Uplifting the Race

Preface

The Intersections of Racial Liberalism and Racial Uplift Ideology

In the period between his departure from the Nation of Islam in March of 1964 and his assassination on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X broadened the terms of identity and the tactics of struggle for African Americans. “We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights,” he argued. Malcolm declared that African Americans should circumvent a federal government reluctant to protect black lives and political rights in the South and bring their grievances to the United Nations as a human rights issue: “Civil rights means your asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. . . . And anytime anyone violates your human rights, you can take them to the world court.”¹

Malcolm voiced the growing disenchantment within the black freedom movement with federal reluctance to protect black and white demonstrators against segregationists’ state-sanctioned terror. Civil rights legislation did not protect African Americans in the South from such abuses. Nor did these reforms address the poverty and discrimination suffered by blacks in urban ghettoes. Central to Malcolm’s critique of civil rights was a changing black consciousness and politics joining struggles for racial and social justice. Malcolm questioned the Cold War liberalism that held sway over the civil rights consensus, with its injunctions that black leadership attend solely to formal equality before the law and remain silent on economic issues and U.S. foreign policy. Reframing black Americans’ struggles within the international context of African liberation movements, Malcolm asserted the citizenship and humanity of African Americans as unassailable first principles.

Malcolm’s critique is a sobering reminder that the civil rights movement fell short of its promise of racial justice in the courts and might have gone on to address disparities in the distribution of wealth and power. Through the post-civil rights, neoliberal ideology of color blindness, race continues to defer political mobilization against social inequalities. Ironically, as neoliberals deny the existence of racism, they nonetheless exploit racial anxieties with coded (or visual) racist references to crime, drugs, and welfare in public discourse. According to Linda Gordon and Nancy Fraser, the trope of welfare dependency has animated attacks on civil rights and the welfare state in the postindustrial United States. And as John Hope Franklin has noted, federal nonenforcement of post-Brown reforms, as seen, for example, in the Reagan administration’s removal of the ban on tax exemptions for racially discriminatory private schools, belies claims of a color-blind society.²

Today we face the paradoxes of persistent racism amidst claims of color blindness. The expansion of the black middle class amidst deepening poverty and social disintegration in black communities is equally unsettling, as many black citizens continue to bear the brunt of joblessness, recession, and inadequate schools. Nostalgic mass-media narratives of civil rights try to deflect these crises by dwelling on images of a charismatic, messianic leader, invariably male, and usually martyred. In the meantime, since the 1980s, conservative black leadership has assisted the federal assault on civil rights reforms, maintaining for some the illusion of color-blind fairness. No wonder that many middle-class African American media spokespersons respond with apparent nostalgia for the era of segregation, interring the memory of Malcolm’s critique of civil rights. By this shortsighted racial reckoning, in which black ideals of self-help respond to and reinforce the majority society’s hostility to federal enforcement of civil rights, integration, antipoverty programs, and the expansion of the black middle class have produced a culture of poverty, ending a golden age of supposedly healthy black communities during the era of de jure segregation.

There is a clear relationship between post-civil rights neoliberal claims of a color-blind society and the enlistment by the federal government of black conservatives, aided by the confused responses of mounting black anger and disaffection with civil rights and of nostalgia for segregation and self-help. Documentary media remembrances of the civil rights era recycle the dream of a charismatic leader as if to avoid confrontation with the enduring nightmares of racism, joblessness, and social misery. For many blacks, this master narrative of civil rights signals a sense of malaise, exemplified in the mass-media lament over the disappearance of role models. Such mythologizing represses the democratic, anti-imperialist agenda that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were evolving when they were slain, and which W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson had pursued until they were branded nonpersons at the height of the repression of civil rights and civil liberties during the Cold War.

