The Begetter and the Misbegotten

I cannot forbear commentary on the CRIMSON article of 22 January, 1971. Even then I do not know in what capacity I make the following observations,though I should like to think that it is in a personal and not in any official role. I should state at the outset that I was not present at the meeting, was not involved in the plans for Mrs. DuBois's visit, and I confess I learnt of the episode at Sanders Theatre only from the pages of the Crimson.

In any case, I know that Mrs. DuBois's appearance was sponsored by the Afro-American Studies Department in honor of W.E.B. DuBois-titular head of the department, and of the projected Research Institute. As such, certain reported remarks on the squalid episode in Sanders Theatre seem a trifle disingenuous. It is surely not enough to merely state that "no one was authorized to say whites were excluded"-for authorized or not, someone evidently said so and succeeded in turning away the Harvard community from what ought to have been a memorable occasion. What is clearly needed is a complete dissociation of the department from the sort of tribute to DuBois exemplified by this action; and which also would constitute a reassertion that there was not in fact any official connivance at such antics of incomprehension. I should add that I think such is the situation in the department.

What particularly distresses about the sorry spectacle is that it is so singularly inappropriate a tribute to the memory of DuBois. He, above all, placed considerable emphasis on interracial cooperation. On more than one occasion he discerned "the beginning of wisdom in inter-racial contact", and sought-ever so indefatigably-to encompass "broader cooperation with the white rulers of the world," offering a chance for peaceful development of black peoples, and an avoidance of catastrophic race war. If only the whites, "the deaf and dumb masters of the world," could recognize that such cooperation with blacks on the bases of equality is in their own interests . . . This heritage can still be seen in the NAACP of which he was a founder-member. He may have been wrong in this belief in inter-racial cooperation, proved wrong, it would seem, by American society itself. But even in disillusionment, with the obdurate persistence and provocative idiocy of racism in America, DuBois never turned to "black nationalism," but instead joined the Communist Party, attracted, one thinks, to its lingering internationalism and the hope it offered for the liberation of all the oppressed in "Africa, Asia, in America and the islands of the sea." One has to remind oneself that the lecture must have been a tribute to DuBois: the true begetter of Pan-Africanism, and not to Marcus Garvey, the "black Zionist." George Padmore in his brilliant book on Pan-Africanism had made a pertinent observation on the matter: "While Garvey opposed white race prejudice with black, DuBois combated racial arrogance and social chauvinism on both sides. This he did by making a scientific study of the so-called 'Negro Problem' and exposed the myth of 'racial superiority' expounded by such pseudo-biologists as Count Arthur de Gobineau, Houston-Stewart Chamberlin, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, the ideological fathers of Adolph Hitler and the racialists of America and South Africa."

Furthermore, DuBois was an eminent twentieth-century scholar and political revolutionary. He was not a "black scholar" and to think otherwise is to emasculate the great man's achievements. There is no other African of comparable or equal stature in this century. The ideological and racial blunders of the United States have long prevented recognition of this fact, and "black militants" should not now encourage continued postponement of universal recognition and evaluation of DuBois's outstanding contributions to contemporary history.

It is indeed impossible for anyone to spend twenty-four consecutive hours in this country without recognizing the compelling logic and irresistible force of what Sartre has called 'an anti-racist racism." It is the necessary moment of negativity, the "only route which can lead to the abolition of racism." A necessary moment, because, although all the oppressed classes as a whole are victims of a predatory society, nonetheless "the black man is a victim of oppression inasmuch as he is black, in his role as a colonized or as a deported African. And since he is oppressed in his race and because of it, it is first of his race that it is necessary for him to take conscience. He must compel those who, during the centuries, vainly attempted, because he was African, to reduce him to the status of a beast to recognize him as a man." For him there can be neither escape, dissembling, nor crossing the line. "A ew, white among white men, can deny that he is a Jew, can declare himself a man among men. The African cannot deny that he is African, nor claim for himself this abstract uncolored humanity. He is black. Thus he is held to authenticity. Insulted, enslaved, he redresses himself; he accepts the word 'Negro' which is hurled at him as an epithet, and revindicates himself, in pride, as black in the face of white."

But this necessary "anti-racist racism" does not become an end in itself, justifying a conservative totality. Rather, it opens up revolutionary perspectives. Because he is the most oppressed, he necessarily pursues-not only by a Hegelian ruse of reason-the liberation of all when he rises to enact his own deliverance from oppression. DuBois, Fanon: there is in them recognition that the revolt of the most oppressed constitutes inevitably and at the same time the embodiment and culmination of the revolt of all the oppressed for the abolition of relations of oppression and of racism. This is the source of the black man's passion for liberty and liberation.

A few fragments of black African writing:

Negro herald of revolt

You know the roads of the world

Since you were sold in Guinea.

or this:

Five centuries have seen you walk with weapons in your hand

and you have taught the races exploiting you

the passion of liberty.

or yet again:

Black harbinger of hope

You know all the songs of the world

Since those of the immemorial shipyards of the Nile.

The obverse of this revolutionary perspective is a conservative world-view which underlies black nationalist ideology. Slavery, repression, and defeat have driven the black nationalist into a kind of "apartheid," which dangerously tends toward counter-revolutionary racial exclusiveness. As Tom Nairn, following E.P. Thomson, so judiciously observed of the British working class: "Such 'apartheid' was the necessary pre-condition of the conservative class-hierarchy. It was only the systematic fostering of this sense of irremediable and inherited difference, of social exclusion felt (even if not intellectually assented to) as a fact of nature. This was one of the most powerful weapons any conservative regime has ever had in its hands, worth any number of policemen. A conservative totality, and the broad distribution of property and power it represents, is bound to be safe as long as the various subordinate sectors of it have a consciousness of themselves as different and separate, as mere 'sectors' in the social space allotted to them. Such a sectional or corporate self-consciousness is the essence of social conservatism. It matters relatively little that it should be accompanied, by a sense of grievance or injustice, by demands that wrongs be righted, or demands for a 'square deal.' What counts is that the wrongs and rights are apprehended as those of the class, as opposed to the moments in history where a class desires to escape altogether from its 'apartheid and identifies its rights with those of society as a whole . . . The reflex of class hierarchy was the aggressive consciousness of themselves as an 'estate' almost a separate 'nation' on its own. The very success of the conservative formula made it necessary to turn one's back on all that did not concern one." Should "black nationalists" succeed in imposing such a conservative formula, black liberation would have been further postponed to the Greek Kalends.

Finally, it would be a pity if this incident would provide an occasion for self-righteousness on either side. It is not insignificant to recall that Harvard refused to offer an academic appointment to DuBois. not because of his intellectual distinction-which to the credit of the University, was recognized in important respects-but because it was not conceivable at the turn of the century to appoint any black to the Harvard faculty. In the final analysis, are Harvard and the society at large any less to blame that developments have come to such a pass? I wonder.