to comment on them because they were alien to his thinking?
CW: It’s a good question. My hunch is that he was certainly aware of them. He was too cosmopolitan and intellectual not to know that Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Proust, Kafka, and Mandelstam and others were around. He may have read Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil [1945] in German, but we have very little evidence for this, and it would be the same in terms of modernist movements and in Afro-American life. What did he think of Charlie Parker? Was he moved by the pianistic genius of Art Tatum? I would like to know.
CHB: And what about Richard Wright and writers of his time?
CW: I think he did read Wright. I recall reading a review of Richard Wright, especially given the Communist overlap, both being members of the Communist culture.37 Wright was actually a member of the party. Du Bois was not, but they overlapped for a little while before Wright left the party. And what did Du Bois think about Ralph Ellison? I think he did actually write about Ellison, too. So, again, I mean this not so much as a brick thrown at the great Du Bois but as a matter of trying to see what constitutes his edifice and which bricks are missing in the building that he was working on. And I think this again resonates with the concerns about popular culture, the contemporary cultural expressions of his day, and the concern about popular culture as a whole.
CHB: There is a heated debate about religion in Du Bois’s work, and most of his biographers think he was an agnostic, if not an atheist, due to his Marxism. There are comments that he makes from which you could conclude that. But then there is an interesting book by Edward Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet, who argues that Du Bois, though certainly not an orthodox Christian, was religious in a way and kept it up.38 In his view, Du Bois did not just do some window dressing using religious phrases, examples from the Bible, but there was a, let’s call it, spirituality that shaped him throughout his life.
CW: I think that Du Bois had a self-styled spirituality that was not wedded to cognitive commitments to God talk. He was very similar to his teacher George Santayana. Santayana used to go to Mass, shed tears weekly as a lapsed Catholic, and would say, “The Mass was too beautiful to be true.” So he was moved by the passion and the perceptions and the purpose in the Eucharist but could not make cognitive commitments to any of the claims. Ludwig Wittgenstein was the same way, and I think Du Bois is part of that particular coterie of secular figures who are profoundly religiously musical, to use Max Weber’s words; people who resonate deeply with the issues that religious people are wrestling with—what it means to be human, how do you engage in a virtuous life, what kind of character do you cultivate, what kind of sensitivity, what kind of compassion, what conceptions of justice, the centrality of love and empathy—without being religious in terms of belief in God, in the rituals of faith.
And I have a great respect for Du Bois’s spirituality, even as a Christian, which makes him in some ways even more of a prophet than most Christians or religious Jews or religious Buddhists and so on, because it means that he was able to sustain himself spiritually without the help of the religious apparatus of tradition. He also didn’t fall into the kind of narrow reductionist traps of scientistic, positivistic ties to science, the kind of narrow Darwinism that you get today among the number of the more sophomoric atheists like our dear brothers Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, who reduce the rich Darwin to narrow scientism. Darwin is the brook of fire through which we all must pass. But you can be religiously sensitive without being religious, and Du Bois certainly was one of the most religiously sensitive of the secular thinkers.
CHB: Du Bois wrote an essay entitled “The Revelation of Saint Orgne”—i.e., Negro—“the Damned,” and there is a concept of a new church which, according to Du Bois, should be based on the “word of life from Jeremiah, Shakespeare and Jesus, Buddha and John Brown.”39 And it’s a church organized “with a cooperative store in the Sunday-school room; with physician, dentist, nurse, and lawyer to help serve and defend the congregation; with library, nursery school, and a regular succession of paid and trained lecturers and discussion; they had radio and moving pictures”—now: mark that!—“and out beyond the city a farm with house and lake.”40 That’s his—Orgne’s—concept of a church, and what I think is so interesting about it is what is joined here: not just the secular and Christian traditions but body and soul, mind and body; that is what the church would have to offer to help people come to combine the two, to provide food for body and soul. I have noticed that this concept appears in several of Du Bois’s writings, and I’d like to follow up on that because I don’t think it has been much commented on, though it seems to be part of his later thinking. At first Du Bois counted on the mind exclusively, and then he changed and said, “No, that’s not enough,” and although he does not go as far as you wished him to—namely, to take into account the physical expression in dance and music and so on of the African American tradition—as a concept he expresses it in that new church that he thinks is needed to raise people to a higher level.
