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W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line
In this explosive book, Adolph Reed covers for the first time the full sweep and totality of W. E. B. Du Bois's political thought. Departing from existing scholarship, Reed locates the sources of Du Bois's thought in the cauldron of reform-minded intellectual life at the turn of the century, demonstrating that a commitment to liberal collectivism, an essentially Fabian socialism, remained pivotal in Du Bois's thought even as he embraced a range of political programs over time, including radical Marxism. He remaps the history of twentieth-century progressive thought and sharply criticizing recent trends in Afro-American, literary, and cultural studies.
296 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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About the author
Adolph L. Reed Jr.
21 books136 followersAdolph Leonard Reed Jr. is an American professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in studies of issues of racism and U.S. politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School for Social Research and he has written on racial and economic inequality.
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February 18, 2023
In 1997 Adolph Reed Jr. leveled an attack on the professional managerial class's tendency to interpret black intellectual history through a close study of the legacy of WEB DuBois. A reading of a historical or intellectual figure pushes us forward in the present by way of example. Reed's literature review and analysis of the perception of DuBois within it is instructive to current conversations. He writes:
"To the extent that the agents being linked respond to different questions, comparison must focus on their answers, that is, on their positions on reified issues such as 'the state,' 'justice,' 'democracy'. While this approach may inform our understanding that the vectors of influence running between individuals joined through text, it does not convey much sense of the discursive communities in which those texts are embedded, the concrete issues they seek to resolve. David A. Hollinger (in an essay "Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals" from *New Directions in American Intellectual History* from 1979) "describes this problem clearly":
"Questions are the point of contact between minds, where agreements are consolidated and where differences are acknowledged and dealt with; questions are dynamisms whereby membership in a community of discourse is established, renewed, and sometimes terminated. To focus instead on a belief or value attributable to an individual or to a is at once to move back from those authentic, contingent relationships; when historical subjects are said to hold a belief or value, those subjects are endowed with merely abstract, static characteristics (for example, a belief in "progress" or in "republicanism") that may or may not be shared by a virtual infinity of other subjects who may or may not interact with each other. Yet when these same ideas are viewed in their capacity as answers to questions shared with other persons (for example, "What is the national destiny of America?" or "What kinds of political conduct are virtuous?"), they become contributions to the discourse" (12).
I reread that four times over to get clear on the approach. Throughout the book, I had moments of skimming over the top of this book, but Reed's treatment of this corpus of ideas is excellent in the way it shows a slow shift this way or that imposed by feelings and politics despite (or in opposition to) concrete progress and realities. Many examples come to mind, but for me, especially, I have been thinking this in regards to gun violence. The "thoughts and prayers" response providing something of an emotional rubber stamp does little to stem the obvious tide at the heart of the problem. A good friend, Ashley, introduced the term 'pediatric gun violence' from her work at a research hospital. Framing gun violence as a public health issue killing or disabling children is a paradigmatic change, and one that moves past the emotional into the concrete.
Indeed, Reed is thinking along these lines while rescuing DuBois from narrow readings: "a generative or evolutionary approach to inquiry into the history of political thought (that) grows out of a study of DuBois. Although his substantive interpretations of the world owed very little, if anything, to philosophical pragmatism, his practice spoke eloquently of the substantively pragmatic relation between knowledge and action...Whether or not he would have embraced it theoretically, DuBois's career realized... the deepest epistemological significance of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it'" (186).
Such a dirty word these days turns away many he is trying to convince. Reed may be one of the best known 'race reductionists' in the country. He distinguished practice from analysis in a 2021 JSTOR Daily interview, explaining that categories of practice "we use in everyday life and we want to examine," such as race, but:
"What the problem is, is when we use race as a category of analysis, what we’re doing is employing the notion that presumes an abstraction to be a real thing that has impact in the world.
Race reductionism is ultimately a couple of things. One of them is a presumption that race as a category can explain social phenomena. The other is that every grievance, injustice, beef that in any way affects a person of color, or a person of non-color, can be reduced to race, or can be reduced causally to race or to racism..."