This book examines the historical circumstances that have led us to the post-civil rights media spectacle of posthumous black messianic leadership. The search for the origins of racial liberalism, civil rights, the myth of color blindness, and the reactive black messianism that circumscribes black struggle and distorts its history leads us back to the turn of the century. Even the most seemingly principled expressions of liberalism from that period were not immune to racism. In his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that established “separate but equal” as the legal basis for segregation, Justice John Marshall Harlan found the ruling as objectionable and pernicious as the Dred Scott case. At the same time, however, his dissent shared with the majority opinion a fundamental distinction between political and social equality as they pertained to the American racial landscape:

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not that it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows, nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.³

While claiming the Constitution as the color-blind, classless guarantor of formal equality before the law, Harlan regarded white dominance as axiomatic and eternal. Without evident irony, he believed that white supremacy would be upheld by “principles of constitutional liberty,” a profound, if unintended, indictment of the original intentions of the framers, for whom African slavery was evidently essential to liberty for white men. In both the theory and practice of federalism, civil rights and racial (and social) inequality went hand-in-hand, as southern legislatures would eventually repeal black male suffrage and the provisions of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment with race-neutral (i.e., color-blind) amendments to state constitutions. Formal equality was not enough to protect southern blacks from political terror, and under the rubric of states’ rights, local courts facilitated the exploitation of black and white agricultural labor. Harlan’s dissent, defining equality in form but not substance, affirmed that federalism protected the interests of racists and landowners more than those of impoverished blacks and whites.

Although prompted by an inquiry into the sedimented, and often unconscious, racial assumptions driving much U.S. political discourse, this study concentrates on black elites’ responses and challenges to white supremacy since the turn of the century. Since then, how have African American spokespersons answered the widespread charge that people of African descent were noncitizens, less than fully human? A sustained reflection on their contradictory position as both an aspiring social class and a racially subordinated caste denied all political rights and protections, struggling to define themselves within a society founded on white dominance, offers a profound understanding of the historical nexus of race, class, national and sectional politics, and black leadership in our society.

The self-help ideology of racial uplift describes the response of educated African Americans, who, according to Alfred Moss, numbered roughly 2 percent of the black population in the 1890s, to de jure, or legal, segregation.⁴ Against the post-Reconstruction assault on black citizenship and humanity, black ministers, intellectuals, journalists, and reformers sought to refute the view that African Americans were biologically inferior and unassimilable by incorporating “the race” into ostensibly universal but deeply racialized ideological categories of Western progress and civilization. Generally, black elites claimed class distinctions, indeed, the very existence of a “better class” of blacks, as evidence of what they called race progress. Believing that the improvement of African Americans’ material and moral condition through self-help would diminish white racism, they sought to rehabilitate the race’s image by embodying respectability, enacted through an ethos of service to the masses.

Through racial uplift ideology, elite blacks sought the cooperation of white political and business elites in the pursuit of race progress. Their social vision of blacks within American society was largely determined by those powerful whites who reasserted control over black and white labor by disfranchising blacks and poor whites after the democratic experiment of Reconstruction. In other words, racial uplift ideology cannot be regarded as an independent black perspective. Black middle-class ideology cannot be isolated from dominant modes of knowledge and power relations structured by race and racism. While black elites’ oppositional claims of self-help may have symbolized their desire for independence and self-determination, this self-image obscured the extent to which self-help also functioned as an accommodation to blacks’ noncitizenship status.

Besides the limitations of self-help ideology (as opposed to more practical self-help efforts), black elites’ class-bound argument for black humanity was deeply contradictory. The attempt to rehabilitate the image of black people through class distinctions trafficked in claims of racial and gender hierarchy. In light of Malcolm’s claim, it is noteworthy that the appeal implicit in racial uplift ideology for the recognition of black elites’ capacity for citizenship—indeed, humanity—had overshadowed postemancipation arguments by blacks and whites that posited inalienable rights as the basis for black male citizenship, economic rights, equal protection, and group empowerment.

