- 1 Here I follow Pearce’s 2024 correction to the seminar dates provided by Torres Colón and Hobbs, whi (...)
1The historical connections between early American pragmatist philosophy and anthropology likely are thicker than most contemporary pragmatists and anthropologists realize. John Dewey’s professional relationship with Franz Boas probably is the best-known association. Dewey (1859-1952) and Boas (1858-1942) were colleagues at Columbia University for approximately thirty years (1904-1930, when Dewey retired) and they even co-taught a seminar for three consecutive years, from 1913 to 1916.1 Both emphasized the primacy of experience, and Boas’ influence on Dewey helped Dewey develop an anthropological account of nature that intertwined it with culture. In turn, Dewey’s account of nature influenced subsequent generations of anthropologists who based their work on dynamic, interconnected models of humans and their environments (Torres Colón & Hobbs 2015).
2What is less well-known is the rich connection that pragmatist philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) had with the field of anthropology, including a significant influence on Boas. In 1905, one year after Boas’ move to Columbia, Du Bois invited him to Atlanta, Georgia, to give Atlanta University’s 1906 commencement address and to present at its annual Conference on Negro Health and Physique, an invitation which Boas accepted. In his presentations, Boas simultaneously praised the accomplishments of ancient African peoples and encouraged Black Americans to work hard and be patient until white people realized that Black people were not inferior to them. In that way, they effectively echoed the position of Black accommodation to white culture that was (in)famously championed by Booker T. Washington (Willis 2008: 60). While Boas’ speeches generally were not well received by his Atlanta audiences, they nonetheless had a profound effect on Du Bois, who credited Boas for inspiring him to research African history and ethnology in more depth. Despite the speeches’ content, they also positioned Boas, unawares, on the “radical” side – that of Du Bois against Washington – of the Black American leaders’ national struggle over what racial justice for Black people should look like and how it should be achieved (ibid.: 65-6).
- 2 But see also Baker 2021 for further analysis of how Boas argued, in 1909, that Black people needed (...)
3As a result, Du Bois had a powerful impact on Boas’ work, pushing him to leave the ivory tower and be the critical public intellectual and activist on issues of race, racism, and social justice that he later became (Baker 2004, 2022).2 Beyond Boas, Du Bois also went on to influence a great number of early African American anthropologists who received their training in the 1920s through the 1940s and developed pioneering analyses of race and culture that challenged racism and white supremacy: Allison Davis, Irene Diggs, St. Clair Drake, Carolyn Bond Day, and Arthur H. Fasset (Baker 2022). Du Bois’ pragmatist philosophy thus is central to early anthropologies of race. When contemporary scholars seek historical inspiration for developing pragmatist anthropologies of race, they need not be limited to focusing on the relationship between Dewey and Boas, important though that relationship was (cf. Torres Colón & Hobbs 2016). Du Bois also is a significant part of the rich history of the intersections of pragmatism and anthropology, especially when issues of race and racism are at stake.
4My goal in this article is to illuminate the anthropological aspects of Du Bois’ corpus, and I will do so in two ways. First, drawing on the recent recognition of Du Bois by contemporary anthropologists, I will highlight the anthropological work that Du Bois conducted on Black people and communities in Philadelphia and Atlanta. This work often is recognized as sociological, and rightly so, but it also made important contributions to the burgeoning field of anthropology. Second, and more ambitiously, I will argue that when reading Du Bois with an eye for his anthropological pragmatism, contemporary philosophers and anthropologists should not stop at reading Du Bois’ work on Black people. We also should read his analyses of whiteness and white people as components of a critical anthropology of race. This is so even though Du Bois did not empirically investigate white people and communities in the same methodological way that he did Black ones. Nevertheless, reading Du Bois as an anthropologist of whiteness has the beneficial effect of providing fresh insight into Du Bois’ analyses of whiteness and deepening the links between pragmatism and anthropology in his work. As a pragmatist, Du Bois is a meliorist concerned with the concrete experiences and habits of human beings. His focus on race encourages both philosophers and anthropologists to examine how those experiences and habits are shaped by racial prejudice and domination.
5Based on his early social scientific work, Du Bois has come to be recognized as one of the founders of American sociology, and related fields such as criminal justice and history also acknowledge the influence of his work (Williams 2006). In particular, The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, and Du Bois’ Atlantic University publications, which he edited in the early 1900s, often are seen as groundbreaking sociological analyses of Black life and cultures. However, this work also can been read as a founding contribution to anthropology. Sociology and anthropology complement each other, of course, and reading Du Bois anthropologically need not negate the sociological import of his work. But it is important not to erase or subsume anthropology to sociology when reading Du Bois with an eye for his social scientific contributions.
