Uplift, Dissemblance, Double-Consciousness, and the Ideological Dimensions of Class
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.
I had learned my Jim Crow lessons so thoroughly that. . . I learned to lie, steal, to dissemble. I learned to play that dual role which every Negro must play if he wants to eat and live.
I remember the sickening thrill with which I heard a. . . black boy arraign the mulatto teachers for always giving the choice parts in plays, the choice chores, the cleanest books to mulatto children. He called the teachers “color struck,” a phrase that was new to me, and “sons-of-bitches,” a phrase that was not. He was put out of school. Many black children were put out of school, or not encouraged to continue.
Since the late nineteenth century, and throughout the era of segregation, the term “uplift” has held mixed meanings for African Americans. One popular understanding of uplift, dating from the antislavery folk religion of the slaves, speaks of a personal or collective spiritual—and potentially social—transcendence of worldly oppression and misery. Describing a group struggle for freedom and social advancement, uplift also suggests that African Americans have, with an almost religious fervor, regarded education as the key to liberation. This sense of uplift as a liberation theology flourished after emancipation and during the democratic reforms of Reconstruction. Ideals of group advancement would be kept alive by generations of blacks in the singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” its lyrics written by James Weldon Johnson at the turn of the century. Sung by school assemblies and church congregations since the days when black communities celebrated each new year as the anniversary of emancipation, the optimism of this secular hymn (widely considered the Negro national anthem) was rooted in the memory of past horrors: “Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us / Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.”
Another, quite different connotation of uplift, strongly associated in the minds of many African Americans with the legacy of group struggle, is difficult to isolate. Reflecting both their desire for social mobility and the economic and racial barriers to it, African Americans have described themselves since the post-Reconstruction era as middle class through their ideals of racial uplift, espousing a vision of racial solidarity uniting black elites with the masses. For many black elites, uplift came to mean an emphasis on self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth. Its unifying claims aside, this emphasis on class differentiation as race progress often involved struggling with the culturally dominant construction of “the Negro problem.” Amidst legal and extralegal repression, many black elites sought status, moral authority, and recognition of their humanity by distinguishing themselves, as bourgeois agents of civilization, from the presumably undeveloped black majority; hence the phrase, so purposeful and earnest, yet so often of ambiguous significance, “uplifting the race.”
Contestation surrounds the idea of uplift, which embraces elite and popular meanings and encompasses the tension between narrow, racial claims of progress and more democratic visions of social advancement. In another sense, uplift, as African Americans of all social positions have known it, marks the point where history falls silent and memory takes over. Collective memory recognizes the service of countless parents, teachers, ministers, musicians, and librarians as community builders. Although amateur historians have recorded such efforts at the transmission of group consciousness and history, historians have generally framed black thought and leadership narrowly, stressing the opposition between self-help and civil rights agitation, as embodied by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, respectively. Civil rights liberalism remains the focus of such dichotomous—and masculinist—constructions of black leadership, to the exclusion of more democratic conceptions of uplift.
Popular meanings of uplift, rooted in public education, economic rights, group resistance and struggle, and democracy tend to be absent in those records in which black elites espoused bourgeois values of race progress in several settings: in the pulpit, at academic “Negro” conferences held at black colleges such as Atlanta University and Hampton Institute, at annual meetings of the Negro Business League, and at the meetings of black clubwomen. Didactic expressions of racial uplift ideals were on display as well in a spate of entrepreneurial books, and in black newspapers and periodicals. Although the racial uplift ideology of the black intelligentsia involved intensive soul-searching, ambivalence, and dissension on the objectives of black leadership and on the meaning of black progress, black opinion leaders deemed the promotion of bourgeois morality, patriarchal authority, and a culture of self-improvement, both among blacks and outward, to the white world, as necessary to their recognition, enfranchisement, and survival as a class.
Although blacks believed they were opposing racism by emphasizing class differences, uplift ideology had as much to do with race as class. African Americans’ middle-class ideology, like the majority society’s ideals of social mobility, remained trapped within that which it has denied, or tried to forget: that historically, the conditions for social mobility and class formation among all Americans, blacks, immigrant groups, and other racially marked groups, including whites, have been circumscribed by race and color, and implicated within the legacy of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy. Elite African Americans were replicating, even as they contested, the uniquely American racial fictions upon which liberal conceptions of social reality and “equality” were founded.
