| Title | : | Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0486408906 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780486408903 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 176 |
| Publication | : | First published February 1, 1920 |
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil Reviews
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"These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War. To this thinking I have only to add a point of view: I have been in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced themselves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls the human scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and even illuminating ways. For this reason, and this alone, I venture to write again on themes on which great souls have already said greater words, in the hope that I may strike here and there a half-tone, newer even if slighter, up from the heart of my problem and the problems of my people."
It is amazing that when I
reviewed Black Reconstruction in America I had a much easier handling on reviewing it than I do this book, despite it being an eighth of the size. It is because despite the small size, there is so much content--soulful and intellectual--is in this book. This book came out between
The Souls of Black Folk and
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 and you can see the transition between a purely sociological scholar to the more socialist-adjacent work that began in-earnest with Black Reconstruction. Darkwater sees
W.E.B. Du Bois combine autobiography (on a scale much more expansive than in 'Souls') with sociology and history of black people in-and-outside of America. Parallel to each essay is a fiction piece--poetry or prose--that compliments the essay. The last chapter is a science-fiction short story called
The Comet. This book was Du Bois at his professional peak as a writer and activist and he was 50 (he lived until the age of 95)! He was coming to the end of his legendary tenure as editor of the NAACP's The Crisis Magazine and was about to become more deeply involved in pan-African politics and the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.
"My real life work was done at Atlanta for thirteen years, from my twenty-ninth to my forty-second birthday. They were years of great spiritual upturning, of the making and unmaking of ideals, of hard work and hard play. Here I found myself. I lost most of my mannerisms. I grew more broadly human, made my closest and most holy friendships, and studied human beings. I became widely-acquainted with the real condition of my people. I realized the terrific odds which faced them. At Wilberforce I was their captious critic. In Philadelphia I was their cold and scientific investigator, with microscope and probe. It took but a few years of Atlanta to bring me to hot and indignant defense. I saw the race-hatred of the whites as I had never dreamed of it before,—naked and unashamed! The faint discrimination of my hopes and intangible dislikes paled into nothing before this great, red monster of cruel oppression. I held back with more difficulty each day my mounting indignation against injustice and misrepresentation."
This review will mainly focus on the main essay portions of the book; the companion fiction pieces tend to vary in quality, but are not essential to the book. The overarching-story is Du Bois' own life up to the present (1920), but it is the basis to do a full examination of the fight against white supremacy--not just in the United States--but globally. We cover a lot of ground in these pages. Probably the most famous and anthologized essay from this book is "The Souls of White Folk," a thorough examination and take-down of white supremacy. Penguin Classics actually includes it as a bonus essay in
their edition of The Souls of Black Folk. I was in awe of it, but I was in awe of almost all of the essays. "The Damnation of Women" was written as if Du Bois had been keeping up with #MeToo. His pan-Africanism is very prominent here and he gives a run-down of the situation of colonial Africa and has some interesting ideas of what a post-colonial Africa could look like."As we saw the dead dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture,—stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived,—these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted. Here is whither the might and energy of modern humanity has really gone."
This book was written in the aftermath of WWI and this is something that haunts this book hard, "The World War was primarily the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races." It is for Du Bois the confirmation of what white supremacy unchecked could do to the world. Unfortunately, he would live to see even worst. The book shows Du Bois' growing skepticism of capitalism which he saw as the engine that powered racism (he still was not fully embracing socialism at this point). Of course, then we have his essay on the struggles of black women:"The world wants healthy babies and intelligent workers. Today we refuse to allow the combination and force thousands of intelligent workers to go childless at a horrible expenditure of moral force, or we damn them if they break our idiotic conventions. Only at the sacrifice of intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of modern women bear children. This is the damnation of women. All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.
I simply can add nothing better than that.