- 3 However, anthropology could be said to have begun at the end of the 18th century, with Immanuel Kan (...)
6In part, this has to do with the different histories of the two fields. Somewhat oversimplified, modern sociology originated in the 19th century as an attempt to understand the workings of human society and social behavior, especially at the institutional level and in the wake of massive social change due to the Industrial Revolution. Modern anthropology originated in the 19th and early 20th centuries as the study of human cultures and behaviors in order to understand what makes us human.3 Unlike sociology, out of which the field of anthropology grew, anthropology also has significant roots in colonialism. Early anthropological field work typically took the form of white European or Euro-American scientists studying the so-called exotic customs of small cultural groups in Africa, the Americas, and East Asia and the Pacific Islands (Lewis 1973; Ma 2020; Parsons 2022).
7In the United States, anthropologists focused particularly on Indigenous people in North America – so-called Native Americans – allegedly demonstrating that “the savage stands strikingly close to sub-human species in every respect,” as the soon-to-be first president of the American Anthropological Association William McGee wrote in 1901 (Parsons 2022: 2). Perhaps this was because of a natural-history focus on the indigenous origins of North America. As the Black Columbia-trained anthropologist William S. Willis lamented in 1970, Black people were not seen by “the lily-white composition of anthropology” as exotically mysterious the way that Indigenous people were (Zumwalt 2008: 28). Willis also suspected that white people still perceived conquering the frontier as heroic while they tended to feel guilty when reminded of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and these attitudes helped unconsciously steer anthropologists away from studying Black Americans (ibid.). Whatever the reason, even though racist stereotypes of Black Americans as uncivilized and thus as “savage” pervaded the United States, Black American communities and cultures were largely neglected by the discipline of anthropology.
8This makes Du Bois’ study of Black people and communities in Philadelphia all the more striking. Not only was it the first anthropological study to focus on Black people in the United States, but it also was the first anthropological project – certainly in the United States, but also likely in Europe – in which an anthropologist studied their own people rather than a different group. (I will return to this point shortly.) In 1896, the sociology department of the University of Pennsylvania hired Du Bois to conduct in-depth research on the Black residents of Philadelphia’s seventh ward, in which the largest number of Black Philadelphians lived. Du Bois moved to the seventh ward and lived there for approximately one year while he distributed questionnaires, conducted interviews with the Black seventh ward residents, and gathered statistical data about their occupation, age, gender, health, and other relevant information. Du Bois knew that the city had different motives than he did for conducting the study. “The fact was that the city of Philadelphia at that time had a theory,” Du Bois (1940/1984: 58) acknowledged, “and that theory was that this great, rich, and famous municipality was going to the dogs because of the crime and venality of its Negro citizens, who lived largely centered in the slum at the lower end of the seventh ward.” Du Bois nevertheless accepted the job believing that he could use it for his own purposes, which were to create a more accurate and truthful picture of Black life that could counter anti-Black prejudice. “My vision was becoming clearer,” as Du Bois explained in anticipation of the study. “The Negro problem was in my mind a matter of systemic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation” (ibid.).
9Operating with what today is called research triangulation or mixed-methods research, in his Philadelphia study “Du Bois utilized multiple tools, especially interviews, archival research, and field observations, in order to reduce the errors that might occur if only one methodology were employed” (Williams 2006: 372; see also Clayton Jr. et al. 2023: 156). His approach had affinities with the work of Jane Addams, Isabel Eaton, and other women sociologists at Hull House, who mapped communities in Chicago based on studies of poverty, wages, immigration, and other social and economic factors. Both Du Bois and Addams were guided by Charles Booth’s late 19th century empirical study of poor people in London (Clayton Jr. et al. 2023: 156). Eaton, who studied cloak-makers’ wages and living expenses in Chicago, later worked with Du Bois on The Philadelphia Negro while she was a graduate student in sociology, helping author a substantial portion of the report (Deegan 1988).