It is crucial to realize that uplift ideology was not simply a matter of educated African Americans’ wanting to be white, as E. Franklin Frazier’s polemic attacking a materialistic, status-addicted black bourgeoisie suggested.1 On the contrary, uplift, among its other connotations, also represented the struggle for a positive black identity in a deeply racist society, turning the pejorative designation of race into a source of dignity and self-affirmation through an ideology of class differentiation, self-help, and interdependence. What was problematic about this was not African Americans’ quite understandable desire for dignity, security, and social mobility. Rather, the difficulty stemmed from the construction of class differences through racial and cultural hierarchies that had little to do with the material conditions of African Americans, and less to do with the discrimination they faced in a racially stratified southern labor market, with the active complicity of the state and opinion-making apparatuses of civil society.
Racial uplift ideals were offered as a form of cultural politics, in the hope that unsympathetic whites would relent and recognize the humanity of middle-class African Americans, and their potential for the citizenship rights black men had possessed during Reconstruction. Elite blacks believed they were replacing the racist notion of fixed biological racial differences with an evolutionary view of cultural assimilation, measured primarily by the status of the family and civilization. Cultural differences, then, rather than biological notions of racial inferiority, were said to be more salient in explaining the lower social status of African Americans. And a middle-class consciousness stressing racial solidarity and self-help, uniting blacks across class lines, promised a more legitimate basis for social differentiation than color.
But uplift ideology’s argument for black humanity was not an argument for equality. Indeed, the shift from race to culture, stressing self-help and seemingly progressive in its contention that blacks, like immigrants, were assimilable into the American body politic, represented a limited, conditional claim to equality, citizenship, and human rights for African Americans. Black elites espoused a value system of bourgeois morality whose deeply embedded assumptions of racial difference were often invisible to them. It was precisely as an argument for black humanity through evolutionary class differentiation that the black intelligentsia replicated the dehumanizing logic of racism. Still, however problematic, the bourgeois cultural values that came to stand for intraracial class differences—social purity, thrift, chastity, and the patriarchal family—affirmed their sense of status and entitlement to citizenship.
Racism and its demeaning logic have made the articulation of a positive racial identity for African Americans a divisive struggle whose contradictions often went unnoticed in favor of the unifying, uplifting rhetoric of self-help and solidarity. Reflecting the clash between blacks’ communal quest for social justice and individualistic imperatives of survival, uplift ideology was forged in the fire of U.S. racism, emerging through peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow, the terrorism of lynching and rape, and the ubiquitous contempt for persons of African ancestry. Although uplift ideology was by no means incompatible with social protest against racism, its orientation toward self-help implicitly faulted African Americans for their lowly status, echoing judgmental dominant characterizations of “the Negro problem.”
Rooted in inequality, uplift ideology struggled to contain tensions and contradictions. It was comprised of several currents, reflecting popular and elite tensions: black folk religion and group aspirations for emancipation, land-ownership, literacy, legal marriage, equal rights, federal protection, and the suffrage contended with an elite, missionary culture of Christian evolutionism, whose rhetoric gained authority in the context of U.S. imperialism. There were other strains as well; the nationalist theories of Alexander Crum-mell, Martin Delany, and others equated black progress and humanity with territorial nation building, civilization, and patriarchal authority. Not surprisingly, there were gender tensions. During the early 1890s, black women journalists, intellectuals, novelists, and reformers were contributing their own visions of racial uplift, calling for women’s leadership as vital to race progress, a view that clashed with a male-dominated vision of race progress within a patriarchal political culture. Thus, while the African American intelligentsia spoke universally of the race’s advancement, there was vigorous disagreement on precisely how this was to be achieved. There were bitter debates among African American elites over issues of education, citizenship, equal rights, gender relations, and cultural identity.
The historian Darlene Clark Hine, referring specifically to the social vulnerability and powerlessness of black women, has described their “culture of dissemblance,” which “involved creating the appearance of disclosure, or openness about themselves and their feelings, while actually remaining an enigma to whites.” This tactic, she argues, enabled their survival within a suffocatingly oppressive situation. Powerlessness required black women and men to know, and indeed master, their white employers, if they possibly could. Dissemblance, however, describes more than a guarded demeanor. It must also be understood as part of the majority American culture’s silence, evasion, or outright distortion on matters of race. In short, African American men and women dissemble to survive in a racialized world not of their own making.
