Du Bois and the Ongoing Project of Black Identity (The Souls of Black Folk, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our conversation with Jesse McCarthy, we discuss the spiritual and intellectual underpinnings of The Souls of Black Folk and break down common misperceptions about the work. Jesse also explains why he always teaches The Souls of Black Folk with music.

Jesse McCarthy is the editor of the Norton Library edition of The Souls of Black Folk and Assistant Professor in the departments of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published articles and reviews in the journals transposition, NOVEL, and African American Review and contributed chapters to Richard Wright in Context and Ralph Ellison in Context  as well as a new introduction for Vincent O. Carter’s long out-of-print memoir The Bern Book. He is also the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? , a collection of essays; and a novel, The Fugitivities.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition ofThe Souls of Black Folk,  go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/TSOBF.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by The Souls of Black Folk: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Jx6YYSrTjRTFqgfWsT3vy?si=f7493ea35a7d4588.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/thesoulsofblackfolk/part2/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present part two of our interview devoted to W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1903 masterwork, The Souls of Black Folk, with its editor Jesse McCarthy. In part one, we discussed who Du Bois was and how he came to write this work, and in this second episode we examine the challenges of reading The Souls of Black Folk, Jesse's favorite line in the book, an appropriate playlist, and much more. Jesse McCarthy teaches English and African American studies at Harvard University and has published widely in fiction and non-fiction, including the essay collection “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” Jesse McCarthy, welcome back to the show! 

[Jesse:] Oh, it's good to be back with you. Thank you so much!  

[Mark:] Well, I look forward to talking more with you about W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Jesse, maybe we can start by you telling us what draws you to this book? Do you remember when you first encountered The Souls of Black Folk? 

[Jesse:] I first read The Souls of Black Folk when I was in high school. My first memories of it are of, I remember the sensation for me of of reading, you know, the prologues and opening, opening sequence, if you will, um, opening essays. And for me what I immediately was struck by was the sound of of his prose. Um, I think it's an extraordinarily distinctive sound and voice and in some ways I, um, I think I've sort of been inhabited by it ever since. 

[Mark:] Did it feel archaic to you, since it was published in 1903, or did it feel vibrant and contemporary? 

[Jesse:] If I had to think of, um, a point of comparison and indeed a similar experience I had reading, um, I can – I also vividly remember the first time I read James Baldwin and I was reading from his essay collection, “Notes of a Native Son.” And similarly, I would say it's not at all a language that I would describe as archaic, but it's a language that in some sense, to me, had the feeling of standing outside of time itself. 

[Mark:] Yeah. 

[Jesse:] And that quality, to me, which I associate with great literature, I felt to be powerfully present, um, and seductive. 

[Mark:] So, you first read The Souls of Black Folk as a youngster. What brought you back to it as a scholar? 

[Jesse:] It's a text that I think we'll always be coming back to. In so many ways, it inaugurates an entire way of thinking and gives us access to a kind of vocabulary for thinking about the meaning of identity in the context of a history, and experience, and art, and expression. And for me, it's important, of course, to have a critical lens and a kind of critical regard, but it also is a kind of – it's a great landmark, as I say, it's one of the classics of our literature. I think of it as a classic of world literature, um, that speaks to not only, of course, and most especially African Americans, um, but to the entire diaspora, to black folk all over the world. And indeed, too, I think basically all people who are, um, passionate and interested and, um, invested in thinking about the role that black Americans have played in the making of America and in the defining of the 20th century and forward, as he says, “the century of the color line.” 

[Mark:] Jesse, is there a common misreading of The Souls of Black Folk, or something that people misperceive about it? 

[Jesse:] One of the things that I do think people sometimes misperceive about it is, perhaps, an overemphasis on double consciousness. To be clear, I think it's an extraordinarily powerful concept, but Du Bois never explored double consciousness systematically. And he wasn't, I think, interested in kind of, in defending and arguing for double consciousness as a well-grounded philosophical concept. And I think sometimes people, um, fail to read these chapters as essays. That is to say, in the emology that we get from Montaigne, that they're attempts. They’re attempts to understand something, to say something that has not been said before. And to say something that has not been said before, to try and capture experience, to give dignity and beauty to things that are not considered dignified and beauty – and beautiful, excuse me – to show, um, the meaning of something that to Du Bois is so obvious and self-evidently important but which is scorned and treated – and denigrated, that requires, um, a new language. And Du Bois is really, I think, he's, he's experimenting, he's trying to forge a new way of talking about race. And I think that really is truly important, um, but sometimes I think there's a way in which people place an emphasis on double consciousness that I don't think Du Bois gave it in his own writing. He didn't return, for instance, to that concept or elaborate upon that concept in his later work. 