"I shall forgive the white South much in its final judgment day: I shall forgive its slavery, for slavery is a world-old habit; I shall forgive its fighting for a well-lost cause, and for remembering that struggle with tender tears; I shall forgive its so-called "pride of race," the passion of its hot blood, and even its dear, old, laughable strutting and posing; but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world nor the world to come: its wanton and continued and persistent insulting of the black womanhood which it sought and seeks to prostitute to its lust. I cannot forget that it is such Southern gentlemen into whose hands smug Northern hypocrites of today are seeking to place our women's eternal destiny,—men who insist upon withholding from my mother and wife and daughter those signs and appellations of courtesy and respect which elsewhere he withholds only from bawds and courtesans.
"I have always felt like bowing myself before them in all abasement, searching to bring some tribute to these long-suffering victims, these burdened sisters of mine, whom the world, the wise, white world, loves to affront and ridicule and wantonly to insult. I have known the women of many lands and nations,—I have known and seen and lived beside them, but none have I known more sweetly feminine, more unswervingly loyal, more desperately earnest, and more instinctively pure in body and in soul than the daughters of my black mothers."
In
The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois included a very moving biography of his intellectual hero
Alexander Crummell. In this book he does a moving eulogy of his musical hero and contemporary who he knew personally:
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. He uses the life of Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British classical composer who lived during the turn of the 20th century to illustrate the importance and hardships of getting black people quality education. Du Bois had sponsored Coleridge-Taylor's tour through the United States that became a legendary event in Black America, and he saw one of the first performances of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast in the UK's Crystal Palace.
When one thinks of Du Bois, science-fiction writer does not usually come to mind. I cannot say that he was the first African-American science-fiction/Afrofuturist author, but it is surprising to see a story like
The Comet appear at the end of this book (again, a cue he took form 'Souls' and its short story "Of The Coming of John"), but it fits with the general feel of the book and, as the strongest fiction piece, was a no-brainer to end the book. The idea of a city-level catastrophe to force a person to drop their prejudice and have to see folk as human. I can see the lineage of a
Octavia E. Butler,
Lesley Nneka Arimah or
Toni Morrison coming from this.
"We may well talk of the waste of wood and water, of food and fire, but the real and unforgivable waste of modern civilization is the waste of ability and genius,—the killing of useful, indispensable men who have no right to die; who deserve, not for themselves, but for the world, leisure, freedom from distraction, expert medical advice, and intelligent sympathy."
Du Bois, like most great figures of history, is a complicated figure. He (like Frederick Douglas before him) was active for a long time and witnessed massive upheavals in Afro-American life (one of the essays in this book is an in-depth look at the first wave of
The Great Migration), but his growing dogmatic obsession with Marxism (similar to
Pablo Neruda) increased his pessimism and the resulting Cold War blacklisting of him by the US government saw him sidelined by the 1950s (really starting in the 1940s) and missing out on the Civil Rights movement and eventually leaving the United States for Ghana on the invitation of one of his admirers,
Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of the Republic of Ghana where he is buried today.
"If the great battle of human right against poverty, against disease, against color prejudice is to be won, it must be won, not in our day, but in the day of our children's children. Ours is the blood and dust of battle; theirs the rewards of victory. If, then, they are not there because we have not brought them into the world, we have been the guiltiest factor in conquering ourselves. It is our duty, then, to accomplish the immortality of black blood, in order that the day may come in this dark world when poverty shall be abolished, privilege be based on individual desert, and the color of a man's skin be no bar to the outlook of his soul." -
A Glimpse at a Legend in Social Sciences...
--Continuing my review of a short-story in this compilation (
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), I guess the period of this collection (pre-1920) may be early in Du Bois’ transformation from an educated black reformist to an anti-imperialist communist. I was hoping to witness more of the latter in the essays (not extensive, thus my rating), although we do get hints…
Highlights:
1) “The Souls of White Folk” – Capitalism and Imperialism:
--The Western Left easily points to Lenin’s 1916 essay
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism as a foundation for theorizing imperialism within capitalism. Those who look deeper will find Luxemburg’s 1913 domestic-underconsumption-requiring-foreign-expansion theory (
The Accumulation of Capital) and Du Bois’ 1915 essay
"The African Roots of War" (not in this collection) on how the imperialist “Scramble for Africa” led to WWI .
