1. Hugh Price, from a speech delivered at the National Leadership Summit Meeting, November 17, 1995.
I have discussed many of the ideas in this essay with Anthony Appiah, John Kain, Cornel West, and William Julius Wilson. Some of the material appeared in different form in Forbes, Time, and The New Yorker; in addition, I drew on descriptions of my Yale experiences from an essay I wrote in the 1960s for an anthology called Hurdles, edited by Herbert Sacks, M.D. (Atheneum).
1. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 131–32; Harold Cruse, Plural but Equal (New York: William Morrow, 1987).
2. Jennifer L. Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
3. Ibid., p. 79.
4. For a dissenting view, see Adolph Reed, “Race and the Disruption of the New Deal Coalition,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 27, no. 2 (December 1991): 326–33.
5. John Kain, “Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 82 (1968): 175–97; John D. Karsarda, “Urban Change and Minority Opportunities,” in P. E. Peterson, ed., The New Urban Reality (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), pp. 33–68.
6. Douglass Massey and Nancy A. Denton, “Trends in the Residential Segregation of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians: 1970–1980,” American Sociological Review 52, no. 6: 785–801.
7. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The De-Industrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982). For an argument that, in fact, blacks were never well represented in the industrial sector, see Norman Fainstein, “The Underclass/Mismatch Hypothesis as an Explanation for Black Economic Deprivation,” Politics and Society 15, no. 4 (1986–87): 439.
8. Christopher Jencks, Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 124.
9. Herbert J. Gans, The War Against the Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 117–18.
10 Joel F. Handler, The Poverty of Welfare Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 141.
11 Mark Lowery, “The Rise of the Black Professional Class,” Black Enterprise, August 1995, p. 29.
12 Gary Orfield and Carole Ashkinaze, The Closing Door (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 4.
13 “Precisely because the new black middle class is largely a product of government policy, its future is subject to the vagaries of politics,” Stephen Steinberg argues in his Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), P 198.
1. This phrase comes from the first line of Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem”—”I lived in the first century of world wars”—in her book The Speed of Darkness (1968), in A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, ed. Jan Heller Levi (New York: W. W. Norton & Son, 1994), P 2.11 In his magisterial treatment of this most violent of centuries, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914– 1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), Eric Hobsbawm suggests the numbers of this century’s “Megadeath” toll to be 187 million (p. 12). Here he follows the estimate of Z. Brzezinski in Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Scribner, 1993). I think both scholars underestimate the death toll in this “most terrible century in Western history” (Isaiah Berlin’s phrase).
2. In Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), W. E. B. Du Bois writes, “Whatever of racial feeling gradually crept into my life, its effect upon me in these earlier days was rather one of exaltation and high disdain…. [M]y African racial feeling was then purely a matter of my own later learning and reaction….” In W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), pp. 563, 638. See also Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 459–67; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1993), PP. 56–70; and Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), pp. 5–15.
3. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in Writings, p. 852. As Peter Gay rightly notes, “The question of the lower orders is the great unexamined political question of the Enlightenment…. [In the writings of the philosophes there is] snobbery … [there is] a certain failure of imagination … [and there is] a sense of despair at the general wretchedness, illiteracy, and brutishness of the poor.” The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Norton Library, 1969), vol. 2, The Science of Freedom, p. 517.
4. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Fawcett Publications, 1961), pp. 48, 50, 75, 76, 83, 87, 101, 107, 109, 125, 126, 132, 139, 150, 170, 171, 182, 189. The last quote is from Page 80.
5. Ibid., pp. 140–41.
6. In a brilliant essay, Shamoon Zamir makes a similar point about Du Bois. “As Du Bois details his curiosity and excitement at the novelty of the situation, his posture is very much that of an ethnographic participant-observer reporting from the field…. [T]he feelings of the young Du Bois reproduce the same exoticism that led the white middle-class reading public at the turn of the century to seek out works that revealed how ’the other half lived.” Zamir grounds Du Bois’s worldview in The Souls of Black Folk in Victorian moralism, Herderian romanticism, and the historical realism of the gospels (sorrow songs). Zamir suggests that Du Bois’s sense of the tragic goes a bit deeper than I admit—but only a little bit deeper. See Shamoon Zamir, “‘The Sorrow Songs’/ ’Song of Myself: Du Bois, The Crisis of Leadership, and Prophetic Imagination,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 145–66, esp. 147–48. For Zamir’s fascinating, yet ultimately unconvincing Hegelian treatment of Du Bois’s early thought, see Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For Du Bois on jazz, see Kathy J. Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 118–20.