[Mark:] It's just so provocative, and putting it right in the beginning of the book – it might have an outsized importance. 

[Jesse:] I do think that's true, and I think part of what it does for Souls is that it places this emphasis on interiority – on the soul. And that's very much a piece with Du Bois’ philosophical outlook. His sense and ethic and care for human beings as not just the kind of being that can be satisfied economically, although he thinks economics and politics are extraordinarily important, right? And he has a great deal to say about that. But the quality of our souls, that which is in our environment which nurtures our souls, or that which in our environment which poisons our souls, he regards as of the utmost importance. And so yes, it has to begin there. It begins with our direct subjective experience of the world. And to the extent that something like race or racism poisons that very first and early, innocent encounter with the world, it makes sense for it to have a kind of pride of place and a point of emphasis, because I think for him so much depends upon that and in some ways flows from that first encounter. 

[Mark:] Yeah, well I'm glad you mentioned the word “Souls” in the title. Can we ask “Souls” as opposed to what? Like, how would the book be different if it were the “Lives” of Black Folk? And I'm also – as you were alluding to, the first chapter is called “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” So, is Du Bois placing an emphasis on, as you say, interiority, or a different aspect of African American lives than was popularly demonstrated at that time? 

[Jesse:] This gets to a difficult question. Um, many people have thought Du Bois is heavily influenced here by his reading of German idealist philosophy, um, his reading of philosophers like Hegel, his thinking about this kind of dialectical language of striving and higher levels of unification. One thing that I would say is I think that, you know, Du Bois, throughout his life – he's not somebody who was ever, in any sense, um, I would say religiously dogmatic or sectarian or anything like that, but he was very much a man of Faith. Um, he has a kind of broad and deep Christian faith that I think informs, especially in his later life, very humanism. I think of him as a great humanist. And so, I think for him the emphasis on “Souls” is partly a kind – a firm belief that the quality by which we really ought to measure our lives is determined there. It's determined in our character; it's determined in our moral life, in our ethical life, in how we treat each other, in our values. Um, he's the kind of person who sees culture, in many ways, as simply the material embodiment of our values, right? And of our spirit. And so, I think for him you have – that's where everything starts. That's where the battle, in some sense, um, is really to be waged. And so, for him The “Souls” of Black Folk are the spirit of the African American people. And to the extent that it is well he believes also, I think, in a kind of historical destiny, right? A historical destiny for this people – in a higher meaning, if you will, that is at work. And so, it's also – “Souls” also, in some sense, speaks to – this is something I try to emphasize for my students – it speaks to this understanding of identity not as something that you are, right? It's not that you *are* black. It's that it's something you are becoming. Identity is not yet finished. Um, identity is part of this historical journey that we're on. You could say, in some sense, we don't yet know what it means to be black. We know what it has meant. We know what it means today. But it isn't, it is a – it is something which is in construction. It is striving to become what it wants to be. And if we understand it in that sense, again, you know for him the “soul” and the “souls” are a dynamic historic substance, if you will, moving in the world. And that, I think, is one of the reasons why it's so important to him metaphorically throughout the book and in the title. 

[Mark:] That's excellent. Jesse, you mentioned your students. Uh, tell me about teaching this book. What are your favorite techniques, or what do you find when you are presenting this to this generation of students? 

[Jesse:] You know, I'm very much a historicist, and so when I teach I do place a fair amount of emphasis and I take a fair amount of time to, in some way, sort of – as best as I can – reconstruct the world in which Du Bois is living. Um, what the politics of that time are like, what the world looks like in that time. Who are the people around him? What is, what's going on? How is, you know, a book like The Souls of Black Folk, what does it look like when we think about it in conversation with Anna Julia Cooper's “A Voice from the South,” right? Really placing it in the field, uh, and of conversation and discourse that it originally appeared in. And I do find that, um, even though that can sometimes take some time and be a little bit laborious, that it's worth it – that my students do feel like, “Oh, that's not something I really understood or knew or didn't really have a strong sense of what that historical era was like.” And I'm wary of jumping too quickly to sort of a conceptual analysis of double consciousness that's untethered from the historical background. But I also find that my students are, um, sort of intuitively attracted to and fascinated by many of the things that people have always been fascinated by in this text. The place of music in it, the question of the different genres, the use of fiction and storytelling, the use of elegy. They're fascinated by, you know, the Booker T. Washington debate and the, you know, politics of that. Um, you know, they're attracted to the philosophical and psychological quandaries of double consciousness, 

[Mark:] When you present this book in class or when you read it yourself, do you have a favorite line in The Souls of Black Folk? 

[Jesse:] Well that's… that's hard. [laughter] 

[Mark:] That's a tough one! It was meant to be a tough one, Jesse. 