CW: I think you are right about that. It reminds me of one of my own favorite figures and thinkers, Nikos Kazantzakis, where you have this kind of self-styled spirituality that appropriates Jesus, Buddha, Lenin, Shakespeare. I mean, it’s quite a heterogeneous coterie of chaps—not too often women actually—who become part of a kind of ecumenical exemplary group of those who constitute grand examples of high-quality living. So it’s the beauty of life, it’s the quality of life, it’s the courage, the freedom that these people exemplify.41 You can go from Socrates to Shakespeare in that regard. And there’s something that I’ve always found fascinating about that, I must say. Again, it has a lot to do with Du Bois’s humanism. He is a thorough-going radically democratic humanist drawing on the Renaissance, on the Enlightenment and the Victorian critics. William Morris was probably the most revolutionary of them, but Ruskin played a role, and certain moments in Arnold, certain moments in Carlyle, certain moments in Hazlitt; those are Du Bois’s intellectual ancestors. I do think that Du Bois would be again relevant for our day because the religious traditions—be they Christian or Islamic or Judaic—if they are not radically Socratized and humanized, then the fundamentalist wings of all three are going to push us into a living hell, which is to say, radically anti-democratic, radically sexist, racist, xenophobic, capitalist hell. Well, I shouldn’t say that radical Islam would be capitalist, though. The fundamental Christians would be capitalist, but not the fundamental Islamic folk; they are just theocratic. Now the fundamentalists in Judaism, that’s interesting. They tend to be free-marketeers, too, in general, though there are theocratic manifestations of it, too.
You can just see how badly we need Du Bois today in the midst of our catastrophic circumstances. There is no doubt about it. We need the rigor of his structural and institutional analysis, the religiously musical sensitivity to the things that religion is wrestling with as opposed to simply the truth claims of the God belief or the truth claims of the faith appropriated by religious people, and, probably more than anything else, his acknowledgement of subaltern peoples and voices, and just how crucial those voices are in helping us come to terms with our crisis. There is a sense in which Du Bois’s witness is such a thoroughgoing indictment of the transatlantic intelligentsia. It really is. If you were to examine much of the intellectual work of the transatlantic intelligentsia—from Europe and the US—there is not just a relative silence around Du Bois’s work but a relative silence about the issues and problematic that Du Bois is coming to terms with. It’s a very sad state of affairs when you look at the kind of pre–Du Boisian condition of much of the transatlantic intelligentsia. And it says much about how far we have not come; how cowardly, how deferential, how careerist, how narrow so many of our beloved colleagues in the academy can be.
CHB: Well, you pay for it. And he paid for it.
CW: Absolutely. There is a cost to be paid. But I love Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarks in his “Honoring Dr. Du Bois” address.42 I recall talking with John Hope Franklin before he died about his decision to attend this event, because when they had the celebration of Du Bois’s birthday at Carnegie Hall, most of the intelligentsia, including Black intellectuals, would not come within a mile or two miles of the gathering; they were just scared. They were afraid; they didn’t want to be tainted with the Communist brush during the anti-Communist hysteria and frenzy that was then taking place. But, thank God, Martin Luther King Jr., along with John Hope Franklin and a few others, had the courage to attend. This is when brother Martin laid out his statement:
We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life, the English-speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O’Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest living poet though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational obsessive anti-Communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking. [. . .] Dr. Du Bois’s greatest virtue was his committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice.43
This is powerful stuff. This is very, very powerful stuff. King is right. Martin King is absolutely right. Good God Almighty.