--“The Souls of White Folk” frames colonialism as an outlet to relieve the class struggle pressures European capitalists face from their domestic working class. I think it's safe to assume that by domestic pressures, Du Bois is channeling Marx’s
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 thesis: accumulation of capital brings more precarity/surplus labour for the (domestic) masses. Du Bois doesn’t directly cite Marx besides a mention in “Of the Ruling of Men”:Whether known as Communism or Socialism or what not, these efforts are neither new nor strange nor terrible, but world-old and seeking an absolutely justifiable human ideal—the only ideal that can be sought: the direction of individual action in industry so as to secure the greatest good of all. Marxism was one method of accomplishing this, and its panacea was the doing away with private property in machines and materials.
--Since Marx's unfinished Capital project didn't get around to systematically analyzing trade/imperialism, we can turn to the opposite end of the spectrum to see Du Bois' logic of capitalism's colonialism: the infamous British colonialist Cecil Rhoades (not cited by Du Bois; emphasis added):I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism … My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines.
--Du Bois further matches Lenin by describing a European/American labour aristocracy bribed by colonial loot (emphases added):But in the possession of land overseas, in the right to colonies, the chance to levy endless tribute on the darker world,—on coolies in China, on starving peasants in India, on black savages in Africa, on dying South Sea Islanders, on Indians of the Amazon—all this and nothing more.
--Despite Marx not getting around to imperialism, his only finished volume of Capital actually does include this striking passage (emphasis added) on the importance of racial solidarity for the working class, which many radical leftists have practiced since (ex.
Even the broken reed on which we had rested high hopes of eternal peace,—the guild of the laborers—the front of that very important movement for human justice on which we had builded most, even this flew like a straw before the breath of king and kaiser. Indeed, the flying had been foreshadowed when in Germany and America “international” Socialists had all but read yellow and black men out of the kingdom of industrial justice. Subtly had they been bribed, but effectively: Were they not lordly whites and should they not share in the spoils of rape? High wages in the United States and England might be the skilfully manipulated result of slavery in Africa and of peonage in Asia.
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression):In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours’ [working day] agitation [...]
--In hindsight, imperialism + militarism + banking described by Du Bois/Lenin leading to WWI seems obvious (emphasis added):
[Capital Volume 1, Ch.10, section 7]The establishment of world credit systems is built on splendid and realizable faith in fellow-men. But it is, after all, so low and elementary a step that sometimes it looks merely like honor among thieves, for the revelations of highway robbery and low cheating in the business world and in all its great modern centers have raised in the hearts of all true men in our day an exceeding great cry for revolution in our basic methods and conceptions of industry and commerce.
--Du Bois’ logic is echoed after WWII by Césaire’s 1950 essay
We do not, for a moment, forget the robbery of other times and races when trade was a most uncertain gamble; but was there not a certain honesty and frankness in the evil that argued a saner morality? There are more merchants today, surer deliveries, and wider well-being, but are there not, also, bigger thieves, deeper injustice, and more calloused selfishness in well-being? […] Consider our chiefest industry,—fighting. Laboriously the Middle Ages built its rules of fairness—equal armament, equal notice, equal conditions. What do we see today? Machine-guns against assegais; conquest sugared with religion; mutilation and rape masquerading as culture,—all this, with vast applause at the superiority of white over black soldiers!
Discourse on Colonialism (
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Fascism/Nazism is colonial genocidal tactics brought home during capitalist crisis to discipline workers and revive capitalist production via militarism.
--This has further evolved with the US military industrial complex/dollar imperialism/Cold War/War on Terror (
Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance), and 2008 Crash/Global Trumpism (
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).