[Jesse:] I think I have, uh, I've had different favorite passages at different times in my career and at different times in my, in my life. One moment for me that I more recently, I think, have come to, um – and that I didn't initially think quite in the same way about as I do now – comes from the last chapter of “The Sorrow Songs.” And this moment, where Du Bois actually is speaking directly to his white reader, and in this moment of kind of fierce and impassioned interrogation asks, “Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song – soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brwn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation's heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right.” You know, part of what I think has changed for me in reading that passage is that now I really, I hear in it Du Bois’ calling back to someone like David Walker, um, and his appeal to the colored citizens of the world from 1829. And this kind of indication of, um, something like an African-American claim upon the nation – you might say upon the soul of the nation – um, a claim of belonging. It’s a – it's interesting because I think it's not always a kind of popular way of thinking about this extraordinarily fraught and in many ways tragic relationship, but I think it's a very, very powerful challenge. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with it, but it's, it's a passage that, I think, when I first read Souls I didn't necessarily, um, think about, or I certainly didn't think about, the way I think about it now. 

[Mark:] That's wonderful, and, first of all, it's written about as poetically as you'll ever, uh, encounter in a book of sociology. How does Du Bois couch his argument? How is he trying to appeal to his readers? 

[Jesse:] I think for Du Bois, he would say he's trying to appeal by any means necessary. And indeed he's employing all the strategies that he can: rhetorical persuasion, historical evidence, um, you know, the investigations of sociology, um, pathos. But at the end of the day, I think what Du Bois believes is that he is fundamentally in the historical right. In other words, it's not so much a matter of succeeding in persuading his white reader or, um, reaching, in some sense, the soul of his black reader. He's speaking to the truth of a situation – to a historical truth, to a spiritual truth, to a moral truth as he understands it. And I think he holds the conviction, right, that he's – that this is the right side of history and that this way of thinking about the destiny of the African American people in the United States is bound up in a tragic but powerful story of moving that country, as he says, away from its worst impulses, it worst, uh, commitments and behaviors, and elevating it to something better. Though, the question of whether it's attainable, ultimately, I think he leaves open. But the sense of that trajectory is what he takes to be the truth that he's pointing to. And I think he thinks it's incontrovertible. 

[Mark:] Something that we ask about all of these classics in the Norton Library. Jesse, is there a playlist that comes to mind? You've been talking about this book as uniquely musical, in that Du Bois includes sorrow songs and spirituals as beginnings to each chapter. Does it – does this work make you think of any music? 

[Jesse:] Well it certainly does. And I'm not sure I would provide a playlist, but, you know, as we've seen, the spirituals – the Negro spirituals – are folk music, and for that reason you can find, I mean, hundreds – thousands of wonderful recordings of spirituals, um, in all kinds of different settings. They’re often, you know sung in churches by choirs, um, formally, informally. There are countless excellent recordings. If I had to point to one in particular that I've always loved, however, there is a recording of a number of Negro spirituals by the Great opera singer Jessye Norman. The album that she put out called “Negro Spirituals” in 1979, I believe. And something about that extraordinary voice that Jessye Norman has and the emotion and depth that she's able to bring to her interpretation of the songs, um, I think, for me, perhaps, for my generation, I've always felt to be especially moving. And, and I think that the arrangements of – are of such a nature that Du Bois himself, if he were alive and able to hear that recording and, even better, to hear Jesse Norman sing them live and in person, uh, he would have, uh, he would have, I think, greatly appreciated, admired, and felt that these were some of the finest expressions of precisely that which he was trying to capture in words. 

[Mark:]And so, hearing her album would also help the reader, who is seeing this captured on the page, would give a kind of a a three-dimensional expression to what Du Bois is trying to convey, in terms of the sheet music and the lyrics that begin every chapter? 

[Jesse:] Absolutely. And indeed, when I teach The Souls of Black Folk, uh, in my lectures, I never teach it without playing music. Usually at the beginning of the lecture, I open the lecture, um, by playing a selection from Jessye Norman that could be “My Lord, What a Morning,” one of the pieces that's right within one of the epigraphs, um, but even if you're just going to play not even a whole song but just a few minutes to give students – many of whom, you know, of course in a globalized, you know, culture, which is the kind of culture that we live in almost everywhere now, may have never necessarily heard a Negro spiritual before. I think having that exposure to the music really helps give a sense of, “Okay, I can think about what's being evoked here.” 

[Mark:] Jesse, in your Norton Library edition of The Souls of Black Folk, your endnotes are indispensable. And of all the endnotes that you wrote that were helpful, the one that particularly I would love for you to expand on is your endnote to page 38 when Du Bois refers to “Mr. Washington.” And this is in the chapter “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” So, can you talk a little bit about this book as a response to Booker T. Washington? 