10Influenced by the community-questionnaire model used by Booth and Addams, Du Bois and his team provided an analysis of an urban community that challenged white supremacist thinking about Black people. Rather than monolithically poor, uneducated, and/or criminal, the Black residents of the seventh ward had a great deal of class and economic diversity. Du Bois also used empirical methods to historically situate the struggles of Black people, recognizing that so-called undesirable traits such as low personal motivation and slack moral values existed but arguing that they were remnants of chattel slavery rather than inherent to Black people. Anticipating his later argument regarding “the Talented Tenth,” which was the top ten percent of “exceptional men” who could “save the Negro race” (Du Bois 1903), Du Bois identified a Black elite class in the seventh ward and argued for their importance in racial advancement for Black people. Finally, Du Bois concluded his study with public policy recommendations: “duties,” as he called them, for Black people to promote socially and economically “proper” behaviors, along with a call to white people to allow Black people to advance as far as their abilities allow (Williams 2006).
11After Philadelphia study was published, the president of Atlanta University approached Du Bois and asked him to oversee the university’s work in sociology and in particular the new conferences on the so-called Negro problem that the university was beginning. From 1896-1910, Du Bois and his students published eighteen monographs based on studies of Black life in the Atlanta area. This work was notable for adding the social sciences and the data it generated to existing social reform work on the part of Black Americans, which often consisted of stories of improvement accompanied by moral admonitions for other Black people to do the same (ibid.: 378). The Atlantic University publications tended to focus on Georgia, for example, gathering crime data to challenge claims that crime was rising among Black Americans. But some of them had a national scope, such as the 1900 The College-Bred Negro, which interviewed Black college graduates across the United States, documenting that most of them were employed post-graduation in jobs and professions appropriate to their training. This helped counter prejudiced assumptions that higher education for Black people was misguided because it supposedly left them with useless skills for the type of (presumably menial) jobs that were their only option (ibid.: 379).
- 4 Du Bois probably was overworked and under-resourced when conducting his study of Philadelphia; inde (...)
- 5 For more on those challenges, see Lopez-Dicastillo & Belintxon 2014.
12The Philadelphia Negro and the Atlanta University publications are two of the most prominent examples of Du Bois’ social scientific study of Black Americans. Other examples include Du Bois’ 1898 publication The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: A Social Study, which was commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and is notable for its documentation of class differences among Black Americans living in the Farmville area. Methodologically, Du Bois’ work was groundbreaking even though it had limitations, which Du Bois himself recognized. For example, in addition to the problem of “one lone worker and little money” and white skepticism that hampered The Philadelphia Negro study, Du Bois was not necessarily seen as one of their own by the other Black residents of the seventh ward.4 As Du Bois (1940/1984: 58) frankly admits, “Blacks [in the seventh ward] said, ‘Are we animals to be dissected and by an unknown Negro at that?’” Du Bois does not elaborate on how he overcame Black resistance to his work in Philadelphia, Farmville, or elsewhere, but he rightly flags some of the methodological challenges entailed, for example, by participant observation field work, which persist in contemporary anthropology and ethnology.5 He also was acutely aware of the dangers of personal bias and of unavoidable faults in statistical methodology, raising those as important issues for social scientists to acknowledge and grapple with (Du Bois 1940/1984: 59).
13Both the achievements of and the obstacles faced by Du Bois’ turn-of-the-century studies of American Black communities thus remain instructive for scholars today. As a distinctively pragmatist anthropologist, Du Bois models how to study human experience for the express purpose of improving it. Collectively, Du Bois’ empirical studies of Black people thus have earned him the status of an “unacknowledged ancestor” of today’s anthropologists whose research “anticipate[s] and even at points go[es] beyond the insights of such contemporary subdisciplines as urban anthropology, […] radical historical political economy, […] and humanistic anthropology” (Harrison 1992: 234).
14As important as Du Bois’ studies of Black American people and cultures are, they are not the only anthropological legacy that Du Bois has bequeathed contemporary scholars. Via his substantial critical analyses of white culture, Du Bois also can be read as an anthropologist of the “odd tribes” of white people, to adopt John Hartigan Jr.’s (2005) felicitous phrase. Given that anthropology’s roots lie in white scholars’ examination of non-white “savage” tribes, to consider white people as a “tribe” effectively turns the tables on them. It subjects their practices, rituals, and beliefs to critical examination and treats them as culturally specific – even bizarre, abnormal, or “odd” – rather than as manifestations of a universal truth regarding the achievements of civilization and definitions of what it means to be human.