Historicizing Race

“Race” is a historical phenomenon. It is not, as commonly assumed, a natural, fixed biological essence, or a physical fact. While late-nineteenth-century social scientists and commentators produced a great deal of writing on race, presuming their expertise, it is important to realize the extent to which forms of knowing besides “right reason”—feelings, fears, desires, and other non-rational processes—have invaded intellectual and cultural expressions regarding race, and ultimately, how these cultural narratives about race reflect power relations.⁵

Historicizing the cultural narratives structured by ideologies of racial difference requires subtler ways of thinking about race. First, we must acknowledge that there were, and are, many degrees and varieties of racial discourse, indeed, of racism. Secondly, the varieties of racism, in word, image, and deed, are shaped and reshaped by historical processes and trends, including industrialization, immigration, internal migrations, urbanization, empire building, and social contestation, particularly in debates over national identity and cultural authority. Finally, the embeddedness of race in these sociohistorical contexts and its material consequences for blacks and whites require us to treat it as more than mere illusion. Indeed, the way we discuss race in the contemporary political climate of “color blindness” is of utmost importance. Such intellectual work should be guided, as Cornel West has argued, by the spirit of “critical negation, wise preservation and insurgent transformation.”⁶

Building on the contributions of critical race theory and cultural studies, my analysis of race and racism pays close attention to the production of knowledge about race, and how that knowledge is institutionalized and contested.⁷ Ideologies of race promiscuously bundled together intellectual and popular expressions. Moreover, gendered and sexualized meanings lent murderous terror and thus material reality to negrophobic cultural attitudes. Inseparable from issues of reproductive sexuality, the many-headed beast of U.S. racism fed upon an irrational amalgam of fear, desire, and even guilt, despite rhetorical professions of scholarly expertise and rationality. Antiblack racism might well be regarded as a theodicy of whiteness, making permissible and seemingly natural the hatred, oppression, and degradation of black people by any means necessary, however contrary such acts were to the moral and political ideals of the Republic. Regardless of what African Americans did or felt, whites’ claims about the category of blackness were reproduced in a variety of media besides the printed page, including such commodified forms and forums as mass-produced illustrations, toys and material objects and ephemera, public performance rituals, and, finally, in the darkness of often-segregated movie houses. Mass-media technologies and industries provided new, more powerful ways of telling the same old stories of black deviance and pathology, confounding claims for a rational basis for the tangled meanings attributed to race. It should be noted, however, that at the same time mass-culture industries provided opportunities for black cultural production, the construction, or reconstruction, of black consciousness, and further struggle and contestation over representations of race.

It should be clear that this approach questions the validity of knowledge about race produced by intellectuals, white and black alike. This is not to say that intellectuals were in any way united in purpose. Nor do I wish to devalue the antiracist words and deeds of black and white intellectuals. Nevertheless, the majority of writers and intellectuals inescapably drew on deeply problematic varieties of knowledge about race. Although there were exceptions, discussions of race and class by blacks and whites, albeit contested, remained separate and unequal, reinforcing racial essentialism. Dominant discourses on race were fraught with a biological determinism that naturalized and upheld existing relations of power and knowledge in regard to political economy, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and American politics and conceptions of nationhood.

The first three chapters sketch the sociopolitical and cultural contexts of racial uplift ideology. Chapter 1 discusses the changing meaning of uplift, amidst the demise of black political power after Reconstruction, from a collective sense of social advancement to an evolutionary racial ideology. Chapter 2 examines some of the humiliations of the Jim Crow social order in the South for African Americans and revolves around an instance of white supremacy at its most lethal—the Atlanta riot of 1906. Chapter 3 explores black elites’ deeply conflicted racial visions of uplift, self-help, group consciousness, and political protest, all as reactions to popular minstrelsy and racist social science, amid the changing sociopolitical contexts and crises of labor insurgency, mob violence, urban migration, disfranchisement, and U.S. imperialism.

