Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  CORNEL WEST: Absolutely. Let me start off by saying that W. E. B. Du Bois, alongside John Dewey, is the towering public intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century in the American empire. And when looked at through the international lens, he is even more important than Dewey, because Du Bois understood the centrality of empire, and he understood the centrality of white supremacy and the shaping of the US empire in a way that John Dewey did not. And when we look fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years from now, when the American Gibbon puts pen to paper to the “Decline and Fall of the American Empire,”5 it will be Du Bois’s work that will be seen as most insightful, as opposed to Dewey or even William James or some of the other great figures that we know. And so in that sense we may not even be yet in a position to fully appreciate the breadth and the scope and the depth of W. E. B. Du Bois as a scholar, as a public intellectual, as well as an activist, as someone who offered an astute critique of capitalism and class hierarchy and understood the latter’s intimate relation to white supremacy and racial hierarchy. And so I think we are still very much in the early stages of the kind of appreciation of Du Bois’s contribution to our understanding, especially, of a post-American world or a world in which the American empire is no longer at the center. And in that regard, I think, we have to proceed very tentatively, provisionally, and yet also firmly to try to understand the variety of different dimensions and aspects of this towering genius.

  CHB: It’s interesting that it took him a while to get to the internationalization of the problem, as he mentions in his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn.6

  CW: That’s true. I think it is the 1915 book The Negro where he really begins to understand the centrality of empire and again race in the US empire.7 You can just see him beginning to become awakened, and any time he becomes awakened there are two fundamental consequences. One is the radical character of what he has now to say, and the second is the problem of how to come to terms with the marginal status of such a radical perspective. After all, most of America, and especially the American academy, is just not ready. They can’t assimilate, they can’t incorporate, they can’t render intelligible the radical message that Du Bois is putting forward. I think this is going to be true for a whole subsequent slew of figures, including myself.

  CHB: It certainly was true during Du Bois’s lifetime, when he was not recognized adequately in the academy, though he was one of the foremost sociologists of the time, a man who came up with a new method: interdisciplinary empirical studies.8 If he had been a white man, this breakthrough would have been celebrated, and he complains that he was not even published, and that when his book on the Negro in Philadelphia came out, there were no reviews.9

  CW: Yes, the 1899 classic Philadelphia Negro, it’s true. But I think that even if Du Bois had been white, his radical view would still have been very difficult for mainstream America and most difficult for the American academy to come to terms with. Being Black made it even more difficult. There is no doubt about that. So the response has been to domesticate Du Bois, sanitize and sterilize him, and to make him part of a kind of a domesticated view about Black Nationalism on the one hand and integrationism on the other hand. And of course, there was the issue of his dispute with Booker T. Washington, especially Washington’s reluctance to promote civil rights, voting rights, and liberal education for Blacks. And those are part and parcel of who he is, but they are just small slices of what his project was, and I think in the twenty-first century, it’s up to us to begin to see what he was actually about. How is it possible for this emerging cultural freedom—that comes out of an enslaved and Jim-Crowed people—to present a challenge to an imperial power with very deep roots in white supremacy, one driven by a capitalist project or driven by capitalist forces and tendencies? For Du Bois, this becomes the central problematic, and it very much is our problematic today. I think there is a sense in which W. E. B. Du Bois is the most relevant figure from the twentieth century for us in the twenty-first century, and we ignore him at our own peril. Very much so. And in that sense, you know, we all stand on his shoulders. When I had written fifteen years ago that he is the towering Black scholar of the twentieth century, there was no doubt about that, and I’m more convinced of that fifteen years later than I was then.

  CHB: You have just remarked that it is from the position of an outsider, or, as he himself calls it, a “group imprisonment within a group,”10 that he could analyze the empire, and actually, I think he is of the conviction that it is only from the margin that one can criticize society because of the distance one necessarily has from it.11 One does not fully identify with it. So that though, in general, there is a great disadvantage in being at the margin, in this one respect there is an advantage in marginality, and I would think that you have that view on your own condition as well.

  CW: Yes, I think that’s true. Of course, you can be marginal and an outsider and still get it wrong. But in terms of those who are willing to tell some of the most painful truths about the emergence and sustenance of the American empire alongside the precious American democratic experiment within the American empire and the tension between those two, certainly being on the margins or an outsider is almost a precondition. I think he is right about that. The problem is when it comes to solidarity and its preconditions, which is to say the conditions under which collective insurgency can emerge, the conditions under which agency among the oppressed can emerge, oftentimes it becomes a rather depressing matter because, you see, it seems as if there is a relative impotence or relative powerlessness. The emergent agency is so often pacified, and folks suffer generation after generation with unjust treatment, unattended to, and then layers of suffering begin to mount, just like in the ninth thesis of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” that history of catastrophe, the piling of wreckage, generation after generation, all of those precious lives lost, wasted potential, witnessed generation after generation.12

  One wonders how Du Bois, who lived ninety-five years, was able to witness that wreckage, see the US empire shipwrecked at the very moment when it viewed itself as victorious and sailing uncontested in the sunshine. You can imagine what a tearing of the soul that must have been for him. Of course, he began as a much more naïve Enlightenment figure, naïve Victorian figure, who was initially tied to empire and tied to the West in its contemporary incarnation. He never gives up on the West; he never gives up on the Enlightenment; he never gives up on the Greeks; so the legacy of Athens, the legacy of Jerusalem, the legacy of the Enlightenment mean much to him. But once he really discovers the Marxist critique of capitalism, once he discovers the variety of critiques of empire and weds it to his profound resistance and critique of white supremacy, he’s in a different space. I think he began to realize that after the lynching of Sam Hose.