More positively, dissemblance might be seen as a weapon, indeed, a source of strength for African Americans. It may well be viewed as the psychic armor enabling the survival of the powerless. But this self-protective withholding of one’s true feelings from more powerful others might also work too well, sundering African Americans from a history of group oppression and struggle. One may survive, even prosper, while leaving oneself vulnerable to any number of self-lacerating racial falsifications. In short, desperation, ambition, and the imperatives of survival might produce an ostensibly positive black identity in simplistic, reductive terms that replicate the racist and sexist cultural codes of the oppressive society.2
Dissemblance describes African Americans’ defensive response to the gendered dimension of racial oppression. Oppression kept African Americans from fulfilling the majority society’s normative gender conventions, and racist discourses portrayed society’s denial of the authoritative moral status of the patriarchal family as a racial stigma, a lack of morality, and thus, a badge of inferiority. For educated blacks, the family, and patriarchal gender relations, became crucial signifiers of respectability. Bitter, divisive memories of the violence and humiliations of slavery and segregation were and remain at the heart of uplift ideology’s romance of the patriarchal family, expressed by black men and women’s too-often-frustrated aspirations to protect and be protected. Claiming respectability often meant denouncing nonconformity to patriarchal gender conventions and bourgeois morality. A sense of shame might also compel silences or revisions, producing a secretive family lore on any number of sensitive matters of parentage, disease, transgressive sexuality, or other behaviors or occurrences to which a real or imagined racial stigma might be attached.
The problem with racial uplift ideology is thus one of unconscious internalized racism. The racist and antiracist preoccupation with the status of the patriarchal family among blacks and the notion of self-help among blacks as building black homes and promoting family stability came to displace a broader vision of uplift as group struggle for citizenship and material advancement. At worst, this misplaced equation of race progress with the status of the family blamed black men and women for “failing” to measure up to the dominant society’s bourgeois gender morality, and seemed to forget that it was the state and the constant threat of violence, not some innate racial trait, that prevented the realization of black homes and families. Racial uplift ideology’s gender politics led African American elites to mistake the effects of oppression for causes, influencing theories of oppression and liberation that, echoing racist social science arguments, frequently faulted blacks for supposed weaknesses branded into the race’s moral fiber by slavery.
The displacement from societal oppression to the moral, behavioral realm of the family was not the only outcome of dissemblance. From yet another angle, dissemblance might be viewed as part of an open, ongoing struggle for autonomous self-consciousness, and a black identity less susceptible to racist untruths. The violence and other crises calling out for protest ruptured patterns of dissemblance that kept one’s deepest feelings, including rage, hidden away. For example, the increased racial violence in the South during the Spanish-Cuban-American War was met with outraged protests by black spokespersons, journalists, and soldiers. Nevertheless, the concept of dissemblance, along with the self-censorship mandated by a repressive social order in the South (and North) that was intolerant of freedom of thought and expression, raises troubling questions about the very “truth” or intentionality of much of black middle-class uplift ideology. Given the threat of force, elite blacks’ accommodations to segregation and violence made a virtue of self-preservation. For many educated black men and women, uplift ideology often meant repressing anger toward whites, their struggles to make themselves and the race acceptable potentially leaving a psychic residue of self-doubt and shame. An elite self-image that might overcome powerlessness and racial stigmas perhaps required the displacement of feelings of anger and shame onto other powerless blacks, or perhaps rival elites, even in the name of racial uplift.
The romance of the family exerted, and continues to exert, an enormously powerful, yet ambiguous, role in crystallizing black aspirations for freedom and security, serving as a smoke screen for oppressive sociocultural forces. Despite elite or rising African Americans’ tendency to regard theirs as a natural familial relationship to the group in terms of support and interdependence, one cannot help but detect a half-concealed alienation in this desire to represent “the race” as a family. Occasionally, critical reflections on what it means to describe one’s self as a member of the black middle class address the grim internal dynamics of oppression, often unspoken, underlying that self-image.