7. For a provocative recent treatment of this age-old dichotomy created by intellectuals—the ultimate logic of which denies the full human status of the majority of people—see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). For direct references to black people—some of which resonate with Du Bois’s—note pp. 52, 65, 121, 125, 148, 194f., 210. Needless to say, most of the figures Carey examines—such as José Ortega y Gasset, Knut Hamsun, T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Machen, George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley—were either arch elitists or outright xenophobes. Du Bois’s democratic sentiments tempered his elitism and xenophobia (e.g., his anti-Jewish stereotypes were toned down in later editions of The Souls of Black Folk). For example, note David Levering Lewis’s analysis in W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 285.
8. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, in Writings, p. 596.
9. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), pp. 221–22.
10 Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 227.
11 This brief tilt toward the tragic in Du Bois’s corpus may be contrasted with that most rare of despairing moments in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s upbeat writings—namely, his often overlooked poem “Threnody,” one of the great elegies in the English language, written in response to the death of his beloved five-year-old first son, Waldo. Note how Emerson wrestles with the overwhelming irrevocability of his son’s death in its opening lines, with no reaching for reason or revelation:
The South-wind brings
Life, sunshine and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire;
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.
12 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 154–55. See also Keith E. Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), PP. 2.9–31
13 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 153.
14 For a fascinating yet unpersuasive reading of this neglected moment in Du Bois which claims that “this suffering has no redemptive moment,” see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 138–39. Gilroy rightly points out that Du Bois experiences “an awful gladness in my heart…. No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil! … Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrows for you” (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 156). Yet the first sentence of the chapter—”Unto you a child is born”—invokes Jesus of Nazareth (that most redemptive of figures). Du Bois also hears “in his baby voice the voice of the Prophet that was to rise within the Veil” while his son is alive. And he vows that his son’s death “is not the end. Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free. Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,—but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning … some morning….” (p. 156). This certainly is Du Bois in a tragic mood, yet his Enlightenment eschatology—with a small dose of Stoicism—gets the best of him. Like Candide in that marvelous Enlightenment novelette Candide (1759) by the inimitable Voltaire, even in the midst of the deepest tragedies and absurdities, cultivation can still generate a harvest, rational control and moral action can still yield fruit down the road. In fact, Du Bois’s salvific sentiments provide more hope for the future than Voltaire’s witty and resilient Stoicism. Only Du Bois’s incredible and torturous prayer in response to the Atlanta Riot—his classic “A Litany of Atlanta” (1906)—explores the tragic and absurd depths of the human condition. His desperate call for moral integrity and political action in the face of the “white terror” of human suffering and divine silence, as well as his embrace of the “dark sleep,” is one instance in his corpus where he engages in the existential deep-sea diving of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kafka, Coltrane, and Morrison. For this sterling performance, see James Melvin Washington’s canonical text, Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 102–4. Washington’s profound “Afterword: A Scholar’s Benediction” captures my own Christian tragicomic sense of life—a sense grounded in the Christocentric humanism of Erasmus, Kierkegaard, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the tormented love ethic of Tennessee Williams, Leo Tolstoy, and Toni Morrison; and the indefatigable compassion of Anton Chekhov, Muriel Rukeyser, and John Coltrane. My own perennial wrestling with existential tension in history is deeply influenced by the profound corpus of Eric Voegelin.
15. For Du Bois’s direct debt to the father of Victorian social criticism, Thomas Carlyle, see Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 74–75, 77, 78, 115–16, 120, 136, 148. The best general treatment of Carlyle’s life and work is Fred Kaplan’s Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
16 Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in Writings, pp. 842, 861.
17 Du Bois’s critique of patriarchy—black and white—grows and deepens in the course of his long career. For instance, see his 1920 classic essay, “The Damnation of Women,” from Darkwater, in Writings, pp. 952–68.
18 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 70.
19 Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in Writings, pp. 846, 847.
20 For superb synoptic treatments of two exemplary figures, see Thomas C. Holt, “The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership,” in Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 39–61; and Joseph P. Reidy, “Aaron A. Bradley: The Voice of Black Labor in the Georgia Lowcountry,” in Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era, ed. Howard N. Rabinowitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 281–308.