The example he uses is COVID: "There’s all the talk about there being a special need to be concerned about Black people’s resistance to getting the vaccine—because, I guess, of the muscle memory of the Tuskegee experiments—but it turns out that that’s just not true. Black rates of vaccination are lower than White rates. But to the extent that they are lower, what accounts for the difference is access. That doesn’t have anything to do with any bizarre memory of the Tuskegee experiments, which most people get wrong anyway. They’re often confused with The Tuskegee Airmen. It’s really crazy" (Reese).
In the book, Reed writes that a focus on interpreting major events like the Atlanta Compromise rift between DuBois and Booker T. Washington and major ideas like 'double consciousness' simplifies DuBois’s impact, which is complex and far ranging. He warns of a "self-defeating racial defensiveness or a straight-jacketing narrowly single minded focus on race. William Fontaine and L.D. Reddick in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, pointed to the limitations of a simplistic concentration on race that ironically blunts the development of knowledge about the American situation. Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin in the 1950s and 1960s bemoaned the dominant presumption that black art should be evaluated primarily in relation to its status as an aid to social protest. Those arguments converse around a reaction against the stance I have characterized as racial vindicationism" (145).
Instead, DuBois advocates for a sensitive inquiry through education. Public education is good, but DuBois was "sensitive to the propagandistic character of mass-information culture as well as the non-rational sources of popular attitudes, especially dangerous and retrograde attitudes like racism. The program of systemic popular education was one of two prongs of his strategy for eliminating racial antagonism, the one directed toward the white population. He maintained: 'White leaders and thinkers have a duty to perform in making known the conclusions of science on the subject of biological race.'" Reed quotes DuBois's 'Prospect of a World without Race Conflict' from a 1944 issue of the *American Journal of Sociology*: "It takes science long to percolate to the mass unless definite effort is made. 'Public health is still handicapped by superstitions long disproved by science; and race fiction is still taught in schools, in newspapers, in novels. This careless ignorance of the facts of race is precisely the refuge where antisocial economic reaction flourishes,'" (50).
The middle of the book looks at the way WEB DuBois has been represented throughout Afro-American intellectual history. For me, Reed is always at his best as a critic. He evaluates Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
On Baker, he looks at the idea of a unified 'black experience': "the presumption of a unitary black experience imposes a false homogeneity on Afro-American intellectual history. It also supports the reduction of politics to the expression of group identity.... a view that allows him to allege a common political project advanced by (among others) Coutee Cullen's and Langston Hughes's poetry Frederick Douglass's abolitionism, the civil rights movement, late-sixties black cultural nationalism, the folkloric figure of the trickster, Alain Locke's New Negro rhetoric, Paul Lauranace Dunbar's fiction, and the music of the rap group Run-DMC. Such a chronologically and substantively disparate array of individuals, activities, and artifacts can be united only by the banal abstractions" (133).
About Gates, who he accuses of careerism and has some of the most entertaining takedowns of, especially on 159, talking about Gates's "Rush Limbaughesque stereotype of black poverty: 'In general a household made up a of a 16-year-old mother, a 32-year-old grandmother, and a 48-year-old great-grandmother is not a sire for hope and optimism.' He polishes this argument off in fine, Victorian form, raising the spectre of lazy, sturdy beggar: 'It's also true that not everyone in any society wants to work, that not all people are equally motivates. There! Was that hard to say?' Well, no, it is not at all hard to say in Forbes..." or, a page later 160 Gate's "memoir--which from its rhetorical structure could have been titled Up From Slavery on Lake Wobegon or Booker T Washington Meets Garrison Keillor-- is a reminiscence on 'a village, a family, and its friends. And of a sort of segregated peace.'" (160).
The attack is certainly relentless, but the warped reading of the past, according to Reed, and the softening from an "assertive and trenchant race-nationalist... in the late 1980s'' to a publisher of "social commentary in mainstream organs of opinion." gates's is attempting to establish centrism, writing about a "vital center... the search of a middle way... and even endorsing Clinton... which according to Gates, 'is not the centrism of caution it reflects, rather, a heartfelt negotiation between creeds that are bitterly in conflict but do not have to be so.'" (155).
Reese, H. (2021, April 28) Adolph Reed Jr.: The Perils of Race Reductionism. JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/adolph-reed-j...
