§5

W. E. B. Du Bois Double-Consciousness, Jamesian Sympathy, and the Cosmopolitan

The Souls of Black Folk is W. E. B. Du Bois’s most famous work. It is a short book, representing a small portion of his oeuvre.1 It is a relatively early work, composed in large measure of previously published pieces. The famous first chapter, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” was published originally as “The Strivings of the Negro People” in 1897, some six years before Souls.² This was during the period that Du Bois was researching one of his first major sociological studies, The Philadelphia Negro, seven years after he had graduated from Harvard, and a mere three years after graduate study in Germany.³ He was a young man, at the beginning of a turbulent career that would extend into the 1960s.

The Souls of Black Folk has remained his most influential and widely read book, although Du Bois appears to have had some ambivalence about it. In his own review of the book, published a year after Souls, he states,

One who is born with a cause is predestined to a certain narrowness of view, and at the same time to some clearness of vision within his limits with which the world often finds it well to reckon. My book has many of the defects and some of the advantages of this situation. Because I am a Negro I lose something of that breadth of view which the more cosmopolitan races have, and with this goes an intensity of feeling and conviction which both wins and repels sympathy, and now enlightens, now puzzles.... This is not saying that the style and workmanship of the book make its meaning altogether clear.... Nevertheless, as the feeling is deep the greater the impelling force to seek to express it. And here the feeling was deep.

In its larger aspects the style is topical—African. This needs no apology. The blood of my fathers spoke through me and cast off the English restraint of my training and surroundings. The resulting accomplishment is a matter of taste. Sometimes I think very well of it and sometimes I do not.⁴

I have quoted this self-review at some length because it not only addresses Du Bois’s feelings about the book, at least in 1904, but also reflects several of the themes that will be addressed in this chapter—sympathy, race, and a Du Boisian notion of cosmopolitanism. As is well known, Du Bois took a turn toward Marxism later in his career. At the time he wrote Souls, his politics might be described as a progressive conservatism or a conservative progressivism. Commentators have different views on the extent to which Du Bois’s early work is consistent with his later neo-Marxism. For example, Adolph L. Reed Jr. argues, “[T]hroughout his career Du Bois’s writings rested on a conceptual foundation that is compatible with the collectivist outlook and ... this orientation is evident in his attitudes about the importance of science in social affairs and the proper organization of the Afro-American population as well as in his specific concerns with political positions, such as Pan-Africanism and socialism.”⁵

Defending or criticizing a claim of this nature is beyond the scope of this chapter. The goal here is more modest. I will argue that the philosophical and conceptual underpinnings of Souls can be located in four sources: (1) Williams James’s interpretation of the Scottish theories of sympathy and impartiality; (2) notions of cultural or racial differences that can be traced back to Herder; (3) Hegel’s concepts of recognition and self-consciousness; and (4) Du Bois’s situated experience as an African American. In this chapter I will not be able to supply all of the biographical and historiographical material that would demonstrate that Du Bois was self-consciously drawing on these traditions. But I will supply sufficient textual and circumstantial evidence to defend the plausibility of this claim. Further, my goal is not simply archeological. I will argue that in Souls—specifically, in the passages in which he addresses the notion of double-consciousness—Du Bois moves beyond his own very nineteenth-century assumptions about race and provides a critical edge for rethinking theories of sentiment and sympathy that have informed Anglo-American ethical traditions. In doing so, he speaks to current debates regarding whether the sources of ethical life are best understood in terms of reciprocity. Souls also remains compelling because Du Bois is seeking to find a path that will allow him to respect and pay homage to cultural differences, to the particular, while defending the notion of a common humanity that informs this respect. The resolution of this seeming tension relates to the question of the reconciliation of the universal and the particular. How Du Bois tackles this issue not only looks back to the previous chapter but looks ahead to later chapters in which challenges to notions of self-determination and transcendence are addressed.

One of the central goals of Souls is to have its readership—in Du Bois’s day primarily an educated Anglo audience—appreciate what it means to live behind what Du Bois refers to as “the Veil,” where he locates the world of black experience. Du Bois stresses that he has been on both sides of the Veil, as well as above it. “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.... And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?”⁶ Du Bois hopes that if his audience can feel something of what he has felt, of what blacks in America have experienced, he will invoke a natural sympathy. Along with this sympathy, reason will play a vital role in helping us to overcome prejudice. Here are two passages from Souls, one that emphasizes reason; the other, sympathy and feeling.

