The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois by Aberjhani

Author:Aberjhani [Series, The Wisdom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2010-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

8

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Whiteness and Race Relations

Growing up in the New England region of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, allowed Du Bois during his childhood to develop a personality unscarred by the psychologically debilitating effects of overt racism as it was practiced in other parts of the United States. It was not until he was ten years old that he became aware of life as something defined largely by the blackness of his skin—though it was much lighter than that of many darker African Americans—and the whiteness of his playmates’. That was when he found himself “shut out from their world by a vast veil” as a young white stranger, unlike his other playmates, refused to accept from him the greeting card they generally exchanged to announce an intent to visit their home. However, just as the event made him sensitive to his racial difference, it also forced him to recognize and rely upon his intellectual gifts to excel academically and refute the implied or stated charge that he was something inferior to anyone else.

Later, fortified and certified by one degree from Fisk University, studies in Berlin, Germany, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Du Bois dissected the conundrum of American race relations on every level. The impact of American slavery and the then ongoing practice of apartheid in the country had already demonstrated the devastating effects of the concepts of whiteness and blackness upon people of African descent. Within the American concept of race, blacks were political have-nots given to the command of whites because of their supposedly innate inferiority. If such inferiority was more a product of white imagination than black reality, the very real chains of forced servitude and the decades of oppression that followed had in fact made blacks economically and socially disadvantaged. The imagined inferiority was forced to become the truth in America just as it was in those African countries colonized by Europe.

What was less evident when weighing the cost of dividing human beings into categories of color was the consequences of such a practice upon whites. They were, Du Bois noted, many and devastating. For if the black family was continuously corroded by the economic and social instability generated by racism, the white family, particularly in the South, was often made incomplete by its need to deny and dehumanize offspring of mixed heritage. And if blacks suffered the degradation of knowing whites labeled them inferior, whites suffered the delusion with all its attendant mental and moral failings of believing the same.

Neither science nor history supported claims of inferiority and superiority. For whites to deny the humanity of black people was to deny their own humanity. Moreover, the claim to superiority was not new and it was nothing if not one vast psychological pitfall already writhing with history’s dictators, despots, madmen, and bigots. What then were the implications of a national agenda with nothing more than the worship of whiteness as its principal goal? The way out of the maze of whiteness and blackness that led inevitably,

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