The first three chapters, which sketch the social origins, problems, and concerns of racial uplift ideology, lay the groundwork for the several biographical chapters that follow. These chapters, 4 through 9, are both chronological and thematic in design, charting the emergence of an increasingly dominant academic sociological discourse of uplift in response to black migration, a trend opposed by the post-World War I development of radical anticolonial and black nationalist critiques of black elites’ traditional support of Republican politics. The biographical chapters show their ambivalent subjects struggling to reconcile racial uplift ideology’s ideals with changing social realities, the end result all too often being their personal and political disillusionment. The major themes addressed, all interrelated, are black nationalism, gender tensions, and the intersections of black and mainstream racial discourses. These themes give rise to the central problem racial uplift ideology addressed: black elites’ quest for the authentic, or “positive,” black middle-class subject. These biographical chapters survey the writings of representative figures, not to rehearse simplistic messianic, or dichotomous, constructions of black leadership (e.g., accommodation vs. resistance), but to document the ideological and social diversity of the black intelligentsia, and the conflicts inherent in its members’ assimilationist visions of black respectability and leadership. Some of these writers, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Anna Julia Cooper, are familiar; others, such as William Ferris, James Corrothers, and Hubert H. Harrison, more obscure. The writings and activities of this group of intellectuals and race leaders, representative, yet marginal by definition, reflect the various genres in which black middle-class discourse was formulated and contested, including autobiography, fiction, essays, journalism, and sociological writing. Above all, they illustrate the complexity and contingency of black middle-class subjectivities, complicating the quest for a stable, unitary vision of respectability and race progress.

Chapters 4 and 9 illustrate the intersections of black nationalism with racial uplift ideology. Although usually understood as a political discourse, black nationalism, like dominant Anglo-American nationalism, was intensely concerned with gender issues and illustrates the affinity between black and white anxieties surrounding racial purity, intermarriage, paternity, and the reproductive sexuality of black and white women. During the period covered by this study, black nationalism, like uplift, was a contested concept. While some black nationalists based their sense of cultural authority on ethnocentric conceptions of an African continent in need of redemption, or on biological fictions of race purity, for others, such as Hubert H. Harrison, an anti-imperialist pan-African consciousness opposed affinities with racialized thought, or with what he otherwise identified as an oppressive white civilization.

In considering the question of black nationalism at the turn of the century, we should not be driven by presentist assumptions, nor by the expectation that there exists a normative black nationalism to be apprehended historically as a usable past. Then, as today, “black nationalists” reflected on the meaning of African Americans’ relation to peoples of African descent in the diaspora and on the African continent, past and present. American-born black nationalist intellectuals’ visions of the African past often expressed contemporary yearnings. Diaspora visions of blackness at the turn of the century contended with black nationalist preoccupations with the vexed question of gender relations. For example, the concept of Africa (as opposed to a more direct knowledge of the continent’s cultural diversity) was commonly invoked as a symbol of the normative patriarchal gender relations associated with race progress. The quest for the race’s supposed authentic origins in Africa thus came at the expense of black women intellectuals’ claims to equal status, although the pressures of patriarchal U.S. political culture also had much to do with the situation. Such leading black women intellectuals as Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells found themselves marginalized within black bourgeois and nationalist ideologies that equated race progress with male dominance and Victorian ideals of sexual difference in both political and domestic life. Barraged with sexual and racial stereotypes, black women, like black elites in general, campaigned for moral authority, and for a position of respectability from which to speak publicly.

Chapter 7 concerns the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Corrothers, and literary production and mass culture as sites at which the struggle for the representative black middle-class subject was further waged. This was a complex modern moment of collision between cultures, literary and vernacular, and between those of African Americans and nonblack immigrants, resulting from the urbanization of black culture and the nation. The moment also saw the rise of mass cultural industries based on blackness as a contested commodity, and the search by some black writers for distinctive black expression against the popular stereotypes and racial formulas white audiences had come to expect. On the one hand, African American writers and artists who stood for uplift and respectability employed an assimilationist cultural aesthetic, hoping to refine Negro folk materials into a universalistic expression of high culture. On the other hand, those black writers less beholden to “positive” images and racial vindication played with white stereotypes of “authentic” blackness, manipulating minstrelsy, Negro folklore and dialect, and black vernacular forms in search of new forms of black cultural expression, including Negro humor.

Such subversive literary appropriations of black vernacular humor were risky, given that for many middle-class blacks, the political necessity of defending the race was no laughing matter. Chapter 6 concerns a more characteristically earnest expression of the black intelligentsia: the links between racial uplift ideology and academic and journalistic sociological writing on urban blacks. Ambivalence, marked by the tension between racialized and social, environmentalist perspectives, describes Du Bois’s sociological tour de force, The Philadelphia Negro. Although Du Bois’s pathbreaking study documented the discrimination faced by blacks in Philadelphia, it also flirted with dominant racial visions of urban pathology that viewed the presence of poor blacks in the city, and particularly that of single black women, as a moral peril.