The nineteenth century was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhopper and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, “Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?” And then all helplessly peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, “O World of Worlds, how shall man make you one?” ⁷

Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly.... They can be met in but one way,—by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture.⁸

Some readers have been perplexed by the appeal to reason and to feeling in Souls, as if one had to choose one course over the other. However, if reason is understood as the rationality of the broad-minded and catholic impartial spectator—an understanding that Du Bois would have inherited from William James and the Scottish tradition and that is implicit in the passage just cited—then a good deal of the seeming tension evaporates.

Du Bois studied with William James at Harvard for two years, from 1888 to 1890. James’s seminal Principles of Psychology was published in 1890. In Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, Shamoon Zamir argues that in spite of Du Bois’s own proclamations regarding his indebtedness to James, the relationship was a complex one from the start. No doubt Du Bois shared many of James’s vitalist and volunteerist sensibilities during the period in which he wrote Souls, but even when he was James’s student, he may have begun to raise questions about James’s ahistoricism.⁹ Zamir also argues that while James certainly appealed to the notion of an impartial spectator and sympathy in his ethics, Du Bois’s “own recourse to sympathetic understanding ... is closer to Boasian attempts at crosscultural understanding than it is to James’s attitudes.”¹⁰ Zamir’s position is well founded because James’s ethical and political attitudes do not develop in the direction of sympathetic attachments to other cultures and their historical trajectories, as they do for Du Bois. Yet James’s influence, and through him the Scottish theorists of sentiment, in particular Adam Smith, do play an important role in the psychological assumptions that inform Souls. It is because individuals have “Jamesian” souls, selves, that it is possible to motivate them to recognize cultural differences and move beyond parochialism. James’s ideal self, a broad-minded impartial spectator, can help overcome prejudice and inspire African Americans to self-actualize, and it can help Anglos better understand the potentialities of another race. James’s orientation also helps account for the manner in which reason or impartiality and feeling are interwoven in Du Bois’s text. So before turning to the cultural and racial dimension of Du Bois’s thought, and to the notion of double-consciousness, which has Hegelian roots, I explore in some depth James’s account of the self in The Principles.

For those attuned to think of the self as a unitary phenomenon, James has a surprise in store in The Principles. In “The Consciousness of Self,” he begins by speaking of multiple selves, which should be viewed as empirical: the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self; and a metaphysical pure ego. James remains agnostic about the pure ego. He will tell us at the end of the chapter that there may be metaphysical reasons for accepting a pure ego, whether in its spiritualist or transcendental incarnations, but this would carry “us beyond the psychological or naturalistic point of view.”¹¹ The material self is easy enough to understand. In this category we find the body, clothes, family, and home. “All these different things are the objects of instinctive preferences coupled with the most important practical interests of life” (PP, 292). Here we should think of the body and its parts as a possession. For James there is “an ... instinctive impulse” that “drives us to collect property” (293), which becomes part of our empirical self.¹² Further, following in John Locke’s footsteps, James declares, “The parts of our wealth most intimately ours are those which are saturated with our labor” (293).

One might think that some of the things that James includes under the material self—clothing and property, for instance—should fall under the social dimension of the self, especially since James defines “a man’s social self” in terms of “the recognition which he gets from his mates” (293). But let us leave aside the question of what should be denominated as material, and turn directly to the social. Generally speaking, the social is the domain of the acknowledgment or recognition of our actions and activities by others. There are in fact multiple social selves. “Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him” (294). This observation is clearly one that Du Bois employs in discussing the damage done to the psyche of African Americans through the lack of appropriate recognition by Anglos. James also claims that the images that others have of an individual fall into classes, so “we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups” (294).¹³ Du Bois utilizes this insight in Souls when he reflects on the ways in which African Americans have related to different social groups. And as we shall see, it is also an insight that sets the stage for Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness. Finally, the spiritual self should be viewed in terms of psychic dispositions or faculties,¹⁴ for example, “our ability to argue and discriminate ... our moral sensibility and conscience, ... our indomitable will” (296).¹⁵

There is a hierarchy of selves: the merely bodily at the lowest level, the spiritual at the highest, with the extracorporeal material and social selves ranged similarly in the middle (313, 291–329). According to James, we learn to subordinate our lower selves to our higher selves. How does this happen? James tells us that there is a kind of moral education of the race, as well as direct ethical judgments (whose genealogy is not specified). And there are also judgments “called forth by the acts of others” (314). Here James borrows directly from the Scottish tradition. Our encounters with others lead us to judge ourselves and to develop a higher moral self. “But having constantly to pass judgment on my associates, I come ... to see ... my own lusts in the mirror of the lusts of others, and to think about them in a very different way from that in which I simply feel ” (314).