21 Du Bois acknowledges this fact in Dusk of Dawn (in Writings, p. 690): “It still remains possible in the United States for a white American to be a gentleman and a scholar, a Christian and a man of integrity, and yet flatly and openly refuse to treat as a fellow human being any person who has Negro ancestry.” As in Leo Tolstoy’s magnificent short story “After the Ball” (1903), in which a genteel old colonel masks his hatred and cruelty toward a lower-class person, this paradox and hypocrisy undermines one of the crucial “truths” of the Enlightenment worldview and Victorian social criticism.
22 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth: Memorial Address” (1948), in A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995), p. 349.
23 Ibid., p. 350.
24 Two neglected gems in the rich Victorian tradition of social criticism especially pertinent in our precatastrophic postmodern times are L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (1904) and C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (1909). In the former text, Hobhouse—a great anti-imperialist democrat of Edwardian England—echoes Du Bois’s famous claim that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” In the latter book, Masterman—the sagacious critic of English self-deception just prior to World War I—writes,
Humanity—at best—appears but as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge of rock, beaten by wind and wave; which cannot tell how many, if any at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning. The wise man will still go softly all his days; working always for greater economic equality on the one hand, for understanding between estranged peoples on the other; apprehending always how slight an effort of stupidity or violence could strike a death blow to twentieth-century civilization, and elevate the forces of destruction triumphant over the ruins of a world. (London: Methuen & Co., 1909; p. 233)
25 George Steiner, “A Responsion,” in Reading George Steiner, ed. Nathan A. Scott, Jr., and Ronald A. Sharp (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 278. Steiner’s critical attitude toward the academy echoes that of the grand old (Canadian-born) Harvard humanist Douglas Bush. His 1966 book on the greatest nineteenth-century English poet, John Keats, is one of the best we have, and his 1939 Alexander Lectures lament the loss of the “general reader.” In the latter he states,
One may wonder, timidly, if a real revival of the humanities might not be inaugurated by a moratorium on productive scholarship … long enough to restore our perspective and sense of value. What a golden interlude we might have, with the learned journals temporarily withdrawn, with no scholarly lucubrations to read or write, no annual bibliographies to torment us with hundreds of things we must know if we are to be qualified to lead hopeful young men into the same labyrinth, with nothing to do, in short, but sit down in peace with the great books we ought to be soaking in!… In front of my desk are serried rows of card-indexes, bibliographies, and periodicals. Out of sight behind me are Holbein’s portraits of Erasmus and More., “Saint Socrates, pray for us.” (Quoted from Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1939], pp. 132–33)
For one of the most powerful critiques of professionalized cultural studies in this century, see Geoffrey Scott’s classic The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (1914; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974).
26. For a brief examination of the slow demise of American exceptionalism in American historiography, see David W. Noble, The End of American History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985). Note also Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1993): pp. 1-43.
27 Du Bois confronts this pessimism most strikingly in two of the most insightful and angry essays in his corpus—”The White World,” in Dusk of Dawn (1940), and “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater (1920). These essays echo the themes in the work of the grand dean of Pan-African Studies in America, John Henrik Clarke. But in neither essay does Du Bois openly acknowledge that a long tradition of black cultural and revolutionary nationalists had already arrived where he seemed to be headed. Harold Cruse makes this persuasive argument in his classic work, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1967), pp. 330–36. For Du Bois’s essays, see Writings, pp. 652–80, 923–38.
28 Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America of 1843,” in Black Nationalism in America, ed. John Bracey, August Meier, and Elliot Rudwick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 73.