"To the extent that the agents being linked respond to different questions, comparison must focus on their answers, that is, on their positions on reified issues such as 'the state,' 'justice,' 'democracy'. While this approach may inform our understanding that the vectors of influence running between individuals joined through text, it does not convey much sense of the discursive communities in which those texts are embedded, the concrete issues they seek to resolve. David A. Hollinger (in an essay "Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals" from *New Directions in American Intellectual History* from 1979) "describes this problem clearly":
"Questions are the point of contact between minds, where agreements are consolidated and where differences are acknowledged and dealt with; questions are dynamisms whereby membership in a community of discourse is established, renewed, and sometimes terminated. To focus instead on a belief or value attributable to an individual or to a is at once to move back from those authentic, contingent relationships; when historical subjects are said to hold a belief or value, those subjects are endowed with merely abstract, static characteristics (for example, a belief in "progress" or in "republicanism") that may or may not be shared by a virtual infinity of other subjects who may or may not interact with each other. Yet when these same ideas are viewed in their capacity as answers to questions shared with other persons (for example, "What is the national destiny of America?" or "What kinds of political conduct are virtuous?"), they become contributions to the discourse" (12).
I reread that four times over to get clear on the approach. Throughout the book, I had moments of skimming over the top of this book, but Reed's treatment of this corpus of ideas is excellent in the way it shows a slow shift this way or that imposed by feelings and politics despite (or in opposition to) concrete progress and realities. Many examples come to mind, but for me, especially, I have been thinking this in regards to gun violence. The "thoughts and prayers" response providing something of an emotional rubber stamp does little to stem the obvious tide at the heart of the problem. A good friend, Ashley, introduced the term 'pediatric gun violence' from her work at a research hospital. Framing gun violence as a public health issue killing or disabling children is a paradigmatic change, and one that moves past the emotional into the concrete.
Indeed, Reed is thinking along these lines while rescuing DuBois from narrow readings: "a generative or evolutionary approach to inquiry into the history of political thought (that) grows out of a study of DuBois. Although his substantive interpretations of the world owed very little, if anything, to philosophical pragmatism, his practice spoke eloquently of the substantively pragmatic relation between knowledge and action...Whether or not he would have embraced it theoretically, DuBois's career realized... the deepest epistemological significance of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it'" (186).
Such a dirty word these days turns away many he is trying to convince. Reed may be one of the best known 'race reductionists' in the country. He distinguished practice from analysis in a 2021 JSTOR Daily interview, explaining that categories of practice "we use in everyday life and we want to examine," such as race, but:
"What the problem is, is when we use race as a category of analysis, what we’re doing is employing the notion that presumes an abstraction to be a real thing that has impact in the world.
Race reductionism is ultimately a couple of things. One of them is a presumption that race as a category can explain social phenomena. The other is that every grievance, injustice, beef that in any way affects a person of color, or a person of non-color, can be reduced to race, or can be reduced causally to race or to racism..."
The example he uses is COVID: "There’s all the talk about there being a special need to be concerned about Black people’s resistance to getting the vaccine—because, I guess, of the muscle memory of the Tuskegee experiments—but it turns out that that’s just not true. Black rates of vaccination are lower than White rates. But to the extent that they are lower, what accounts for the difference is access. That doesn’t have anything to do with any bizarre memory of the Tuskegee experiments, which most people get wrong anyway. They’re often confused with The Tuskegee Airmen. It’s really crazy" (Reese).
In the book, Reed writes that a focus on interpreting major events like the Atlanta Compromise rift between DuBois and Booker T. Washington and major ideas like 'double consciousness' simplifies DuBois’s impact, which is complex and far ranging. He warns of a "self-defeating racial defensiveness or a straight-jacketing narrowly single minded focus on race. William Fontaine and L.D. Reddick in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, pointed to the limitations of a simplistic concentration on race that ironically blunts the development of knowledge about the American situation. Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin in the 1950s and 1960s bemoaned the dominant presumption that black art should be evaluated primarily in relation to its status as an aid to social protest. Those arguments converse around a reaction against the stance I have characterized as racial vindicationism" (145).