James tells us that for each sort of self (material, social, and spiritual) there is a degree of potentiality for growth, for a widening of the self, that requires us to forgo immediate rewards. “Of all these wider, more potential selves, the potential social self is the most interesting ... by reason of its connection with our moral and religious life” (315). James goes on to declare,

I am always inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now. The ideal social self which I thus seek in appealing to their decision may be very remote.... Yet still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion, if such companion there be. This self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent Me which I seek. This judge is God, the Absolute Mind, the “Great Companion.” ... The impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an ideal world. (315–316)

Now this is an intriguing turn. Not only do we appear to have left the merely empirical for the ideal, but there is a tension present. On the one hand, the spiritual self we are told is the highest self, the most personal aspect of one’s self, the sphere of conscience and will. On the other hand, the realm of morality, the realm in which we judge our actions to have moral worth, can be viewed as an extrapolation or development of our social self. And further, there is an inevitable press to the religious from within the social. “All progress in the social Self is the substitution of higher tribunals for lower; this ideal tribunal is the highest; and most men, either continually or occasionally carry a reference to it in their breast. The humblest outcast on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid by pursuit of this higher recognition” (316).

Once one starts down the path of seeking recognition, there seems to be a natural progression to an ideal sphere, one in which God recognizes one’s actions. This is not to suggest that James dismisses the empirically spiritual. It is to ask how we are to understand the genesis of the moral self. If one remains nonmetaphysical, then it appears that James’s examination of the self leads him in the direction of the social genesis of Adam Smith’s man within the breast, the impartial spectator.

For James, the development of this wider, ideal, impartial self is linked to broadening our horizons through sympathy, and it would be impossible to develop this “wider” self if we were incapable of basic sympathetic attachments to others, that is, if we lacked an ability to place ourselves in the positions of others, what I have referred to as “empathy.” Without sympathy or empathy, the impartial spectator could not evolve. Impartiality is equated here with a form of cosmopolitanism, a broadening of one’s horizons, a capacity for seeing things from the vantage point of others. In addition, sympathy, in the sense of compassion for others, assists in the growth of the self through felt relations. Du Bois utilizes both notions of sympathy in Souls, that is, empathy (the taking of the perspectives of others) and compassion. These notions are seemingly blended in the following passage from James’s Principles, which helps shed light on some of Du Bois’s assumptions in Souls. In reading James’s words, consider how Du Bois may have viewed their applicability to the children and grandchildren of freed slaves and the white southerners of his generation.

All narrow people intrench their Me, they retract it.... People who don’t resemble them, or who treat them with indifference, people over whom they gain no influence, are people on whose existence, however meritorious it may intrinsically be, they look with chill negation, if not with positive hate. Who will not be mine I will exclude from existence altogether; that is, as far I can make it so, such people shall be as if they were not. Thus may a certain absoluteness and definiteness in the outline of my Me console me for the smallness of its content. Sympathetic people, on the contrary, proceed by the entirely opposite way of expansion and inclusion. The outline of their self often gets uncertain enough, but for this the spread of its content more than atones. Nil humani a me alienum. Let them despise this little person of mine, and treat me like a dog, I shall not negate them so long as I have a soul in my body. They are realities as much as I am. What positive good is in them shall be mine too, etc., etc. (312–313)

Du Bois was in basic agreement with the sentiments that James espoused in the passage, which is evident in the passage quoted earlier, which began, “The nineteenth century was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself.” However, Du Bois understood that this broadening of the self is seriously undermined, if not made impossible, by the Color Line. As long as the Veil is present, one cannot sympathize with the other. Thus, the Color Line limits the “expansion” of the self, which as we saw in Chapter 4, Mead also promoted. But the issue for Du Bois is not only a matter of getting individuals to expand their horizons by sympathizing with individuals who are members of other races. It is a matter of understanding that individuals have identities that are tied to their membership in a race, and these races have a life of their own. We must learn to recognize and treat other races, as well as individuals, “sympathetically.”

Du Bois accepts the notion that there are great races, and he supports the actualization of the potentialities of these different races. As Siegland Lemke points out, there is good reason to believe that Du Bois was directly familiar with and influenced by Herder (whose ideas certainly found their way into nineteenth-century German letters).¹⁶ It’s worth comparing Herder’s words with those of Du Bois. First, Herder from Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, and then Du Bois from a talk that he gave in 1897 to the American Negro Academy.