The African American essayist and literary critic J. Saunders Redding reflected on the injuries of race, color, sex, and class repressed by the unifying rhetoric of uplift. In his autobiography, published in 1942, Redding recalled his youth in Wilmington, Delaware, and the impact of black migration after World War I. He described an oratorical contest before a full school assembly of parents in which he competed with a dark youth, one Tom Cephus, impressive of voice and self-possession. Intimidated, Redding, “from sheer fright and nervous exhaustion burst into uncontrollable tears,” but still managed to finish his oration. “I was certain that I had lost.” Cephus, for his part, was “superb.” He was the clear favorite of the audience, which Redding described as “row after increasingly dark row of black faces and beaming eyes.” More than a school contest to them, “it was a class and caste struggle.” After the audience’s “deafening and vindicative” applause, one of the judges “icily” announced Redding the winner, with Cephus taking second. “Stunned beyond expression and feeling, the back rows filed out.” The front rows, filled with light-complexioned families partial to Redding, cheered. A disconsolate Redding could not face Cephus and avoided school for a week. The incident was even more disastrous for Cephus, who, later that year, dropped out of school.3
Redding’s memory of his high school years was a confession, indeed, exorcism, of his complicity with internalized racism among blacks. For young women, such color prejudices were compounded by sexist stereotypes. Redding, who claimed to be “only lightly color-struck,” recalled, as a high school senior, being warned by Edwina Kruse, the “near white” school principal, to end his friendship with Viny, a dark youth who worked as a servant girl to Kruse. Kruse did not mince words. “”Let her alone!. . . [W]hat would you look like married to a girl like that?’ she said bitingly. ” No friends, no future. You might as well be dead!’” As Redding recalled their conversation, Kruse predicted a dire future for Redding, delivering ice or cleaning outdoor privies. “Don’t you know girls like her haven’t any shame, haven’t any decency? She’ll get you in trouble.” According to Redding, after Viny quit and moved away, he received letters from her once a year. Haunted by the question of what became of “those I came to know in 1919,” Redding reported that many, including Cephus, were dead.
At Brown University during the 1920s, Redding shared little with the only other black student except a preoccupation with the gaze of unsympathetic whites and a strenuous avoidance of the appearance of clannishness: “We never ate together.” This fellow student left school, unable to abide such isolation, and further distressed, as Redding told it, at the prospect of having impregnated a young black woman, also a student, from Philadelphia. While the fate of the young woman remained obscure, as for his black classmate, “I never saw him again,” Redding recalled, “for in the late spring he killed himself in the bathroom of his parents’ home in Cleveland.” According to Redding, this was the first of five suicides in their circle of fifteen black New England collegians.4
Redding’s candor amounts to a sort of black middle-class survivor’s guilt, disclosing the alienation of black pioneers within elite white social settings, anxieties over bourgeois sexual mores that doubtless weighed more heavily on already stigmatized black Americans, and overall, the internal tensions of class, gender, sexuality, and color seldom mentioned by privileged African Americans. When one acknowledged, as did Redding, the inconsistencies between black bourgeois ideals and conduct, claims of race solidarity could not withstand the devastating realities of segregation and poverty.
Educated African Americans’ struggle to define uplift and realize their aspirations for freedom was complicated by a dissemblance that often unconsciously evaded the most painful aspects of an oppressive past and present, and the shame of being at the mercy of whites, body and soul, and perhaps also, a burden of guilt for having internalized codes of white supremacy.
Dissemblance and disclosure might go hand-in-hand in some meditations on race, class, and uplift ideology. Born in South Carolina and raised in Boston and Queens, Celia Delaney was brought up by aunts after her mother and an uncle had “died in a fight with some white men who were bent on raping my mother.” She recalled that her aunts never spoke of her mother, but constantly dwelled on the memory of the uncle. “My aunts taught me,” remembered Delaney, a schoolteacher interviewed by an anthropologist in the 1970s, “that the better-class-of-colored people had a responsibility to lead the less fortunate of our race.” Although it was understood that the “less fortunate” included darker-complexioned blacks, at the same time, she was taught that dark skin and other black physical traits were “handicaps” that might be “overlooked” if the persons “had money or behavior.” Revealingly, she confessed to being snobbish, or “sedidy” (demonstrating that the African American lexicon had developed a vocabulary for intraracial class tension and snobbery), adding, “I was properly finished at Spelman and Radcliffe” colleges. Still, she believed that African Americans “have no choice about sticking together,” and that “for all our color hang-ups, we are a great deal saner than white people about it. We don’t kill each other about our color.” Even the most candid recollections by elite African Americans, revealing racial uplift ideology at its most defensive and ambivalent on matters of intraracial color hierarchy and its compensatory noblesse oblige, banished from speech and memory the more painful, gendered aspects of black oppression, specifically the rape of black women by white men.5
Within the historical tension between collective, social, and elite racial meanings of uplift is the constant struggle for an independent black identity and the social and political implications of this struggle. Although he did not explicitly acknowledge its middle-class character, and what is more, spoke only in masculine terms, W. E. B. Du Bois’s formulation of the “double-consciousness” of educated blacks, by which the latter often viewed themselves (and other blacks) through the judgmental gaze of whites, even while struggling to break free of falsified white images of blackness into self-consciousness, captures the inner conflicts of black middle-class ideology.6 Double-consciousness captures the tragic difficulty of racial uplift ideology: its continuing struggle against an intellectual dependence on dominant ideologies of whiteness and white constructions of blackness.7