Instead, DuBois advocates for a sensitive inquiry through education. Public education is good, but DuBois was "sensitive to the propagandistic character of mass-information culture as well as the non-rational sources of popular attitudes, especially dangerous and retrograde attitudes like racism. The program of systemic popular education was one of two prongs of his strategy for eliminating racial antagonism, the one directed toward the white population. He maintained: 'White leaders and thinkers have a duty to perform in making known the conclusions of science on the subject of biological race.'" Reed quotes DuBois's 'Prospect of a World without Race Conflict' from a 1944 issue of the *American Journal of Sociology*: "It takes science long to percolate to the mass unless definite effort is made. 'Public health is still handicapped by superstitions long disproved by science; and race fiction is still taught in schools, in newspapers, in novels. This careless ignorance of the facts of race is precisely the refuge where antisocial economic reaction flourishes,'" (50).
The middle of the book looks at the way WEB DuBois has been represented throughout Afro-American intellectual history. For me, Reed is always at his best as a critic. He evaluates Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
On Baker, he looks at the idea of a unified 'black experience': "the presumption of a unitary black experience imposes a false homogeneity on Afro-American intellectual history. It also supports the reduction of politics to the expression of group identity.... a view that allows him to allege a common political project advanced by (among others) Coutee Cullen's and Langston Hughes's poetry Frederick Douglass's abolitionism, the civil rights movement, late-sixties black cultural nationalism, the folkloric figure of the trickster, Alain Locke's New Negro rhetoric, Paul Lauranace Dunbar's fiction, and the music of the rap group Run-DMC. Such a chronologically and substantively disparate array of individuals, activities, and artifacts can be united only by the banal abstractions" (133).
About Gates, who he accuses of careerism and has some of the most entertaining takedowns of, especially on 159, talking about Gates's "Rush Limbaughesque stereotype of black poverty: 'In general a household made up a of a 16-year-old mother, a 32-year-old grandmother, and a 48-year-old great-grandmother is not a sire for hope and optimism.' He polishes this argument off in fine, Victorian form, raising the spectre of lazy, sturdy beggar: 'It's also true that not everyone in any society wants to work, that not all people are equally motivates. There! Was that hard to say?' Well, no, it is not at all hard to say in Forbes..." or, a page later 160 Gate's "memoir--which from its rhetorical structure could have been titled Up From Slavery on Lake Wobegon or Booker T Washington Meets Garrison Keillor-- is a reminiscence on 'a village, a family, and its friends. And of a sort of segregated peace.'" (160).
The attack is certainly relentless, but the warped reading of the past, according to Reed, and the softening from an "assertive and trenchant race-nationalist... in the late 1980s'' to a publisher of "social commentary in mainstream organs of opinion." gates's is attempting to establish centrism, writing about a "vital center... the search of a middle way... and even endorsing Clinton... which according to Gates, 'is not the centrism of caution it reflects, rather, a heartfelt negotiation between creeds that are bitterly in conflict but do not have to be so.'" (155).
Reese, H. (2021, April 28) Adolph Reed Jr.: The Perils of Race Reductionism. JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/adolph-reed-j...
November 10, 2023
I love Reed's academic writings, but I am not as excited about DuBois as a subject so this was a bit of a mixed bag. Definitely well-researched and well-argued, but rather more far-ranging than I thought the subject deserved. Surely not easy being DuBois in today's culture of scholarship, so I respected Reed's unwillingness to extrapolate what DuBois wrote and said into what he might have wrote and said now. It is impossible to know an useless to debate. Not my favorite Reed book, but it will likely be more interesting to those who esteem DuBois more than I do.
August 25, 2014
W.E.B. DuBois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line by Adolph L. Reed, Jr. is a scholarly volume. Thoroughly researched, broad and deep, it is not a DuBois biography, but rather is a study of the evolution American political thought and social attitudes. Reed surveys the development of twentieth-century progressive thought by placing it within the intellectual currents of American history. He takes an acerbic look at recent trends in Afro-American, literary, and cultural studies that seem to isolate it from those currents. He is particularly harsh with those who attempt to to gain validation of their own philosophical contructs by removing DuBois’ ideas from their historigraphical contexts.
April 3, 2013
Perhaps one of the best summations of the thoughts and ideas of W.E.B. DuBois. Reed does a masterful job of framing DuBois' thinking relative to the era that produced him. The book also speaks wonderfully about the reason why the "double consciousness" language in the "Souls of Black Folk" has become so popular among contemporary Black elites. Must read book that puts DuBois in his proper context.
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