15Du Bois’ examination of whiteness does all that and more. He not only strips white people of their role as the unmarked exemplar of the “normal” human, as the work of white scholars critically studying white people also can do. As a Black scholar, he eliminates the white gaze altogether. His studies of white people position non-white people – Black people, in this case – in a superior epistemological role. Black people often know white people in terms of their race better than white people know themselves. Needless to say, this is something that white people generally are unaccustomed to in societies structured by white privilege and white supremacy, as the United States (and other white-dominated countries) was and is. Du Bois’ studies of whiteness and white people thus were just as, if not more groundbreaking than his work on Black people. As Hartigan (2005: 202) notes, “Arguably the first social scientific attempt to analyze – rather than champion – whiteness was W.E.B. Du Bois’s account of the ‘white world’ in Dusk of Dawn.”
16In fact, Du Bois critically examined whiteness earlier than the 1940 publication of Dusk of Dawn. For example, in 1920, he published a scathing account of “the souls of white folk” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920/1999). Admittedly, that account might not strictly count as social scientific since it does not utilize any quantitative or qualitative scientific measures, but neither does the essay on “The White World” in Dusk of Dawn. Rather than pinpoint which is Du Bois’ first social scientific analysis of whiteness, however, what is more important for my purposes is the larger question of whether Du Bois’ on whiteness and white people can be profitably read with an anthropological lens. My answer to that question is yes. Even though Du Bois’ work on whiteness does not fit with a methodologically strict understanding of anthropology, imaginatively reading it from an anthropological perspective shows how it can contribute to a critical anthropology of race. Here too Du Bois’ distinctively pragmatist approach to anthropology shines through: his work on whiteness demonstrates how to study human experience for the express purpose of improving it.
17Du Bois himself indicates his interest in explicitly connecting anthropology to studies of whiteness, at least early in his career. In Dusk of Dawn, quoting himself from the conclusion of The Philadelphia Negro as he outlines a plan for further study, Du Bois (1940/1984: 61) writes:
Particularly with regard to anthropology I said: “That there are differences between the white and black races is certain, but just what those differences are is known to none with an approach to accuracy. Yet here in America is the most remarkable opportunity ever offered of studying these differences, of noting influences of climate and physical environment, and particularly of studying the effect of amalgamating two of the most diverse races in the world – another subject which rests under a cloud of ignorance.”
- 6 Needless to say, contemporary anthropological methods such as focus groups and surveys of white peo (...)
18Du Bois does not follow up on the opportunity to empirically compare and contrast white and Black people. However, he does go on to write brilliantly and frequently about the practices and beliefs of white people, revealing them to be not just an “odd tribe” but also a malevolent one. Moreover, he uses multiple methods to analyze whiteness, providing a kind of methodological triangulation in this work as well. Somewhat loosely, we can categorize those methods as: participant observation of white people, interviews of white people, and historical research about white people.6
- 7 For more on worlds and world-traveling especially in the context of racial oppression, see Lugones (...)
19Du Bois’ entire life could be described as one of fieldwork via participant observation of white people and their particular customs, beliefs, and habits, especially those concerning race. He lived surrounded by white people as he grew up in a small town in Massachusetts (the only “colored student” to graduate from its high school, in 1884), as he attended Fisk University for his undergraduate degree and then Harvard College and the University of Berlin for his advanced degrees, and in his teaching, research, and editorial jobs in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New York (Du Bois 1940/1984: 20-5). Interacting with white people is not unique to Du Bois’ situation, of course; most Black Americans had to do so if only to remain employed. But Du Bois was particularly adept at understanding and analyzing the experience of being immersed in a cultural group that he did not belong to, and he thus could simultaneously be surrounded by and observe that group critically. As Du Bois (ibid.: 135), explains, he was born into a racially segregated society, but “in addition I lived in an environment which I came to call the white world.” By “world,” Du Bois intends something different than the typical meaning of the word, for example, the earth and its various countries and natural features. The white world is a distinct world in the sense of set of practices and values that are actively created through material and semiotic processes and that give definition and meaning to the people and things within that world. A particular geographical space can be the site of different worlds that conflict with one another, and people sometimes “travel” between worlds – often out of necessity for survival.7
20The main thing we learn about the white world from Du Bois’ participatory field work in it is that white people highly value mastery and control. They seek to control other people and they are extremely devoted to controlling Black people in particular. As Du Bois explains, the white world “often existed primarily […] to see with sleepless vigilance that I was kept within bounds […]. I could not stir, I could not act, I could not live, without taking into careful daily account the reaction of my white environing world” (Du Bois 1940/1984: 135, 136). The mechanisms for exercising and securing that control are numerous, and they drill down into the minute aspects of quotidian life. Du Bois’ experience reveals the wide range of the white world’s attempts at mastering – pun intended vis-à-vis white slave masters – the lives of Black people in post-slavery America: “How I traveled and where, what work I did, with whom I talked, where I sought recreation, where I studied, what I wrote and what I could get published […] this fact of racial distinction based on color was the greatest thing in my life and absolutely determined it” (ibid.: 136).