Through double-consciousness, Du Bois described the alienation of persons of African descent in America: “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.” Double-consciousness describes Du Bois’s struggle, and that of other black elites, to transform a pejorative concept of race into an affirming vision of cultural distinctiveness. The national destiny hinged on what Du Bois called blacks’ pursuit of “self-conscious manhood,” which he represented as a synthesis of American and African identities: “He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit on by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”8
However influenced by the racial mysticism of his day, Du Bois’s analysis of African Americans’ ambivalent quest for self-consciousness captured the imagination of literate blacks, reflecting more than their desire for a hybrid of American and Negro identities. Sharing nothing but alienation from their cultural origins, with virtually all memory of the land and language of their ancestors lost to them, and furthermore, laboring under ethnocentric dismissals of “the dark continent,” elite blacks confronted abuses on American soil that only intensified their desire for a true homeland, even one of the imagination. Du Bois had thus articulated yearnings that had long existed among literate African Americans, yearnings that had oscillated between the indefinite, unrealized poles of African and American identity. A sense of Du Bois’s impact on his audience, however impressionistic, emerges in the remarks one optimistic reader jotted in a 1907 edition of Du Bois’s text, autographed by the author in 1909. In the margin, next to Du Bois’s words, “He would not bleach his Negro soul. . . Negro blood has a message for the world,” this reader was moved to write: “This simple ambition is slowly but surely lifting the colored American into the ranks of achievement all along the line.” Du Bois’s lyrical meditations on the messianic gift of African Americans to American civilization and democracy attacked the dominant formulation of “the Negro problem” and promised the resolution of the struggles of double-consciousness. The Souls of Black Folk provided a vehicle for an incipient black middle-class cultural sensibility, instilling in generations of race women and men a sense of collective historical destiny. Whatever the intellectual or philosophical constraints of racial uplift ideology, black middle-class consciousness was multifaceted and contingent, representing a myriad of responses under changing historical circumstances to the fundamental ambivalence of being black in America.9
Along with Hine’s concept of dissemblance, Du Bois’s concept helps explain a great deal of public discourse by African Americans. The struggle for black identity was subject to historical forces. Black elites responded to changing relations of capitalist production, including urban migration and the consequent economic competition between blacks and whites in cities, defining themselves and their social function with terms for labor organization set largely by white elites. Despite the state’s hand in maintaining forced labor in the South, many black elites seconded the plantation legend that held that African Americans were better off in the rural South as an agricultural peasant class than in cities as industrial wage workers. Black elites’ earliest images of the growing urban black working class relied heavily on minstrel stereotypes of urban black idleness and immorality. Moreover, post-Reconstruction nostalgia for the plantation legend fueled concomitant myths of black urban pathology and immorality, which, among other things, discredited blacks’ political participation in Reconstruction and fueled the movement to disfranchise black voters. Focusing on the supposed innate capacity and behavior of African Americans, and paying scant attention to those elements of the state and civil society that combined to control black labor, uplift ideology, like white supremacy, was ultimately subject to the logic of market values and minstrel representations prescribing the subordinate social place of African Americans.
But if some elite spokespersons tended to see black farm workers as white planters, philanthropists, and journalists perceived them, impoverished blacks in the rural South were less beholden to these stereotypes. Through migration, they rejected the sharecropping system and its abuses, first gradually, throughout the 1890s, then by the millions during World War I. Despite the opposition of some black elites to the movement cityward, many African Americans sought freedom, jobs, education, leisure, and citizenship in the North. Thus, while these developments hinted at new possibilities for black consciousness and a social expression of uplift, black elites responded with the sociological discourse that sought empirical demonstrations of racial uplift ideology’s standard of social differentiation, or its absence, in urban settings. Throughout, the general pattern was that black elites seized upon the status of the family and moral and cultural distinctions (with their inevitable racial overtones) between themselves and the black masses to affirm the class differences among African Americans that racist whites were loathe to acknowledge.
The wartime mass migration of blacks from the U.S. South, joined by migrants from the West Indies, created the conditions for a militant, black diasporic “New Negro” race consciousness that challenged uplift ideology’s accommodation to the racial and economic status quo. Among New Negro militants and a younger black intelligentsia of artists and writers critical of established black leadership and given to satirizing professional race uplifters, the evolutionary rhetoric of class stratification rang hollow. New Negro militancy ranged from the socialist, anti-imperialist internationalism fusing race and class consciousness embodied by Hubert Harrison, to the popular nationalism of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, to the NAACP’s liberal program of antilynching agitation and a judicial struggle against segregation that, following the assumptions of uplift, relied on class distinctions to claim both legal standing and evidence of discrimination or injury.
