DuBois: Writings

I suspended reading "The White World," in Dr. W. E. B. DuBois' book, DUSK OF DAWN, an extraordinary autobiography, until that chapter. In that chapter he leaves personal autobiography, my main reason for reading it, and ventures into a form of sociological debate with white characters that he has created with whom to joust rhetorically about the racial differences, actual and stereotypical of the 1940s era. I found it to be pedantic and dispiriting; thus, I suspended a few weeks ago, and looking ahead, decided to resume in the following chapter, "The Colored World Within," where, I hoped, Dr. DuBois would return to his own narrative! Not so. I had hardly begun to read, what has turned out to be more social work than raconteur, when I encountered this gem by DuBois: "It is true that Negroes are not inherently ugly nor congenitally stupid . They are not naturally criminal and their poverty and ignorance today have clear and well known remedial causes. All this is true; and yet what every colored man living today knows is that by practical present measurement Negroes today are inferior to whites. The white folk of the world are richer and more intelligent ; they live better; have better government; have better legal systems; have built more impressive cities, larger systems of communication and they control a larger part of the earth than all colored peoples together." P. 681, (1986) The rest is hardly more hopeful . But, for now at least, I persevere, now more cognizant why this work is less frequently mentioned by other authors or readers. This assertion by Dr. DuBois of the "inferior" Negro is clearly his personal conception. His conception of black inferiority was the "true" basis of his "educational" self-help dispute with Booker T. Washington, and Washington's acolyte, Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Dr. DuBois' concept, belief, ideation of Negro inferiority to "whites," inherently explains, much of African American history, since these formative debates, betrayals and deceits, of the early to middle 1900s, which he carefully conceals as "every colored man's" knowledge, instead of his own abhorrence of the blacks.