- 8 When legal racial segregation was eliminated in the United States, yet another answer to this quest (...)
21White Americans’ fixation on control of Black people also is apparent in their quotidian, trivial conversations with them. Du Bois (1903/1994: 1) recounts the numerous times that while making small talk, white people implicitly ask him the real question that is on their minds: “How does it feel to be a problem?” This was a question for him as a Black individual, but it also was a question being asked by white people at a national, collective level. “No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil” in the United States’ Civil War, Du Bois wryly notes, “than this old question [of Black enslavement], newly guised, sprang from the earth, – What shall be done with Negroes?” (Ibid.). How, in other words, can and will white people continue to dominate and control Black people now that the institution of chattel slavery has been abolished? What new societal structures can take its place? The answer at the time was the creation of Jim Crow laws, which began in the 1870s and legally mandated racial segregation in the United States until the 1950s and 60s.8
22Du Bois’ subsequent reflections on this old question reveal another defining characteristic of white culture, which I will call its hubristic single-consciousness about race. This aspect of white culture emerges in connection with Du Bois’ now-famous description of his double-consciousness as a Black person: “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 two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body” (Du Bois 1903/1994: 2). White people, in contrast, generally do not have double-consciousness and thus they lack the epistemic complexity that Black people generally have regarding race. White people do not look at themselves through the eyes of other racial groups, and they do not measure their value and worth against the tape of other people. They do not question or “war” with themselves over whether they are who they think they are. They single-consciously and arrogantly “know” that they are the pinnacle of civilized humanity and thus that it is appropriate for them to set up a world in which they are dominant and control other people.
23While Du Bois never conducted official interviews with white people about race, we can read his fictional conversation with a white person in the essay “The White World” as such an interview. “Fictional” is not quite accurate, however, since the conversation condenses various things that actual white people have said to or in front of Du Bois about race over the years. In that sense, the conversation is real. Du Bois’ interview subject is named Roger Van Dieman, a “white friend” who, Du Bois (1940/1984: 140) explains, is “an abstraction and integration and never existed.” While the singular person Van Dieman does not exist, the amalgamation of white beliefs presented by his words reveals a great deal about the values that undergird whiteness.
24What we learn from Du Bois’ (ibid.: 140-53) conversation with Van Dieman spans the full array of white people’s prejudiced beliefs about themselves and Black people: white people are superior to Black people, whom white people view as objects of pity; white people are uniquely beautiful and represent the standard of beauty against which Black people are measured; white people are the intellectual pinnacle of humanity, in whatever way intellect is defined: “clear thinking, pure reason, mathematical precision and creative genius” (ibid.: 143); white people are morally and spiritually superior to other races; and white people have produced the highest forms of culture and civilization while other racial groups are comparative backward or primitive.
25Du Bois also “interviews” another fictional white companion, who is particularly interesting to Du Bois because the friend shows how “the average reasonable, conscientious, and fairly intelligent white American faces continuing paradox” because of his race-based beliefs (ibid.: 153). This unnamed white person is religiously faithful, seeking to follow Christian teachings that honor peace, good will to all human beings, poverty over riches, and the idea that the meek rather than the powerful shall inherit the earth. This friend also considers himself to be a civilized gentleman; he is courteous to (white) women, charitable toward the needy, and loyal to his country. The bind that this person finds himself in, however, is that he also supports hatred, war, exploitation, and imperialism. When his conflicting values are set out bluntly before him, the white companion is shocked; how can one endorse such contradictory practices and values?