Finally, uplift’s representation of class through evolutionary cultural differences based on patriarchal family norms and bourgeois values informed a liberal social science discourse after World War II that explained poverty and ghettoization as pathologies of family disorganization rather than as the result of systemic factors such as exclusion from the labor market and housing discrimination. Recent and contemporary popular culture and journalistic and academic commentaries on the “underclass” reinforce this cultural essentialism. African American opinion leaders’ class-bound articulations of a separate-but-equal social function of self-help, linked to pathological conceptions of impoverished blacks, thus reinforce widespread misconceptions that poverty, misrepresented as an African American problem, is fundamentally the responsibility of the black middle class, not a matter of broader social concern. African Americans’ self-image and analysis of social reality thus remains the captive of double-consciousness and the oppressive logic of racial hierarchy.
To restore moral authority and promote bourgeois selfhood among black men and women, advocates of racial uplift, as we have seen, seized upon the status of home and family, and upon the respectability supposedly conferred by patriarchal gender conventions. What made uplift compelling for many African Americans was its vision of black freedom and security in the image of the home and the patriarchal family. As political options were foreclosed, the home and family remained as the crucial site of race building. Moreover, insofar as the minstrel stereotypes that comprised whites’ commonsense knowledge of blacks defined the deviation from patriarchal norms and sexual immorality as racial traits, many African American elites responded in kind, making conformity to patriarchal family ideals the criterion of respectability. Since race progress was conventionally defined as male dominance and distinction not only within the family but also within such masculine domains as politics, the market, and the military, black women’s public activities, independence, and leadership were controversial within uplift ideology insofar as they departed from the only legitimate realm for black women’s activity, their reproductive capacity within patriarchal black families.
Just because elite African Americans projected repressive Victorian sexual mores, emphasizing respectable reproductive sexuality within the safe confines of marriage, did not mean that they were silent on, or blithely unconcerned about, sexuality. On the contrary, uplift ideology was deeply concerned with sexuality, which was inseparable from the most violent aspects of domination. Late in his life, W. E. B. Du Bois recalled that in his days as a student at Fisk University and a schoolteacher in rural Tennessee, “murder, killing and maiming Negroes, raping Negro women—in the ’80s and in the southern South, this was not even news; it got no publicity; it caused no arrests; and punishment for such transgression was so unusual that the fact was telegraphed North.”10 Du Bois’s recollection of southern antiblack violence illustrates the struggle of black elites to achieve middle-class status, defined not only materially, but more importantly, in the gendered terms of male protection and protected femininity that were so important to black spokespersons.
Gender tensions within uplift ideology reflect the extent to which blacks were and continue to be haunted by racist and sexist ideologies and the painful legacy of oppression, specifically, the legal tolerance of the rape of black women in the South, fueled and justified by sexual stereotypes of black women’s promiscuity. The myth of the black male rapist led to white mob rituals of lynching and mutilation (though it is important to remember that black women were lynched as well). Black spokespersons were often at pains to rebut the white supremacist mindset that mandated segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching as safeguards against “social equality,” the white South’s hysterical coded term for the miscegenation taboo.
The male-dominated gender politics of uplift posed difficulties for black women as race leaders. The defensive preoccupation with conformity to Victorian patriarchal conventions, as a reaction to minstrel, journalistic, and social science slanders of black families, militated, for example, against the political protest waged by black women leaders in the interests of black people—opposition to Ida B. Wells’s antilynching campaign among black ministers is the most notable example. Furthermore, dissension on gender questions has long been perceived as divisive, as airing the “dirty laundry” of “family” conflicts. Black women are thus placed in the subordinate position of sacrificing gender consciousness and their reproductive self-determination in the name of race unity. In other ways, this male orientation affected how black oppression was theorized, emphasizing the victimization of black men through lynching or economic exclusion and silencing the particular victimizations of black women. The consequence of this dissemblance, this interpretation of the history of black oppression and liberation focusing on the private, depoliticized space of family and emphasizing cultural or behavioral explanations for black poverty, was a self-lacerating middle-class ideology that often pitted black men and women against each other, internalizing prevailing antiblack and misogynist attitudes.