29 It is no accident that these two groups serve as major preoccupations of the two towering European men of letters in our time—Isaiah Berlin and George Steiner. The recent revival around Berlin focuses on his pluralistic liberal political thought, but his greatness resides in his deep and empathetic interpretations of Russian intellectuals such as Turgenev, Belinsky, Bakunin, and especially Herzen and Tolstoy. His powerful readings of Vico, Herder, and de Maistre—though canonical—pale in the face of his self-invested and magisterial treatments of Tolstoy. In fact, his most famous essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (originally entitled, in its shorter form, “Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism”), is the best example of philosophic phronesis (practical wisdom) in this blood-drenched century. Section 6 of this magnificent essay—the pinnacle of his masterful corpus—represents the highest form of philosophic literature written in twentieth-century Europe—and Tolstoy is his major springboard. This essay, to be read and reread, is found in Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York: Viking Press, 1978), pp. 22–81, esp. 68–74. George Steiner’s gallant attempt to focus our attention on early twentieth-century Central European figures such as Hermann Broch, Paul Celan, Arnold Schoenberg, Robert Musil, Sigmund Freud, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Franz Kafka is monumental and has yielded much fruit. For example, recent interest in Musil—due in part to the new edition of his novel The Man Without Qualities (1930), including previously unpublished sections, and of his timely essays, Precision and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), ed. Burton Pike and David S. Luft—is growing. A Broch revival centered on his masterpiece, The Death of Virgil (1945), may be next. Yet Steiner’s project began with the Russians—that is, with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Shestov. His first book was Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1959)—Tolstoy as Homeric bard vs. Dostoyevsky as tragic dramatist in response to the “dilemma of Realism” created by Dickens, Hugo, Stendhal, Zola, and Flaubert. And the great work of Shestov (whose first book was on Shakespeare), Athens and Jerusalem, deeply influenced him. Steiner notes, “The nearing shadow of Hitler made me…. [T]he dialectic of ‘Athens/Jerusalem’ has been perennial throughout my teaching and published work.” And notwithstanding his marvellous readings of Kafka—a figure who shunned noise and music—Steiner states, “The question ‘what in the world is music like?’ has become for me the metaphysical inquiry incarnate…. [I]t is, in Levi-Strauss’s arresting formulation, the invention of melody which remains the mystère suprême des sciences de l’homme” See Steiner, “A Responsion,” in Reading George Steiner, pp. 276, 280, 283, 284. Note the brilliant essays pertinent to my concerns in this superb volume by Robert Boyers, Guido Almansi, Ruth Padel, Edith Wyschogrod, John Bayley, and especially Caryl Emerson. For a seminal effort to connect black arts to nineteenth-century Russian literature—in a call for “universalized particularity”—see Alain Locke, “Self-Criticism: The Third Dimension in Culture,” Phylon II (1950): pp. 391–94. My attempt to link the situation in fin-de-siècle Russia, early twentieth-century Central Europe, and late twentieth-century black America rests in part on possible connections between Tolstoy, Kafka, and black artists like John Coltrane and Toni Morrison. For a brief contrast of Tolstoy and Kafka, see Pietro Citati, Tolstoy (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 223–25. For fascinating and suggestive connections between Tolstoy, Chekhov, and jazz, note Nabokov’s pregnant remarks about the distinctive genius of Tolstoy—his “time-balance”; “his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window”; “Tolstoy’s prose keeps pace with our pulses”; or “the perfectly natural swing” in Chekhov’s The Seagull. This characterization resonates with the formal improvisational freedom, “metrical adventurousness,” verbal playfulness, and syncopated responsiveness associated with black cultural expression—especially its most sophisticated artistic works, such as those of John Coltrane and Toni Morrison. Note Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1981), pp. 141–42, 282. An important historical treatment of the evolution of black culture is Roger D. Abrahams’s Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Penguin Books, 1992). The best recent synoptic treatment of the origins of black culture is Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). A more interpretive examination of black music is Leroi Jones’s classic, Blues People (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1963). The complex relation of the world-historical efforts of Tolstoy and Kafka to those of Armstrong, Ellington, Coltrane, and Morrison to transfigure sadness and sorrow into great art based on meticulous explorations of the quotidian realities of degraded and devalued peoples requires serious inquiry in the future. How do we account for these three incredible artistic peaks—Russian novelistic and theatrical preeminence, Central European literary and epistolary achievements, and twentieth-century black musical and literary supremacy—in late modernity?
30 Du Bois’s debt to Goethe’s Faust was profound. And the word “striving” was—along with “enjoyment”—the most Faustian of terms, rooted in Goethe’s own idiosyncratic theory of entelechy in nature and man. “Striving” consists of a fundamental human urge to embrace the world and takes the form of self-expression in thought and, above all, action. The famous last words of Faust in Goethe’s incomparable modern epic poem are worth quoting here—they get at the heart and core of Du Bois’s worldview:
Yes—this I hold to with devout insistence,
Wisdom’s last verdict goes to say:
He only earns both freedom and existence
Who must reconquer them each day.
And so, ringed all about by perils, here
Youth, manhood, age will spend their strenuous year.
Such teeming would I see upon this land,
On acres free among free people stand.
I might entreat the fleeting minute:
Oh tarry yet, thou art so fair!
My path on earth, the trace I leave within it
Eons untold cannot impair.
Foretasting such high happiness to come,
I savor now my striving’s crown and sum.