26The answer, as Du Bois demonstrates, is that white people ultimately give up on the higher values out of what they consider to be a level-headed, praiseworthy practicality. As his white companion explains, it would be ideal if peace, good will, and the golden rule could prevail, but the reality is that:
[T]his can’t be a world of saints […]. But why not have [instead] a world of gentlemen – well-policed, everybody in his place; all the rich, courteous and generous and all the poor appreciative; propaganda for the right, love of country and prosperous business; White World leading the Colored as far as the darkies can go. Certainly despite all your democracy, blood will tell. Now that seems to be practical. (Ibid.: 166)
27And if push comes to shove – which it inevitably will, given that civilization requires money, as the white friend insists – then “we’ve got to be Americans even if we give up being Christians and Gentlemen” (ibid.: 168). The paradox thus is resolved thanks to white Americans’ supposedly realistic outlook on life. In their view, they are not bad people and they believe in the importance of moral and spiritual values, but they also are smart enough to prioritize practical adaptation to harsh realities – perhaps especially when those harsh realities are created by and in the service of white people themselves. Du Bois’ second interview thus reveals how white people lie to themselves, enabling them to feel good about themselves and camouflaging the actual reality that “the attitude of the white world [is] sheer malevolence” (ibid.: 170).
28Finally, Du Bois provides a historical perspective on white people and nations, complementing the micro-level data gathered through participant observation, conversations, and interviews with macro-level information obtained through historical analyses. While this is not the same as the archival or archeological research sometimes pursued by anthropologists, it does fit with historical anthropology’s aim of understanding how a particular culture has changed over time. And what has changed in the case of white America, as Du Bois demonstrates, is an expansion of its white mastery and control from the national to the international level. The young nation that sought to control Black slaves and newly-freed Black Americans in the 19th century grew in power in the early 20th century and joined Europe in its efforts to control Black people and other people of color around the world. As Du Bois (ibid.: 47) explains, he “began to see the race problem in America, the problem of the peoples of Africa and Asia, and the political development of Europe as one.” Put another way, whiteness and the corresponding “race problem” was always more than a merely American phenomenon – in that sense, nothing has changed – but the full development and coordination of white global control did not take place until roughly the turn of the 20th century (Du Bois 1920/1999: 17).
29In particular, it is during World War I that the staggering horror of global whiteness became apparent. Or rather, it became apparent to white people; it had been obvious to other people for decades. No longer content to exploit and kill non-white people in Africa and elsewhere, “the white world turned temporarily aside to kill each other” (ibid.). The temporary nature of this violence does not mean that it is an anomaly, however. It instead is the clearest picture of what white control and ownership has always been. As Du Bois (ibid.: 22) agonizingly depicts the white nations of Europe during World War I, “this is not Europe gone made; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture – back of all culture –, stripped and visible today.” World War II, including the horrific violence of Nazi Germany, was a logical extension of the soul of white culture – and not just World War I, but also the 1884 Conference in Berlin that preceded it, in which white European nations carved up Africa for colonial exploitation (Du Bois 1940/1984: 170; Sullivan 2021).
30Du Bois’ scathing criticism of Europe does not mean that he lets the United States off the hook, however. Indeed, Du Bois delivers an equally harsh, parallel criticism of America and its actions during and after the war. He finds it almost laughable that America saw itself as fighting a good moral fight for democracy when it entered World War I and then playing a leadership role securing peace at Versailles via the creation of the League of Nations after the war concluded. As Du Bois (1920/1999: 28) wryly notes,
[I]t is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role. For two or more centuries American has marched proudly in the van of human hatred – making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously […]. Instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood American has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow people are concerned. (Emphasis added)
- 9 See also Du Bois (1935; 1920/1999: 47-59) for additional historical analyses of whiteness, includin (...)
31It thus is not just white Europe, but also white America that passionately declares, “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” (ibid.: 18). Du Bois’ analyses of whiteness reveal that to become a member of the odd tribe of white people requires learning vicious cultural habits of possessing and controlling other people, places, and lands.9
32Contemporary anthropologists have begun to acknowledge that Du Bois’ scholarship should be recognized as “intellectually and politically integral to the development of an authentic, critical anthropology” (Harrison 1992: 255). As I have argued, not only his careful empirical studies of Black people, but also his critical experiential analyses of white people can be considered part of an anthropological legacy that contemporary scholars can benefit from today. Indeed, that legacy has borne fruit, as is evident in the important anthropological work on whiteness carried out, for example, by John Hartigan Jr. (1999, 2005) and Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Jemima Pierre and Junaid Rana (2023).