--Also see the latest in Global South theories:
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Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
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The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time
--Du Bois does seem to contradict his critique of imperialism when lauding the unappreciated services of black American soldiers in “Of Beauty and Death” (emphases added):Des Moines never before had seen such a class of colored men. They rapidly became popular with all classes and many encomiums were passed upon their conduct. Their commanding colonel pronounced their work first class and declared that they presented excellent material for officers.
[…] Charles Young is a heroic figure. He is the typical soldier,—silent, uncomplaining, brave, and efficient! From his days at West Point throughout his thirty years of service he has taken whatever task was assigned him and performed it efficiently; and there is no doubt but that the army has been almost merciless in the requirements which it has put upon this splendid officer. He came through all with flying colors. In Haiti, in Liberia, in western camps, in the Sequoia Forests of California, and finally with Pershing in Mexico,—in every case he triumphed. Just at the time we were looking to the United States government to call him to head the colored officers’ training at Des Moines, he was retired from the army, because of “high blood pressure!” […] nearly every Negro in the United States believed that the “high blood pressure” that retired Colonel Young was in the prejudiced heads of the Southern oligarchy who were determined that no American Negro should ever wear the stars of a General.
2) “Of Work and Wealth”:
--Useful essay hinting at the rise of Finance Capitalism, where the inventor/manager/thinker/risks of Industrial Capitalism’s profits are increasingly replaced with the gambler/highway man/usurious interest.
Michael Hudson has you covered on how Finance Capitalism is Neo-feudalism (reviving economic rent)!
The Bubble and Beyond,
https://youtu.be/7Ku76HUOVIY
--Post-WWI, imagining automation for social needs and a society of leisure. Of course, capitalism cannot sacrifice workers discipline (class power) and thus capitalist automation brings workers structural unemployment and useless/social ills jobs instead (
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). Today, we are once again challenging structural unemployment and working the planet to death by demands for shorter work-week/Universal Basic Income/"pre-distribution" i.e. workers ownership + social dividend on technology and information rather than solely relying on state redistribution/expanding the Commons, etc.:
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Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
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Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
3) “The Servant in the House” and “The Damnation of Women”:
--On black “menial servants”; post-WWI, imagining care work being prioritized (“a world of Service without Servants”), which today has been revived especially from the pandemic's “essential workers” framing:
The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values
--Mix of topics
bell hooks elaborates on (
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) as well as family/gender under capitalism, etc. (
Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression). -
W.E.B Dubois is best known for Souls of Black Folk,but was a prolific writer and public critic for the duration of his life. This collection of essays, poems and stories was published in 1920 and included items that had been published elsewhere.They show Dubois passion for justice and his anger at the ongoing degradation being experienced by black people due to Jim Crow. He also writes in support of women's rights and his opposition to war. They also show that Dubois was a forerunner of things such as civil rights, liberation theology and critical race theory. While each piece has its own integrity, I was particularly struct by the short story "The Comet" which tells the story of two people, a poor black man and a wealthy white woman, who survived a poisonous gas that followed the passing of Haley's Comet and how the white woman realized the black man's humanity in her hour of need. My brief summary does no justice to the creative way in which Dubois highlights the hypocrisy of racism in his day and ours. If anything troubled me it was how relevant Dubois words were. We have not come very far in the 92 years since this work was published.
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W.E.B. Du Bois remains one of the best writers America has ever produced. This was clear to me after reading his The Souls of Black Folks, and it’s even more apparent after reading Darkwater.
Like Souls, Darkwater is a collection of essays, but this time including short stories and poems between the nonfiction prose. By Du Bois’ own admission early in the book, this collection is darker and more bitter than his previous work. It betrays a frustration, if not a hopelessness, born of the post-World War I anti-black backlash that manifested itself in the “riots” (massacres) in Tulsa, East St. Louis, Houston and elsewhere. The difference between Souls and Darkwater is 13 years – during which time the undoing of Reconstruction and the smothering enforcement of Jim Crow went from in-progress to completion, the re-subjugation of black America from potential to practical.
