It was hardly the most important aspect of his identity.
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Since I am of mixed-race background, that may be a little hard to define. But reaching across to DuBois’ side of the color line, I’ve recently read books by
Stanley Crouch
Charles Johnson
Shelby Steele
Tananarive Due
Peter Blair Henry
John McWhorter
In response to the idea of a hypothetical display on Du Bois, you replied,
As Dubois was a Stalinist, I’d suggest trying non-totalitarians to balance out a presentation on his work.
Now you’re asking why I said that’s a cartoonish caricature. Basically, as @ChuckV said, he was far more than that.
I mean, imagine if a patron were to ask you (I think you said you’re a librarian?), “Who was J. Edgar Hoover?” Would you reply, “Oh him? He was a closeted-homosexual.” I imagine not, because there was a lot more to Hoover than that, and also it’s not the most noteworthy facet of his life.
Du Bois lived to be 93. His thought, writings, speech and actions went through many phases, and he wrote major works on many topics. In an interview about his third book on Du Bois, Bill Mullens says,
Du Bois was most accurately described as an internationalist. His worldview was framed by 19th-century nationalisms, the Pan-Africanist movement, Communist internationalism and the anticolonial movement of the 20th century. His political orientation was to see in all directions simultaneously the interdependence of the advanced and underdeveloped worlds, as well as the historical movements of people between nations and territories. He called Japan’s defeat of Russia in their 1905 war the first “crossing of the color line” in world history, and India’s independence in 1947 the greatest event of the 20th century. He first used his famous coinage “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line” in the 1900 Pan-African Congress address to refer to the relationship of nonwhite peoples across the world to their colonial masters.
Intellectually, his influences ran from Hegel to Alexander Crummell, Bismarck to Nehru. His 1928 anticolonial novel, Dark Princess, is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For me, communism and socialism provided the intellectual synthesis of this global perspective: he understood what the Communist International called “world revolution” as the drawing together of modern humanity into a single project, or totality, of global unity and emancipation.
Du Bois expressed support for Stalin (Mullen also addresses that mistake) during the last decade of his incredibly varied, peripatetic life, a life that influenced many people in many, many ways. To reduce all of that to “Du Bois was a Stalinist” is indeed cartoonish, as well as offensive.
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Sure, Du Bois lived a very long life and was involved in a wide variety of social and political movements, one of which was indisputably totalitarian. You could say the same thing about Martin Heidegger and Ezra Pound.
We could describe in great detail the political and intellectual activities of Du Bois, Heidegger, and Pound. I just don’t have an interest in doing so.
My preference would be societies to intellectually shun anyone who is enamored of totalitarianism; that whoever espouses totalitarian ideas is forever stained by them. But, again, I’ll be politically neutral in my library.
Thank all the odd gods of the galaxy I wasn’t the only one.
“McDonough’s Song” pops into my head every. single. time.
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I see. I think it’s a great that a lot of people aren’t that simplistic in their judgments of other people.
For one thing, people change.
For another thing, to condemn a man who spent many decades fighting for the downtrodden because of a mistake he made in his late eighties (while still fighting for the downtrodden) is to throw out a ton of good features while in effect obsessing to the point of fetishization about one bad feature.
And for one more thing, people’s reasons for supporting movements of which one facet is sometimes totalitarianism are often more complex than you give them credit for. As Mullens also says about Du Bois,
Du Bois’s political evaluations of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China were consistent with those of many of the people whom we consider to be the most important radicals of the 20th century, including the majority of anticolonial leaders from Asia and Africa. His strong desire for decolonization led him to trust the Soviet Union and China and their promises of aid to that project well past the time their revolutions had become corrupted. To be for world revolution and decolonization in the 20th century, in other words, was to sign up for Communist internationalism with all of its faults. Du Bois signed up early and never fully recanted.
On the other hand, he misapprehended the meaning of Marxism and socialism in ways that we should not forgive or forget. He confused state capitalism – Stalin’s system of socialism in one country and bureaucratic rule from above – with the real meaning of socialism as working-class self-emancipation. His thin understanding of Japanese and Chinese history caused him to perceive Japanese imperialism and expansionism in China as a viable alternative to capitalism for nonwhite workers of the world. Du Bois was both brilliant and fallible.
But he was always, as I try to make clear, vying to find a way that ordinary people could fashion their own liberation and self-emancipation. He found this match of political will and human self-activity in his most brilliant book, Black Reconstruction in America (1935). If he had written nothing else in his life, Black Reconstruction would have cemented his place as one of the most original scholars and political theorists of human freedom. So his life and his work demand a judicious and balanced approach that is well grounded in the theories of revolution and human liberation he was trying to advance. I try to provide that approach, and as you say, walk that line, in my book.
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There is only one way that she is a “thorn in the side” of the library. Namely, that she is right.
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If we’re suggesting a potential complementary/counterpoint
exhibit, something relating to the second half of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, in which he goes north and joins the communist party…
…Along with an exhibit on, well I was going to say Ukrainian history but let’s face it that is a disservice to the many other nations and ethnicities the soviets (and Stalin specifically) oppressed and worse.
Perhaps a better neutral exhibit would be about how the right and left both have squandered all moral authority by apologizing for totalitarians while frequently engaging in “enemy of my enemy is my friend” and “the ends justify the means”.
As horrible as this story is, I’m greatly relieved it wasn’t my initial misreading of the headline which reversed the words “to” and “fire”. That comes across like a joke when I say it, but I’m sad to live in a world where that reading isn’t immediately dismissed as preposterous by some filtering part of my brain.
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Give it a year.
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