For Du Bois’s special love for Goethe’s work and his advice to Fisk University students and graduates to immerse themselves in Goethe in order to expedite “the rise of the Negro people,” see Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 139. For a comprehensive and incisive reading of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk as itself a “striving” in the form of a textual performance and narrative experiment in dramatic form, see Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, pp. 457—539.
31 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 15. Du Bois’s allusion to a European poet’s powerful metaphor of crying seems to echo the opening of Anna Julia Cooper’s classic A Voice from the South (1892)—the first major work of a black woman of letters in the U.S., which inspired the powerful writings of black women intellectuals like bell hooks, Patricia Williams, Deborah McDowell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Alice Walker, Katie Cannon, Hazel Carby, Michele Wallace, Paula Giddings, Wahneema Lubiano, Hortense Spillers, Angela Davis, Tricia Rose, Valerie Smith, and Farah Griffin in our day. In the preface, Cooper begins,
In the clash and clatter of our American Conflict, it has been said that the South remains Silent. Like the Sphinx she inspires vociferous disputation, but herself takes little part in the noisy controversy. One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza, has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black woman,
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light.
And with no language—but a cry.
Cooper’s explicit allusion to the self-description of nineteenth-century Europe’s great lyrical poet Alfred Tennyson—with his themes of the terror of loneliness and the preoccupation with death—resonates with the beginning of Du Bois’s text. W. H. Auden’s famous characterization of Tennyson seems to apply to the existential starting points of both Cooper and Du Bois:
Two questions: Who am I? Why do I exist? and the panic fear of their remaining unanswered—doubt is much too intellectual and tame a term for such a vertigo of anxiety—seem to have obsessed him all his life….
Tennyson became conscious in childhood of Hamlet’s problem, the religious significance of his own experience.
In short, the black predicament first emerged as Hamlet’s problem—the radical contingency of life, the sheer indifference of nature, and human destructive thought and self-destructive action. Like the Russian intellectuals’ obsession with Hamlet—from Turgenev’s torment in his influential essay on Hamlet (and Don Quixote) in 1860 to Tolstoy’s scorn in his infamous renunciation of Shakespeare in 1906 and Kafka’s appreciation of Shakespeare (thanks to his Anglophilic friend Emil Weiss), despite his disorientating experience of seeing Albert Bassermann perform Hamlet in Berlin in 1910—the tragedies and absurdities bombarding black people in the New World made Hamlet’s problem even more intense and urgent. In Tennyson’s case, this intensity and urgency was due in part to an unhappy childhood at home and school (Louth Grammar School) and the early death of his best friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. For the quote in Anna Julia Cooper, see A Voice from the South, introduction by Mary Helen Washington, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gen. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. i. For W. H. Auden’s quotes, see “Tennyson,” in Forewords and Afterwords (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), pp. 228, 229. For Kafka’s brush with Shakespeare, see Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), pp. 127, 217; and Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka: Representative Man (New York: Fromm International, 1991), pp. 252, 259. Hamlet’s famous lines “The time is out of joint—O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” and “To be, or not to be, that is the question” are fundamental themes in black strivings. This is why flight and flow—migration and emigration, experimentation and improvisation—are so basic to black history and life. And also why Hamlet’s motifs of mourning and revenge are two dominant elements in the black cultural and political unconscious.
32 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 15.
33 Ibid.
34 This vicious white supremacist reduction makes it difficult for black people to discuss and display their full humanity and variety among themselves—most clearly seen in the underdeveloped discourse on black sexuality in our era of AIDS. The formidable example of black gay intellectuals like the late Marlon Riggs and Kendall Thomas and black lesbian intellectuals such as the late Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith is indispensable in resisting this inhumane reduction.
35 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: New American Library, 1951), p. 7.
36 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 148.
37 Ibid., p. 149.
38 Ibid., p. 150.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
41 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: New American Library, 1987), P. 140.
42 Ibid., p. 251.
43 Ibid.
44 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 156.
45 James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1953), pp. 137–38.
46 Like Nina’s precious words at the end of Chekhov’s The Seagull, “Know how to bear your cross and have faith,” or Irina’s at the conclusion of The Three Sisters, “I’ll give my whole life to those who may need it.”
47 Morrison, Beloved, pp. 87, 88–89.
48 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 157.
49 Ibid., p. 158.
50 Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper & Row, 1940), pp. 20–21.