The result in Darkwater is a beautiful poetry of rage:Doth not this justice of hell stink in Thy nostrils, O God? How long shall the mounting flood of innocent blood roar in Thine ears and pound in our hearts for vengeance? Pile the pale frenzy of blood-crazed brutes, who do such deeds, high on Thine Altar, Jehovah Jireh, and burn it in hell forever and forever!
More than simply a beautiful writer, Du Bois is an incisive analyst, whether arguing for the inclusion of women in public life, for public education or for the existence of beauty in the world, Du Bois’ thoughts remain perceptive and relevant.Ugliness to me is eternal, not in the essence but in its incompleteness; but its eternity does not daunt me, for its eternal unfulfillment is a cause of joy. There is in it nothing new or unexpected; it is the old evil stretching out and ever seeking the end it cannot find; it may coil and writhe and recur in endless battle for days without end, but it is the same human ill and bitter hurt. But Beauty is fulfillment. It is always new and strange. It is the reasonable thing. Its end is Death – the sweet silence of perfection, the calm and balance of utter music. Therein is the triumph of Beauty.
So strong is the spell of beauty that there are some who, contradicting their own knowledge and experience, try to say that all is beauty. They are called optimists, and they lie. All is not beauty. Ugliness and hate and ill are here with all their contradiction and illogic; they will always be here – perhaps, God send, with lessened volume and force – but here and eternal, while beauty triumphs in its great completion: Death.
As Darkwater shows, human beings can indeed create great beauty in the face of ugliness. -
In its deep and earnest humaneness this book is timeless. Really the 100 year time difference was scarcely an issue and when it was it was only because Du Bois had a dandy vocabulary.
Anyways it’s a bit sad that 100 years has passed and these words still resonate deeply. The socialist America he dreamed of did not happen and it’s fascinating to read about the early labor movements. His critiques are TIMELESS because the essence of race relations in America are the SAME.
I enjoyed the way it darts between forms. A personal essay followed by a poem and then prose interwoven with sociological commentary. You can tell he was lively in every way.
Favorite essay: of beauty and death.
Favorite story: the comet -
DuBois couldn’t help but write original, incredibly trenchant, well-researched essays. Not worse than Souls of Black Folk.
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One of those rare masterpieces of theory, history, poetry, sociology, and – yes! – science fiction that is simply stunning in its passion, intelligence, artistry, and moral clarity. I know I give a lot of books I love five stars, but DARKWATER is simply in a category of its own. One hundred stars.
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It felt like I probably should have read The Souls of Black Folks before this, to have an easier introduction to Du Bois. But regardless, this small collection of essays, poetry, and creative nonfiction ripped into me. Feels like it could have been written today, really - a straight line of clear and righteous anger from Jim Crow country to MAGA country.
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Du Bois was ahead of his time. These essays talk about issues that are still current.
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“If the uplift of mankind must be done by men, then the destinies of the world will ultimately rest in the hands of darker nations.” Prophetic words from a prolific scholar-activist. This powerful work by the illustrious W.E.B. Du Bois is the definition of speaking truth to power. Du Bois’ radicalism and militancy is on full display, as is his contempt and indictment of Western Civilization. With Du Bois’ proclamation of “this is Europe” in reference to the Belgium genocide of the Congolese, Du Bois rips the mask off of presumed white innocence. His indictment of “whiteness” is expressly anti-colonial, as he centers whiteness as a necessary condition for colonial expansion and capitalist ownership.
Du Bois’ language throughout the book is striking. He defines “colonies” as places where “niggers are cheap and the earth is rich…where like a swarm of hungry locusts white masters may settle to be served as kings…” He also proclaims that “[I]f the attitude of the European and American worlds is in the future going to be based essential upon the policies as in the past, then there is but one thing for the trained man of darker blood to do and that is definitely and openly as possible to organize his world for war against Europe.” No wonder that this book entangled and frightened Du Bois’ white critics.