This study surveys the black intelligentsia’s response to racism and its contribution to national discussions of race since the turn of the century. I am less concerned with documenting the black elite’s existence as an objective social group than I am in unpacking that group’s ideology, and the extent to which that “group” was itself socially and ideologically fragmented. Following Raymond Williams, ideology, in the broadest sense of the term, consists of a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group, and the societal processes by which meanings and ideas are produced.11 Accordingly, I examine the internal content and tensions of uplift ideology, its external influences, namely, the ideologies and social forces that shaped its concerns and the process by which it, in turn, shaped and continues to reshape dominant perspectives on race, black leadership, and social theory and public policy toward African Americans. I discuss uplift ideology largely through the perspectives and words of African Americans themselves in order to demonstrate that their perspective was not insignificant, or peripheral, but, on the contrary, influential. Since the post-Reconstruction period, uplift ideology has worked to maintain (and sometimes challenge) relations of power and dominance, and subsequent articulations of racial uplift and self-help discourse continue to do so.
As my use of the recollections of Delaney and Redding indicate, this study is concerned less with the material aspects of class formation than with the cultural or ideological dimensions of status that figured in representations of class, which, for whites as well as blacks at the turn of the century (and in the present as well), derived as much meaning from racial and gender categories as from economic or material realities. Although I am somewhat interested in the material conditions of what might very loosely be termed a black middle class, I am more interested in how the black intelligentsia sought to promote itself as a “better class” in a society that relentlessly denied black Americans both the material and ideological markers of bourgeois status. What were the historical implications of their expressions of black middle-class identity? My purpose here is not to contribute yet another study of a pioneering, persevering black middle class. Nor do I approach my subject as a social historian, political scientist, or an economist might, using statistical and other empirical maneuvers to demonstrate the existence of a black middle class, its income, and its occupational structure. Nor do I want to reinforce the wishful but wrongheaded assumption that heralds the arrival of the black middle class as fanfare for America’s entry into an era of color blindness and social harmony.
“Uplift” is thus meant to describe a black middle-class ideology, rather than an actual black middle class. Occupations within the black community widely perceived by historians as middle-class, including that of teacher, minister, federal officeholder, businessman, and professional, cannot be regarded as equivalent with the business, managerial, and craft labor occupations among whites from which blacks were largely excluded. The same applies to the occupations that blacks held to service white clienteles throughout the late nineteenth century in the urban North and South, such as barbering, catering, and other personal service and domestic jobs. Calling these service occupations middle-class introduces a false universal standard for class formation that ignores the extent to which the very notion of the black middle class—indeed, of class itself—is built on shifting ideological sands.
This book addresses the tension between black elites’ perception of themselves as middle class and the social and cultural forces that relentlessly denied that status. It is more accurate to speak of the struggles of African Americans to overcome their marginality and achieve the security, protection, respectability, and recognition withheld by the nation’s industries and political and civic institutions (churches, schools, the military, labor organizations and political parties, the courts, journalism and the mass media). In short, uplift ideology describes African Americans’ struggles against culturally dominant views of national identity and social order positing the United States as “a white man’s country.”
Upon closer scrutiny, the category of the “black middle class” obscures the extent to which the social position of blacks is irretrievably mired in racial and class inequalities, with the two fused together in a manner that grants neither one primacy. The enduring significance of race within changing social relations, and the subordinate “place” of blacks within them, is illustrated in the case of black service workers. One instance of a postemancipation racial economy of class is found in the social relation between black domestic workers, and Pullman porters, and the whites they toiled for. Jack Santino argues in his study of oral histories of Pullman porters that the crucial element of the Pullman company’s luxury overnight train service to its customers was provided by black porters, “whose job [was] one of total personal attention to the passenger.” During the 1870s, Pullman hired former slaves as porters, whose duties, according to Santino, “were several and servile.” The porter came to symbolize to white travelers the company’s service and luxury, as well as its institutionalization of black subordination, reinforcing white passengers’ assumptions of class privilege and authority. For the porters, low wages, harsh working conditions, and constant confrontations with Jim Crow customs and patronizing, if not abusive, passengers made the job all too reminiscent of slavery.12
Its demeaning aspects aside, however, to work for Pullman conferred status within the black community, since the job paid better than the few, mostly menial jobs then available to black men. The Pullman company offered travel, enabled social mobility for many of the children of porters, and promised black men deliverance from the drudgery of field labor. Eventually, the job attracted better-educated men and yielded some leisure for study and self-improvement, as the Jamaican historian J. A. Rogers suggested. An educated railroad porter was the protagonist of Rogers’s novel From Superman to Man, in which the porter gets the best of a white supremacist U.S. senator from the South in a debate on contemporary race relations during an overnight journey.13
For all its apparent benefits, however, the job epitomized the tragically stunted aspirations of black men within a racist social formation. “Being out here on the road, seeing the things that go on, I have sat here and cried a many a night because I did not. . . finish college,” remarked Homer Glenn, who went on to insist, “I do like the job. . . I had no alternative—no other alternative. So when I found out I had no alternative, I liked the job.”14 Glenn’s attitude toward being a porter reveals the lack of any meaningful options for black men except difficult, painful ones.