51 Ibid., pp. 285–86.
52 Ibid., p. 275.
53. Ibid., p. 277. Note Wright’s allusion to “the last best hope of earth”—”America”—in Lincoln’s famous message to Congress on December 1, 1862: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” See Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. v.
54 Wright, Native Son, p. 268.
55 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 159.
56 Needless to say, this theme of bondage applies above all to those obsessed not simply with oppression but with the sheer concrete fact and potency of evil. Bigger’s existential nihilism—his inability to run from himself (including the white supremacy in him)—echoes that of Ahab in Melville’s classic Moby-Dick (1851), Attwater in Robert Louis Stevenson’s late masterpiece, The Ebb-Tide (1894), and Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s famous Heart of Darkness (1902).
57 Wright, Native Son, pp. 22–23.
58 Ibid., p. 388.
59 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 146.
60 Wright, Native Son, pp. 237, 238.
61 Ellison, Invisible Man, p. 11. For a fuller and richer elaboration of this Ellisonian insight, the classic works of Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues and The Hero and the Blues, are peerless.
62 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 161.
63 Wright, Native Son, pp. 109–10.
64 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 164.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., pp. 164–65.
67 Ibid., pp. 23, 41.
68 Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). See also Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Random House, 1995).
69 For a powerful treatment of the negative impact of globalization on the most disadvantaged and vulnerable human beings on the globe, see Herb Addo (the major exponent of neoradical creative pessimism), “The Convulsive Historical Moment: Considerations from a Neoradical Third World Perspective,” Macalaster International 1 (Spring 1995): pp. 115–48. Addo’s sophisticated Neo-Marxism leads him to conclude: “1) History is not just any old absurdity, but a patently silly absurdity; 2) global life is not only just a drama, but a dark drama; and 3) the Third World role in both is not just any old invigorating happy laughing farce, but a huge bad-humored farce” (p. 115). This apocalyptic—yet far from outlandish—prospect is also entertained in Giovanni Arrighi’s magisterial The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Old Times (New York: Verso, 1994), in which he concludes that humanity “may well burn up in the horrors (or glories) of the escalating violence that has accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world order. In this case, capitalist history would also come to an end but by reverting permanently to the systemic chaos from which it began six hundred years ago and which has been reproduced on an ever-increasing scale with each transition. Whether this would mean the end just of capitalist history or of all human history, it is impossible to tell” (p. 356). Eric Hobsbawm reaches similar conclusions—but with a small dose of English reticence: “Our world risks both explosion and implosion. It must change…. If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness” (Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 585). The most recent erudite world historian to look into the future and risk the curse of Cassandra is Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, who claims that “the day of democracy looks as if it has arrived, but it will prove to be a false dawn or a short spell of wintry light…. [Recrudescent fascism is the great political menace of the near future…. Ethnic enmity is likely to continue to be a breaker of states.… [I]t seems inevitable that in the next century the world will experience more rounds of ethnic cleansing … the massacres will be bloodier and the conflicts more prolonged…. [T]he world, I feel tempted to conclude, will go on getting worse.” Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Scribner, 1995), pp. 726, 727, 732, 736. Thomas M. Callaghy and John Ravenhill desperately attempt to temper such pessimism in “Vision, Politics, and Structure: Afro-Optimism, Afro-Pessimism or Realism?” and “How Hemmed In? Lessons and Prospects of Africa’s Responses to Decline,” in Hemmed In: Responses to Africa’s Economic Decline, ed. Thomas M. Callaghy and John Ravenhill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), PP. 1–17, 520–63.
70 For the incredible empirical figures revealing the disparity between the wealthy and others, see Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), pp. 7, 10, 11. For the two most important books on the decay of American democracy concealed by the political rule of liberal and especially right-wing elites, see the work of the progressive populist William Greider, Who Will Tell the People?: The Betrayal of American Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); and that of the conservative populist Kevin Phillips, Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats, and the Decline of Middle-Class Prosperity (New York: Random House, 1993).
71 Quoted from Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 345.
72 A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988), p. 257.
73 Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason, pp. 368, 427-30. Kafka writes, “I realized that if I somehow wanted to go on living, I had to do something quite radical, and so I decided to emigrate to Palestine. I probably would not have been able to do so; I am also quite unprepared in Hebrew and in other respects, but I simply had to have hope of some kind to latch on to.” Although Kafka was not a Zionist, he might well have emigrated to Palestine if tuberculosis of the larynx had not ended his short life. Like John Coltrane, Franz Kafka died at forty.