[Jesse:] Well I can certainly try. It's, um, it's one of the very important aspects of the book, of course. But it's a fairly complicated debate. I think where I might begin for a contemporary reader, say a student of this text, is, you know, we'd have to try and resituate ourselves and really try and understand, um, the significance of a figure like Booker T. Washington. Now, um, he's in some sense, I think, um, fallen into a kind of cast of historical figures for us. People, I think, vaguely, I think, still, you know, may remember, “Ah, that name sounds – strikes me as familiar.” But in the period that Du Bois is writing Souls, and up until Washington's death in 1915, Booker T. Washington had the kind of presence in American life, um, that Martin Luther King had in his day and still has for us, if that makes sense. He was the great black leader of that period, he was the voice of Black America in so many ways, he was beloved by black Americans and white Americans alike. Booker T. Washington, unlike Du Bois, let's remember, had been born in slavery. He'd been born in the south, in Virginia, unlike Du Bois, who'd been born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the north. And Washington, um, was really, you know, experienced, you know, experienced life as a black man in a completely different way, of course, than Du Bois. And he, I think, had a much more pragmatic, in some sense chastened sense of what you had to do to survive and how you could use the system – the Jim Crow system – to really eke out some measure of security, of autonomy, of power. Famously, of course, he becomes the leader of the Tuskegee Institute, which is the normal industrial school. Which is to say that it's a school that's committed to, uh, philosophy of training and uplifting black folk, in particular by helping them acquire trade skills, by making them essentially, um, good workers, useful for employment, um, certainly, also self-reliant as well. But this is a model of education that is very much appealing, uh, not only to southerners, but also to white northerners, in particular the white northern industrialists, who – with the collapse of slavery both in the North and the South – are looking for sources of what they would call, maybe, reliable labor and cheap labor and are – and would like to put these people, uh, not back to work but to continue to keep them as a source of cheap labor for, uh, for the needs of an industrializing country. And this leads to a kind of profound, really philosophical clash between Du Bois and Washington, over what the role of education should be for black folk at this particular time and place. Washington wants – is at the helm – at the head – of, um, not just Tuskegee but in some sense a kind of empire that extends through his influence and his reach within something like the black middle and upper middle class. Um, his relationships to black newspapers, um, doctors, and so on so forth – he's a champion of this kind of class. And he is seen, again, as a kind of pragmatic leader, um, but the kind of schooling – not just at Tuskegee but as a model for all education – is a model that is explicitly sort of rejecting the liberal arts, right? We're not going to bother with sort of higher education, reading the classics, learning Latin and Greek, these kinds of thing, because it's not necessary, it's not useful for progress. And this is, of course, is the very opposite of Du Bois, who, as we've seen, has this impassioned belief in the nurturing of the soul through the higher faculties. Really briefly, what I'll say about this, is that the conflict in between these two visions, um, can sometimes be caricatured. It really is worth saying that, um, Du Bois is painted often times as aloof, but he himself was actually in favor of something like the Negro Business League. Uh, he cared about economic self-development for African Americans. It's just that he didn't want education to be subservient to those demands. And he was, moreover, particularly concerned that Washington's emphasis on economic gains and securing this economic basis – Du Bois’ argument was, “Well, you can do that, but how will you secure it without political rights?” Right? “Without political rights, it can always be taken away from you.” And basically, what Du Bois is saying is, “Look, if you look at the history of the 1890s, you look at evictions, you look at racial terror, what you see is, it's – there's no point in us building up these institutions and schools if when the Klux Clan comes through, they're never prosecuted,” right? “and we can't stand and we can't have access to juries. We don't have political rights and we don't have the capacity to protect these economic gains.” So there's a debate over the philosophy, but also over the kind of questions of political strategy that are at stake here. But, very quickly, I also just want to say, because it is important: Washington can also be far, far too much maligned in this story. One of the things that was discovered, um, especially after his passing in 1915, people started looking into his archives and his correspondence. He was working very hard quietly, uh, through back channels, behind the scenes on civil rights, right? It wasn't that it wasn't – that he didn't care about those issues or didn't think that they were important, but of course as somebody who's trying to run an institute, who's taking all this money from white philanthropy and white industrialists, he couldn't have the kind of public discourse and rhetoric that Du Bois had. So, in many ways, both men are sometimes pitted against each other in ways that actually caricature their true commitments and positions. But it's nonetheless true that there was, at its core, kind of deep fundamental disagreement about the nature of education and what – at its best – an education is for. 

[Mark:] Jesse McCarthy, editor of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk for the Norton Library. We thank you so much for joining us, Jesse. 

[Jesse:] Thank you so much. This has been great.  

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of The Souls of Black Folk, edited by Jesse McCarthy is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description for this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

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