Normative assumptions about elite blacks and racial uplift were shackled, so to speak, to the sociological images of urban pathology and, ultimately, to the racist constructions of blackness that uplift ideology purported to transcend. Racial uplift ideology answered, without dispelling, the negrophobic minstrel images and journalistic claims asserting ineradicable black difference, immorality, disease, and mortality. Consciously or not, these racial assumptions influenced Du Bois’s and subsequent sociologists and journalists in their propensity to view segregated, impoverished urban blacks through the distorted ideological lens of family disorganization. Racialized sociological claims of pathology were essential to claims for the existence of respectable blacks, those proverbial credits to the race, exceptions to the rule.

Reflecting their precarious social position, as well as internal divisions across lines of class, color, culture, region, and gender, African American elites disagreed amongst themselves on a number of issues, despite white elites’ penchant for viewing Booker T. Washington as the Moses of his people and the guarantor of interracial consensus. The racial crisis at the turn of the century saw perpetual arguments over the meaning of education for blacks, over the advisability of participation in imperialist and foreign wars, and over questions of citizenship rights, gender relations, and the meaning of black culture. Black intellectuals presented within the apparent unity of uplift ideology—for who was opposed to the advancement of the race?—a diversity of views that belied such social fictions as a monolithic, messianic black leadership, even as elite blacks themselves sought recognition from influential whites in those very terms.

Given that racial uplift ideology constituted a complicated, contested appropriation of dominant racial discourses, some readers will no doubt wonder what precisely is the difference between black middle-class ideology and that of Anglo-American elites. To be sure, I will argue that there were similarities, the crucial one being that both black and white elites spoke the same dominant language of race in defining their middle-class status. At the same time, obviously, there were crucial divergences. The unequal social positions and thus disparate experiences of blacks and whites made all the difference. To fully comprehend this, we must examine not only black intellectuals’ struggles to define themselves against the dominant society’s refusal to recognize their humanity. Beyond this, we must also consider the psychosocial perceptions of those who defined themselves as white, as well as the extent to which political institutions and the public sphere, including department stores, businesses, public accommodations, labor unions, and the courts, to name just a few sites, reinforced whiteness as a preferred status by excluding blacks. Because of its preferential status, whiteness meant that its subscribers would never in their right minds want to live their lives as African Americans. Small wonder that those African Americans able to “pass” for white would claim for themselves the opportunities and freedoms denied to the race, sparking anxiety in many whites, and in some African Americans as well. The bottom line was that black elites, like all black people, were demonized and terrorized by white supremacists of all social strata, and were especially vulnerable to attack when claiming full equality. However much black elites sought interracial cooperation and searched for an ideological common ground with whites, the violence of the era, as commonplace as it was explosive, exposed the limits of black accommodation. Under these circumstances, it would be profoundly erroneous to equate a racialized black middle-class ideology with an antiblack white racism that, far from being aberrant or extreme, existed at the center of American politics and culture.

Thus, to consider historically what it has meant to be black in America is ultimately to pose a different, yet related, question: What has it meant to be white?⁸ Furthermore, if all this talk about a color-blind society were really true, how would this alter our way of conceptualizing rights, citizenship, justice, and democracy? In a society rigidly stratified by interlocking systems of race and class dominance during the late nineteenth century, and undergoing unsettling changes of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, progressive reformers sought social control by defining citizenship as a bourgeois privilege. In accordance with class-bound restrictions on suffrage, race, gender, and empire were becoming the ideological ingredients of bourgeois status; to be middle class was to claim a normative, often unenunciated whiteness, synonymous with bourgeois morality.

A central concern throughout will be the ambiguous intersection between racist and antiracist discourses, even as they exist in apparent opposition to one another, each echoing and reinforcing the other, particularly on biological notions of race, gender, and sexuality. In the introduction, I will discuss the social and psychic barriers to a secure middle-class status for African Americans at the turn of the century. The bitter contradiction between lofty personal ambitions and uplift ideals and the suffocating realities facing black elites made racial uplift ideology a faulty construction that offered little protection during a difficult period.