On Trusting White People, Redux

Ekow Yankah has a column in the New York Times about whether his children will be able to be friends with White people. People are reacting with the usual levels of charity and grace, and so I thought it might be worthwhile re-up this post I wrote on the subject back in 2008. It was inspired by the following passage from W.E.B. Du Bois' Darkwater (1920), responding to the question, from a roomful of students, "Do you trust White people?"

You do not and you know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world’s you repeat that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are lying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God. 

W.E.B. Du Bois and Albert Einstein

Check out this neat bit of correspondence between W.E.B. Du Bois and Albert Einstein. Du Bois was already familiar with Einstein's reputation (and, having studied in Berlin, was fluent in German), and asked if Einstein might write a short letter of support for The Crisis (house magazine of the NAACP). Einstein agreed, and Du Bois introduced his statement has follows:

The author, Albert Einstein, is a Jew of German nationality. He was born in Wurttemburg in 1879 and educated in Switzerland. He has been Professor of Physics at Zurich and Prague and is at present director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Physical Institute at Berlin. He is a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Science and of the British Royal Society. He received the Nobel Prize in 1921 and the Copley Medal in 1925.

Einstein is a genius in higher physics and ranks with Copernicus, Newton and Kepler. His famous theory of Relativity, advanced first in 1905, is revolutionizing our explanation of physical phenomenon and our conception of Motion, Time and Space.

But Professor Einstein is not a mere mathematical mind. He is a living being, sympathetic with all human advance. He is a brilliant advocate of disarmament and world Peace and he hates race prejudice because as a Jew he knows what it is. At our request, he has sent this word to THE CRISIS with “Ausgezeichneter Hochachtung” (“Distinguished respect”).

And here is what Einstein wrote:

It seems to be a universal fact that minorities, especially when their Individuals are recognizable because of physical differences, are treated by majorities among whom they live as an inferior class. The tragic part of such a fate, however, lies not only in the automatically realized disadvantage suffered by these minorities in economic and social relations, but also in the fact that those who meet such treatment themselves for the most part acquiesce in the prejudiced estimate because of the suggestive influence of the majority, and come to regard people like themselves as inferior. This second and more important aspect of the evil can be met through closer union and conscious educational enlightenment among the minority, and so emancipation of the soul of the minority can be attained.

The determined effort of the American Negroes in this direction deserves every recognition and assistance.

Albert Einstein

Very cool.

Bridge Burners

Jesse Taylor has a really interesting post up (H/T: Adam Serwer) on the broader "birther" narrative, and how it intersects with the various anti-Obama conspiracy theories that center around Obama not being who he says he is. He's not American, he's not intellectual, he's not there on his own merits:

The reason this smacks of racism to so many minorities is because it's the same thing that every minority goes through when they succeed. If you're young and black, you're sent the message that you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and succeed, and stop whining about how you're such a victim. If you do succeed, however, you've inherently victimized some cohort of white person, probably because someone gave you a leg up that they didn't have. You can never win and never succeed on your own merits, unless you happen to pull a Bill Cosby and savage your brethren for not having your success. Merit, particularly for blacks, is not a matter of what you've done, but a matter of what you're willing to let your success say about the unwashed hordes who trail behind you.

Barack Obama is suspect in the eyes of birthers because he is a prominent minority who refuses to burn the bridge behind him. Whatever his failures as a President and as a leader, he is not willing to turn his race into a badge of shame in order to curry favor.

This double bind reminds me of something I wrote awhile back on another blog (devil of time tracking that comment down), regarding the way Blacks are treated when they adopt "Washingtonian" (self-uplift) versus "Du Boisian" (moral case for equality) approaches to racial politics.

[W]hen [Du Bois] is the primary voice of the Black community, people criticize them for being insufficiently Washingtonian (why are you always demanding stuff out of the White community? Why don't you get your own house in order first -- try doing something for yourself rather than getting stuck in this dependency loop!). What we see now is a classic double bind: if Blacks are Du Boisian (trumpeting the moral case for equality), they need to be Washingtonian (solve your own problems -- stop asking so much out of Whites!); when they're Washingtonian (fine -- we'll stop looking to Whites and concentrate on self-improvement), they need to be more Du Boisian (what, you won't talk to White people anymore? Racists!).

Ta-Nehisi Coates raised similar themes with respect to why Booker T. Washington's program was such a massive failure.

The dominant logic of the post-Reconstruction era held that the real problem wasn't white racists, but carpetbaggers and meddlers from up North who'd elevated illiterate blacks above their station. The white Southerner, presumably, had no existential objection to blacks, they just didn't want to live next door to them or have an illiterate and morally degenerate population electing their politicians. To this Washington, and much of black America, said Fine. Cease fire. You let us be, we'll let you be.

In retrospect, this was a grievous error. In point of fact, whites actually did have an existential objection to black people. Their beef wasn't that illiterates and moral degenerates might get too much power. Quite the opposite. Their beef was that blacks would prove to not be illiterates and moral degenerates, and thus fully able to compete with them. To see this point illustrated, one need only look at the history of race riots in the South. When white mobs set upon black communities they didn't simply burn down the "morally degenerate" portions--they attacked the South's burgeoning black middle and working class and its institutions. They went for the churches, the schools and the businesses. It's one thing to be opposed to black amorality. It's quite another to be opposed to black progress. The lesson blacks took post-Atlanta Compromise was that whites had used the former to cover for the latter. These days, it's popular to bemoan the fact that Washington has fallen into disfavor. But it wasn't blacks who proved the Atlanta Compromise fraudulent--it was the whites of that era.

We see this outward hostility towards minority accomplishment all the time. Being a Black magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School (or a Latina summa cum laude graduate of Princeton) just means you were affirmative action baby. Writing a best-selling book means a White guy ghost-wrote it for you. White folks complain about Black dependency, and then complain about teaching people of color to take control of their own destiny as promoting "racial hostility" (even though the programs in question empirically raise the performance of the enrolled students).

And no, this can't be attributed to affirmative action -- it predates that program by quite some time. Marcus Garvey sarcastically defined a "negro" as "a person of dark complexion or race, who has not accomplished anything and to whom others are not obligated for any useful service." He was riffing off the anthropological trend whereby any African culture discovered to have made any substantial contributions to art, culture, politics, whatever, was suddenly not "really" Black. Du Bois made a similar observation. The problem here is exactly what Taylor lays out -- "merit", for Blacks, has nothing to do with the normal qualities of attainment (educational, political, or otherwise). That can always be attributed to someone else. "Merit" occurs when you're willing to turn on everyone else -- which is to say, it has nothing to do with merit at all and everything to do with confirming certain White ideological predispositions.

On Holland

Why isn't this in my quote books?

Holland is an extremely neat and well-ordered mud-puddle, situated at the confluence of the English, French, and German languages.

-- W.E.B. Du Bois

Quote of the Evening

"'Do you trust white people?' You do not and you know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world's; you repeat that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are lying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God."

W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater (Amherst, NY: Humanity, 2003) (1920), 102.

If the only thing you've read of Du Bois is Souls of Black Folks, then you haven't read Du Bois. Arguably the greatest thinker and intellectual in American history (not African-American, but American), Du Bois' writings and narratives remain powerful and poignant today. Du Bois' personal journey--from democratic idealist to socialist to communist, culminating in his self-imposed exile to Ghana ("I am departing America and have not set a date for return") represents one of the greatest live tragedies in the modern era. He died August 27, 1963--one day before Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.