  CHB: He acknowledges himself that he was naïve and that he had to go through stages.13 In the beginning, he thought you just have to teach people; you just have to tell them the truth, and they will accept it and they will change. But then he acknowledged that there was irrationality, that there was habit you have to cope with.14

  CW: Absolutely, the cake of custom and the gravitas of habit. I think in a certain sense the early Du Bois had a naïve conception of evil—evil as ignorance, evil as not knowing the facts—as opposed to the later Du Bois, who saw evil being tied to interest, evil being tied to power and privilege within various social structures that have to be contested politically, organizationally, collectively. And, you know, that Du Bois is the Du Bois that remains our Du Bois; he is a figure of our times. I mean, it’s amazing that it has taken American history fifty, seventy-five years to begin to catch up with Du Bois in terms of this problematic of the US empire that will decline as political system, will be broken as culture, will decay, if it does not come to terms with the kind of very deep democratic reforms and structural transformations required for that empire to revive and become something that’s worthy of affirmation.

  CHB: One of his ideas of how
to try to accomplish that was that he believed in a special role for African Americans. He believed, maybe idealistically, naïvely—I wonder what you think about that?—that due to their tradition, due to roots in Africa and the communal spirit that he thought derived from that African culture and was in a way transposed to the New World, that African Americans could and actually should be a counterforce to American capitalism by forming communal and economic projects by deliberate separatism—a controversial word, of course. His ideas remind me of Malcolm X’s notions of how African Americans should create their own businesses and keep them separate so that whites would not be able to further exploit and profit from their labor, suggesting that anti-capitalist forces might be based on the African American community, something not often taken up, I think.

  CW: Yes, I’ve never been convinced of that aspect of Du Bois or Malcolm in that regard. It seems to me that these Black businessmen and -women tended to be just as deferential to capitalist forces and just as ready to embrace the market forces on the capitalist conditions as anybody else.

  CHB: But maybe there is a difference between Malcolm X and Du Bois in that the latter really means no compliance with the capitalist system but introducing a communist—Du Bois didn’t call it that—but a communist way of doing business, without profit; you know, oriented toward the community and its needs without giving in to capitalism.15

  CW: Yes, at the normative level I can see Du Bois putting that forward. It reminds me in some ways of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, whose economic cooperatives were going to be different than the competitive capitalist models. And yet, when you actually look at the practice of Black businessmen and -women, some of whom may have partly even been influenced by Du Bois—very few probably, but those few who are—they still find themselves caught within the ravages of the capitalist market. And therefore, at the aspirational utopian level it may make sense, but it’s just hard to see how that’s translated on the ground. I do think that one of the most important texts Du Bois ever wrote is The Gift of Black Folk [1924]. It’s a classic that tends to be overlooked and underappreciated like so much of Du Bois’s magisterial corpus, and there, I think, he is on to something. He talks about the gift of Black folk to America and the world as being a reconstruction of the notion of democracy looked at from the vantage point of enslaved or Jim Crowed people, or a reconstruction of the notion of freedom from that vantage, and then a cultural gift as well, in song and story and tradition and art. Each one of those contributions is quite powerful, and they certainly constitute counter-hegemonic forces in making American capitalist democracy a more fully inclusive capitalist democracy; there is no doubt about that. The question is how these gifts did become counter-hegemonic in a more radical way, you see.

  Now one of the things that has always fascinated me about Du Bois—and I have been quite insistent in my critique of Du Bois—is that when it comes to popular culture, he was in love with the “sorrow songs,” to use his wonderful phrase in the last chapter of The Souls of Black Folk. He was in love with the spirituals. But I’ve never been convinced that he had an appreciation, let alone a deep comprehension, of the blues and jazz. We know he was very, very suspicious of blues and jazz; he distanced himself from them. And yet, for me, they constitute crucial, indispensable counter-hegemonic forces in terms of keeping alive ideals of humanity, ideals of equality, ideals of humility, ideals of resistance and endurance in the face of the catastrophe that the US empire has always been for the masses of Black people, be it slavery, Jim Crow, or be it the new hyper-ghetto that our dear brother Loïc Wacquant has written about better than anybody else,16 or the hyper-incarceration that has targeted poor people, specifically Black men. When you look at the forms of agency of those particular brothers and sisters, the music has been central, and it’s not spirituals for the most part, because they are unchurched, most of them; most of them are un-mosqued and un-synagogued; they don’t have any ties to religious institutions at all. So it’s fascinating to me that there is still a certain relic of cultural elitism in the radical democratic, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist project of Du Bois, and this creates a tension for me.