In every one of their inventions, whether of peace or war, and even in all the faults and barbarities that nations have committed, we discern the grand law of nature: let man be man; let him mould his condition according as to himself shall seem best. For this nations took possession of their land, and established themselves in it as they could.... Thus we every where find mankind possessing and exercising the right of forming themselves to a kind of humanity, as soon as they have discerned it.¹⁷

The following are the first two of seven points that Du Bois recommends as a creed for the Academy.

1. We believe that the Negro people, as a race, have a contribution to make to civilization and humanity, which no other race can make.
2. We believe it the duty of the Americans of Negro descent, as a body, to maintain their race identity until this mission of the Negro people is accomplished, and the ideal of human brotherhood has become a practical possibility.¹⁸

It appears that Du Bois relies not only on a Herderian notion of Volk and its right to self-determination but also on a Herderian notion of Humanity (Menschheit or Humanität) in order to give African Americans their due as a people and to argue for their contribution to a common humanity. According to Frank E. Manuel, “For Herder Humanity is one, and a Volk—unless corrupted (this is the implicit caveat)—can express only fully human values and ideas. Progress is the gradual expression of all possible Volk configurations.”¹⁹ While it is true that Herder views this process as unfolding over time, the central moral imperative of his vision is close to that of Du Bois in the period in which he wrote Souls.²⁰ The dignity of each race is linked to a common humanity that finds expression through each race. For Du Bois, it appears that Jamesian sympathy combined with the rationality of the broad-minded impartial spectator, and a Herderian notion of Humanity, are sufficient to generate the interracial communication and respect that he supports. And if Anglos in the United States developed these sensibilities, it would allow African Americans the space to nurture their own culture.

Yet Du Bois himself questions this conclusion through his analysis of double-consciousness in the first chapter of Souls. The sort of sympathy or impartiality that we have been discussing thus far suggests that reciprocity can be achieved through a degree of goodwill and education. However, the experience of double-consciousness undermines this goal. With the introduction of the notion of double-consciousness, Du Bois takes his place in a tradition that extends back at least to Rousseau, one that addresses the damage to the psyches, the “souls,” of those who have been debased by slavery and servitude. For Du Bois, the threats to the self-actualization of black peoples and individuals are due not only to the explicit barriers of Jim Crow and apartheid but also to the psychological repercussions of racism.

Zamir argues that Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness can be directly linked to Hegel’s analysis of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit.²¹ Specifically, he argues that we should understand double-consciousness as a form of “unhappy consciousness,” the mode of consciousness with which Hegel closes the section on self-consciousness. There is a good deal of evidence that Du Bois had studied the Phenomenology . In all likelihood this study took place with George Santayana during Du Bois’s second year at Harvard.²² No doubt Zamir is correct regarding Hegel’s influence. However, it is misleading to tie Du Bois’s double-consciousness to Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness.”²³ The latter entails a split between the changeable and the unchangeable; it is a religious consciousness that is lost to itself. Du Bois is drawing in a more general way on the alienation and doubleness found throughout the section, especially in the master-slave dialectic, as well as on Hegel’s notion of recognition.²⁴

In brief, the Hegelian background to Du Bois’s discussion can be located in the development of self-consciousness for Hegel. To be self-conscious requires a split within oneself; there is a distance between the consciousness that is aware and that of which it is aware. This consciousness experiences itself as alienated from itself and the world. In the master-slave dialectic, we discover that the “splitting” of self-consciousness results in the master’s “essence” being found outside the master in the slave, and vice versa. The goal is to overcome this alienation of self in the other. This will occur only in a society in which mutual recognition is present, and Hegel provides a foretaste of this mutuality in the Phenomenology when he declares, “What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is—this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I.’”²⁵

Du Bois drew on Hegel’s dialectical account of the alienation of the individual’s consciousness from itself. This does not mean that he forsook the Jamesian view of the self as potentially an ideal, impartial self. Rather, he used Hegel and James to augment each other. Hegel demonstrated how a consciousness could be divided and experienced as a “twoness,” and Du Bois drew on his insights in one of the most famous passages of Souls.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born within a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true selfconsciousness, 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, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—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.²⁶

The problem is clear. If one has to expend too much of one’s resources trying to see oneself through the eyes of the other, one loses oneself or one becomes split, a divided self. So the Jamesian model, and Mead’s for that matter, which claims that impartiality is nurtured through individuals taking multiple perspectives, must come to terms with the reality that seeing oneself through the eyes of others can in fact be a damaging experience. Under certain conditions the self can as easily become alienated from itself as it can be led to expand its horizons through taking the perspectives of others.

