Uplifting the Race by Kevin K. Gaines

Author:Kevin K. Gaines
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1996-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

William Edward Burghart Du Bois, ca. 1910.

The very moment of the production of The Philadelphia Negro is thus fraught with ideological tension. Often asserting uplift’s doctrine of class stratification and, therefore, the duty of privileged blacks to set a high moral tone for the black masses, Du Bois’s analysis of discriminatory wages, rents, and living conditions for blacks in Philadelphia nevertheless rendered the usual exhortations of self-help, individualism, and the moral pieties of uplift quixotic at best. Just as uplift’s function for black elites was in part to impose a sense of control and order on the overwhelming problems facing blacks in cities and elsewhere, Du Bois’s study aspired to similar ideals of organized intelligence. He set out “to lay before the public such a body of information as may be a safe guide for all the efforts toward the solution of the many Negro problems of a great American city.” Yet the overwhelming pattern unearthed by his reformist empiricism was a degree of white prejudice and systemic exclusion impervious to his ideals of enlightened reason.10

While brilliantly advancing sociological research methods, Du Bois’s study also exhibited the moral and religious animus underlying much early social science writing. The Philadelphia Negro broke tentatively with the usual perception of the cultural and moral shortcomings of urban blacks and rejected prevailing hereditary explanations of poverty and crime. But at the same time, Du Bois’s construction of class differences among blacks was predicated on cultural and moral distinctions measured by the degree of conformity to patriarchal family norms. This dominant perspective behind Du Bois’s reading of urban poverty anticipated the work of subsequent studies, most notably those of E. Franklin Frazier, which characterized black poverty as an irregular preponderance of matriarchal authority. Frazier’s work, like Du Bois’s, had intended to demonstrate the harmful effects caused by discrimination. Frazier’s theme of family disorganization had its greatest impact with the Moynihan report, published in 1965, which gave new impetus to the myth of black matriarchy, and reentered mainstream media discourse on race as the “culture of poverty” thesis advanced by a legion of informal social commentators, journalists, and policymakers. The contentious discussions of race, social class, gender, and urban poverty since the Moynihan report have their origins in the contradictions of Du Bois’s study, which represented blacks as both discriminated against and morally suspect, subject to inegalitarian constructions of deviance.

In its day, Du Bois’s study was seen as fair-minded and objective, insofar as it seemed to confirm its reviewers’ preconceptions about race. Hampton Institute’s Southern Workman welcomed the author’s unwillingness “to with-hold ugly facts, such as those relating to crime and pauperism and low standards in family life.” While the Nation acknowledged that color prejudice “is a far more powerful force than is commonly believed,” it strangely concluded that “the lesson taught by this investigation is one of patience and sympathy towards the South, whose difficulties have been far greater than those of the North.”11

Elite blacks may have found poor blacks in urban slums embarrassing incarnations of minstrel stereotypes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.