Also not exactly middle-class were the domestic jobs black women accepted in cities and towns at the turn of the century. Although such jobs promised economic independence, they also exacted a prohibitive cost in drudgery, dependence, and the risk of sexual exploitation by white male employers. In 1912, an anonymous domestic worker in the South, writing in the Independent, detailed an endless series of responsibilities, including child care, gardening, housecleaning, and cooking. “I don’t know what it is to go to church,” she wrote, noting the loss of a rare public outlet for the recognition of dignity and respect; lectures and entertainments were equally impossible. “I live a treadmill life and I see my children only when they happen to see me on the streets when I am out with the children, or when my children come to the ”yard’ to see me,” which wasn’t often “because my white folks” forbade such visits. Paid ten dollars a month, and having to rely on “the service pan” of her employer’s leftovers to feed her own children, she observed that “” the today we are enjoying nominal freedom, we are literally slaves.” This was clearly an educated woman, trapped in an exploitative system and enduring material and spiritual impoverishment. Her life could not have been further removed from the leisure associated with white middle-class ladyhood. Still, it is clear that many of these women and men, domestics and porters, passed their aspirations for a better life on to their children, in whom they inculcated ambition through education. Before being supplanted by black teachers and other professionals, porters and domestics serving the most affluent whites occupied a privileged position within the black class structure. But they were far from the social and economic equals of the whites they worked for, or even those whites at the bottom of the class structure. Indeed, Gerald Jaynes notes that at the turn of the century, black domestic workers made from five to ten dollars per month, or about half of what working-class white women made in textile mills.15
It would be useful, then, to discard our generally color-blind notion of middle-class status, whose effect is to mask race and class inequalities through a reified category of the black middle class. Pullman porters’ and domestic workers’ status as exploited workers confirms the impact of race on the class structure. When we examine the experience of those who, at the turn of the century, sought recognition as being, as they would have put it, a “better class,” we find that a restricted labor market, segregation, the lack of legal protection and full citizenship status, and threats of violence or sexual abuse all fly in the face of conventional notions of bourgeois status. After all, to be bourgeois was to be free and protected by the law, as African Americans had nominally been under Reconstruction governments in the South. Through uplift ideology, elite and less-privileged African Americans were striving for bourgeois respectability in the absence of rights or freedom. Their hope was that rights and freedom would accrue to those who had achieved the status of respectability. And although marital status, the possession of a home or education, or the wish to acquire these, are considered markers of middle-class status, the material condition of many blacks with these aspirations was often indistinguishable from that of impoverished people of any color. Consequently, through uplift ideology, elite blacks also devised a moral economy of class privilege, distinction, and even domination within the race, often drawing on patriarchal gender conventions as a sign of elite status and “race progress.”
The conflation of race and class undermined the assimilationist assertion that class stratification would eradicate antiblack racism. In the minds of some black contemporaries, attributes of cultural assimilation, demonstrated by “white” appearance and behavior and figured by regional criteria such as northern origins (not completely distinguished from behavioral or color standards), were often associated with elite status. Thus, in light of their tragic plight within a racist social formation, it is more accurate to say that many blacks, or whites, for that matter, were not middle class in any truly material or economic sense, but rather, represented themselves as such, in a complex variety of ways. At the same time, however, many of these “representative” blacks lived out the very contradictions of uplift ideology, and they and subsequent generations of the black intelligentsia, in the realm of literature, art, and culture, would come to question and challenge many of its cultural and moral tenets.16
To approach the subject of black middle-class ideology and leadership is to raise searching moral questions about the American past. Only through a recognition of those ways in which black middle-class ideology, as a product of the most nightmarish aspects of our history, has affected African Americans for the worse can black elites and intellectuals redefine uplift not just in those narrow, racial, masculinist, and class-specific terms, but as an ongoing project of social emancipation—self-help in the truest sense. But while acknowledging uplift’s contradictions, one must also recognize the potential within uplift ideals for democratic visions, including one rooted in an ethos of social kinship, perpetuating the collective memory of emancipation, whose ideals of struggle and aspiration countered the social and psychic effects of racism, discrimination, and brutality.