Reading group: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), five chapters over five weeks
Its coordinates: 6.29 Philosophy of Gender · 6.30 Philosophy of Race
The Souls of Black Folk is the book I keep pushing onto the philosophy syllabus, because it was doing philosophy all along. Du Bois wrote much of it in my city, at Atlanta University.
The ‘Forethought’ announces that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. The first chapter gives us double consciousness: the sense of always seeing oneself through the eyes of a world that looks on with contempt, of being two things at once, an American and a Negro, in Du Bois's terms. And it opens with the question the white world never quite asks out loud: how does it feel to be a problem?
Plan
- Week 1: Forethought and Chapter 1, ‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings’.
- Week 2: Chapter 3, ‘Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others’. Du Bois's critique of accommodation.
- Week 3: Chapter 6, ‘Of the Training of Black Men’. Education and its purpose.
- Week 4: Chapter 11, ‘Of the Passing of the First-Born’. Short, personal and devastating.
- Week 5: Chapter 14, ‘Of the Sorrow Songs’, and, as a companion, his 1897 essay ‘The Conservation of Races’.
Any edition is fine; the text is public domain. Notice the epigraphs: every chapter pairs a verse of European poetry with a bar of music from a spiritual. That pairing is itself an argument.