Those who have a double-consciousness are in a unique position to achieve the impartiality of the spectator because of a heightened awareness of otherness and multiplicity. This in fact can be a resource for marginalized peoples. Multiple standpoints can lead to a breadth of vision and insight not possessed by dominant groups. Yet this advantage can be undermined through the alienation inherent in dominant/subordinate relationships. The participants in these relationships are not disembodied spirits. Those who are subordinate become frustrated and angry at those who compel them to see the world as they do. Du Bois confronts us with how asymmetry in power relations, which in his analysis is tied to racism, can undermine the best intentions of actors regarding sympathetic or impartial responses to others. To state the obvious, one cannot expect individuals to respond sympathetically under the yoke of oppression. In fact, the oppressed are confronted with a hostile, invasive “critic,” who often appears under the guise of an impartial spectator. This is crucial. Those in the dominant position often have the luxury of appearing to be impartial or benevolent. But if there is no mutuality, no basic respect for the humanity of the other, the result is not impartiality but paternalism. The undermining of the “impartiality” of those who are subordinate through the interior “critic” cannot be separated from the way that the Veil prevents those who dominate, those who see themselves as more human than the other, from truly sympathizing with others. Asymmetrical relations undermine “natural” sympathetic responses for all those involved. For those who dominate, pity can become conflated and confused with sympathy. And pity infantilizes. It is no accident, then, that Du Bois lashes out against pity and the denial of “manhood” to the black race.

Du Bois has drawn on his experiences, his own standpoint as an African American, to challenge the possibility of mutuality and reciprocity, even as he promotes the latter. To place this in the context of contemporary debates about the relevance of recognition to our moral and political lives, on the one hand, Du Bois comes through as an advocate of mutual recognition, of symmetrical relationships of respect. On the other hand, he is a keen observer of the concrete conditions that make the realization of mutuality impractical or at minimum exceedingly difficult. The general framework of the problem, of course, would not be news to Hegel, given his analysis of the master-slave relationship. However, what Du Bois has accomplished is to generate an account of the repercussions of having a “consciousness” that is split between cultural or group identities in a society that is inherently racist, one in which the Veil remains opaque. Under these circumstances the Color Line promotes the presence of an invasive “critic,” not a benign, impartial one. Du Bois has made explicit the psychological impact of this “critic,” challenging Hegel’s optimism that history is moving in the direction of a society of mutual recognition and Herder’s great hope that all Volk will have their day. In fact, Du Bois’s challenge plays on one of Herder’s fears, the corruption of a Volk by foreign influences. Du Bois is telling us that there has been a corruption of the African American Volk through the continuous internal gaze of the other. Unless this gaze is overcome, self-actualization for African Americans as a people will remain unrealized. And, mutatis mutandis, the same is true for Anglos.

Yet The Souls of Black Folk is a testament to the hope that a way can be found around this impasse. Du Bois speaks of double-consciousness in the first chapter. He doesn’t end the book on this note. Perhaps given the right conditions whites and blacks can view each other with sympathy, as complements in a larger American nation, so that double-consciousness will be overcome. The worlds of blacks and whites can be enlarged to include the experiences of each other. Herder’s notion of Humanity will prevail. This is very much in keeping with James’s program, and to a large extent that of other American pragmatists such as Dewey and Mead, regarding the enlargement of the self. As a matter of fact, in the first chapter of Souls, Du Bois presents a notion of complementarity that draws on the latter tradition, as well as a notion of development through the inclusion of differences that bears the mark of Hegel and of the humanism of Herder. It also relates to Mead’s emphasis on the importance of working with others in a common enterprise to overcome alienation and social unrest.

Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need ... all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two-world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes ... all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.²⁷

The last line is perhaps a harbinger of Du Bois’s future orientation, in which he came to question his early views, and in so doing he moved from psychology or cultural sociology to political economy. This is too large a topic for this chapter, but I would be remiss in not mentioning, however briefly, Du Bois’s later work, for he came to understand racism primarily in terms of economic exploitation. In his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, written many years after The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois states, “[E]ven in the minds of the most dogmatic supporters of race theories and believers in the inferiority of colored folk to white, there was a conscious or unconscious determination to increase their incomes by taking full advantage of this belief. And then gradually this thought was metamorphosed into a realization that the income-bearing value of race prejudice was the cause not the result of theories of racial inferiority.”²⁸

I introduce these comments not to take a stand on Du Bois’s later Marxist turn, nor to defend the position that racism can be explained solely in economic terms, but to provide an idea of how Du Bois came to question his earlier position. His comments speak to the limitations of notions of culture and race that Du Bois utilized in his earlier work. In order to understand oppression, we must focus more directly on an economic analysis of capital.