33One of the challenges for the ongoing work of Du Bois’ legacy, however, comes from the fact that his status as an anthropologist tends to be based on the first half of his career, that is, his work up until the Atlanta University studies. As noted earlier, that was the time in Du Bois’ life that he saw himself as engaged in “a careful search for truth” about race that would make “the Truth clear to all,” especially white people (Du Bois 1940/1984: 64). This positivist notion of truth operated with a progressive, liberal approach to the elimination of racism. At that time, Du Bois believed that once white people had the Truth – often capitalized by Du Bois in this context – they would relinquish their prejudice against Black people.
34However, by 1910, Du Bois became critical of this approach and more wary of white people’s racial intentions. He moved, both geographically to New York and academically away from empirical studies, toward producing what he called political “propaganda” via his editorship of the NAACP’s The Crisis, negatively characterizing his earlier work at Atlanta University as an ivory tower-focus on statistics and information about race (1940/1984: 54, 222). Even his NAACP work came under subsequent self-criticism, as Du Bois shifted more fully to confront the unconscious operations of racial prejudice (Sullivan 2003). As Du Bois (1940/1984: 296) retrospectively remarked in 1948, by 1930 he “began to realize that in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determination of white folk to oppress us; we were facing age-long complexes sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge.” And in his final, 1968 autobiography, Du Bois (1968: 228) underscores, “I was not at the time sufficiently Freudian to understand how little human action is based on reason.”
35Du Bois’ criticisms of his early methodology would apply not only to his work in Philadelphia and Atlanta, but also to the critical anthropology of whiteness that is implicit in his empirical studies. After all, participant observation, interviews, and historical research on and with white people are research methods consistent with the progressive, liberal approach to eliminating racism found in Du Bois’ studies of Black people and communities. This fact does not erase the importance to anthropology of Du Bois’ early work, but it does raise an important question. Given Du Bois’ self-criticism of his early work’s positivist methodology, what does his movement away from his recognizably social scientific work mean for his legacy as a founder of anthropology?
- 10 For more on the intersections of anthropology and psychoanalysis, see Groark 2019, and Heald & Delu (...)
36In my view, the shift in Du Bois’ methodology over the course of his career adds to, rather than detracts from, the value of his work as a critical pragmatist anthropologist of race. This is because whiteness and white supremacy substantially operate via unconscious habits of racial privilege (Sullivan 2006), and thus any adequate pragmatism or anthropology of race must confront that fact. Du Bois’ later work can help both pragmatism and anthropology do so.10 Indeed, I think appreciating Du Bois as a pragmatist entails affirming the emphasis he places not only on the consciously-driven experiences and behaviors of Black, white, and other people, but also on their subconscious and unconscious ones. As for anthropology, I would argue that Du Bois’ change of focus toward unconscious habits of racial prejudice should be considered more of a transformation than an abandonment of the social sciences. It is a positive shift that encourages contemporary anthropologists to pay attention to age-long complexes of whiteness, which can seem invisible or non-existent because they no longer operate on a conscious level.
37In the contemporary field of anthropology, Hartigan’s work is notable for doing precisely that by directly tackling, rather than evading the question of the value of Du Bois’ later thinking. Acknowledging Du Bois as an inspiration for his 2005 monograph, Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People, Hartigan (2005: 15) describes the book as a fusion of the social sciences and cultural studies, the latter of which utilizes concepts such as the unconscious and thus makes for a somewhat unexpected partner for anthropology. Du Bois paved the way for that partnership, according to Hartigan, precisely because Du Bois “found the ability of social scientific methods and theories to objectify the nuanced dynamics of racial matters limited” (ibid.: 292, n. 30). Rather than being a drawback to Du Bois’ work as an anthropologist, Du Bois’ methodological turn to unconscious racialized habits can be beneficial for contemporary anthropology. As Hartigan (ibid.) explains, “the analytic tactics Du Bois deployed in the latter works [i.e., The Souls of Black Folks and Dusk of Dawn] are today largely the purview of cultural studies approaches and are clearly critical to the task of understanding racial dynamics today.”
38Overall, Du Bois’ pragmatism encourages anthropologists to pay close attention to the way that race and racial prejudice shape human behavior and culture and to use the results of their work for the purpose of improving human experience. It also highlights the role that whiteness historically has played and often continues to play in the racialization of human life. Finally, it underscores the centrality of unconscious habits in the operation of racial prejudice, especially unconscious beliefs and practices that assume that whiteness is the rightful measure of humanity. This constitutes a rich legacy for contemporary anthropology to embrace.