  CHB: The reason I see for why he was so distanced from that part of the African American tradition is that he was so much afraid of hedonism, of entertainment as something that is just distraction, part of capitalist consumer culture, distracting people from what they should try to become, and he probably didn’t see the serious contribution to cultural work that jazz and blues ultimately makes.

  CW: I think that’s a very good point. There is an irony here, because you know the great August Wilson used to say that Black people authorize reality by performance, that performance in a communal context, where call and response is central, creates a form of agency, creates a form of self-confidence and self-respect that are preconditions for the creation of new realities. You see that in churches in the past under slavery. We’ve seen it in communal artistic practices under Jim Crow, and we see it today in hip-hop. They are not revolutionary forces, but they do constitute spaces, spaces that are very rare, because most of the spaces in the US empire are already colonized. But to have certain spaces by means of performance can provide a view of a different sense of who you are: You’re human as opposed to subhuman. You’re human as opposed to being a commodity. You’re human as opposed to being an object. You’re human as opposed to being an entity to be manipulated. And that’s, again, the profound role of Black music, especially within those communal contexts. I’m not sure Du Bois understood that because of his fear of hedonism and cheap entertainment and the stereotype of Black people as, you know, born singing, born dancing, born moving, and so forth and so on.

  CHB: And another point might be his own upbringing. He was from New England, and it’s really funny to read his account when he first came to the South and was overwhelmed by how his people—and he calls them “his people”—behaved. But he is completely alien to their traditions, for example, in church.17 It was difficult for him. This reticent gentleman, he had problems; he embraced the culture, but it never became part of his own habitus.18

  CW: Absolutely. One of the great ironies of W. E. B. Du Bois is that he is the greatest—and will probably always be the greatest—Black intellectual ever to emerge out of the US empire, and the problematic that he ended up wrestling with about the US empire—the centrality of race and class and gender, but especially the capitalist core—needs to be hit head-on. But he was not the spiritual extension or the spiritual property of the very people that he was willing to give his all for, the very people he was willing to live and die for. Billie Holiday would have scared him to death; James Brown would have sent him into conniptions; and he just would not have been able to fully embrace brothers George Clinton and Bootsy Collins. And the Funkadelics would have generated a heart attack. If he had shown up at a Parliament-Funkadelic concert, with Garry in diapers and brother George and all his colors, Du Bois would have gone crazy. Or if he had listened to a Reverend C. L. Franklin sermon when the whooping began, he would have been ashamed, you see. You would want to say, “Du Bois, this is the spiritual genius and part of the very people you’re talking about.” And yet at the same time we know that there could be no Franklin, there could be no Clinton, there could be no Funkadelics without the genius of W. E. B. Du Bois, because he has given his all, his intellectual wherewithal, his political activism, his time, his energy to affirm the humanity of the Clintons and the James Browns and the C. L. Franklins and the Jasper Williams and Manuel Scotts and all of the great cultural geniuses, the Cecil Taylors, and so forth. So that’s a fascinating irony.

  One of the things that I have been able to really both revel in and benefit from—and you see it probably more in Democracy Matters than in anything else19—is trying to unite this radical intellectual legacy of Du Bois that hits the issue of empire and white supremacy with the popular cultural expressions of genius and talent—be it in music, be it in dance, be it among the younger generation or ol
der generation—so that you actually have a kind of an interplay between, on the one hand, Du Bois’s radicality and militancy when it comes to politics and economics, empire and race, and, on the other hand, the antiphonal forms of call and response, the syncopation, the rhythm, the rhyme, the tempo, the tone that you get in the best of Black cultural forms that are requisite for sustaining Black dignity and sanity, sustaining Black people as a whole.

  CHB: He was so afraid of “uncivilized” behavior, he would probably have taken much of what you are talking about to be just that. And his concern with education—and maybe we could talk about his idea of the Talented Tenth—was quite different from any attempts at grassroots political socialization or education in general.

  CW: Absolutely. Of course, Du Bois should consider Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey, or Bessie Smith part of the Talented Tenth, you see. Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, Aretha Franklin, they are certainly part of the Talented Tenth. Stevie Wonder is part of the Talented Tenth, but given Du Bois’s elitist conception of education, they would be considered mere entertainers. So I do resonate with his need for a conception of education that has to do with awakening from sleepwalking, with wrestling with reality to transform it so that that illuminates and liberates. I do resonate with that. But because of his conception of who would be candidates for that, it seems to be still too narrow for me. The irony is that for Du Bois, the nonliterate or illiterate slaves who created the spirituals would probably be candidates for the Talented Tenth, because when we look closely at his readings of their products, their songs, their expressions, he sees their genius. He really does!