Also, Du Bois, an early proponent of Pan African Nationalism, believed that the development of a United African state out of the ruins of WWI colonialism was the only way to ensure Black independence and humanity. Interestingly, Du Bois did not believe that this Pan African state should serve as a vehicle for global segregation or racial isolation. Rather, he believed that a liberated, unified, and free Africa was a necessary condition for the alleviation of oppressive systems around the world. Nevertheless, he also believed that diasporic Africans had “won the right” to struggle for self-determination wherever they lived around the world.
Not only does Du Bois passionately indict white supremacy and “whiteness” throughout this book, he discusses more generally the problems of sociopolitical and economic inequality, arguing that true democracy is an impossibility as long as it is kept out of the realm of industry.
One of my favorite quotes in the book comes from this same piece on economics and wages, where he states, “Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody’s slavery. They do not want equality because the thrill of their happiness comes from having things that others have not.”
In short, Du Bois’ thoughtfulness and humanism shines as bright as his unflinching demand for African demand for self-determination. This is a must read! -
There is a long, brilliant literary bridge from Frederick Douglass to Ta-Nehisi Coates of analyses of race in America. Between the two are many writers and works that are essential to any useful understanding of 21st century America. Wright, of course, King, and not just his speeches. Baldwin. Many others, particularly if you include poetry, drama and fiction. But sticking with non-fiction, W. E. B. Du Bois is certainly on that list of essential reading. The Souls of Black Folk is a classic of American literature. But so is his autobiography and so is Darkwater, a book of mostly essays with some poetic interludes between the essays and an allegoric short story at the collection’s end. Although published in 1919 with the essays written at various times in the 1910s—and thus a hundred years ago—there is not likely a fresher, more provocatively wise and observant examination of the topic of race from a sociological, historical, or ethical perspective. And if the poetical interludes between the essays are a bit dated and airy, the prose of the essays is always direct and compelling.
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This is a little bit of a departure from his other books. This is a collection of essays mixed in with a few short stories and poems. His tone has shifted as well. It is much darker and he has more of negative view on the world. I have to say that my favorite story was the "Black Jesus" one.
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Heavy read... but definitely one I'll be revisiting.
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Some of the essays were in response to events in the early 1900s and so were a little hard to follow, until I got my bearings, but this book really finishes strong! The essays on women, education and children were especially powerful!
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Du Bois is one of the most powerful writers I have ever encountered. It is easy to be so gripped that you find yourself reading the same essay multiple times before moving forward in the text. That is not something I do very often. One gets the feeling of wanting his words to ring out over and over and over until all of humanity listens—feels them in their bones. After reading this volume and The Souls of Black Folk, I have zero doubt in my mind I will read everything he ever wrote—and probably in relatively short order. Sometimes you just have to answer the call.
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It's an intense political, civil rights, philosophy book. It gave me a lot to think about and go over in my head over the last month, but overall this was a hard book to push through. I think if you want to know more about how race is talked about on a civil rights level, this is THE book to start with. But, when I was given the choice between reading this and other activities, I choose other activities. There is so much to think about and so much going on that it can be a chore to get through.
It paints a deeper picture of racism, not just as prejudice or xenophobia, but as a philosophical structure that claims that all men are create equal, but not all people are men. DuBois goes after European nations for invading the rest of the world and forcing their rule on everyone else. In fact, what DuBois has done is take socialist concepts of the time and extend them to race. He recognizes the plight of the working class, but shows while the right to assemble and unionization helped white workers, this right either did not extend to Asian, Black, and Native peoples, or unions were formed in order to drive these "other" work forces out of town. There's a lot of this, where he recognizes how the working class of the world is kept down through various means (like educating people only to work, poor infrastructure, and generally ignoring the voice of the people), but then goes on to how imperilism and captilism affects black people and women. At the time, working people had no voice but were fighting for it, while he tells that women 'had there husbands to speak for them' and blacks were generally ignored.
This book goes well with all the Bertrand Russell I've been reading, because they both look at problems in their society a century ago that hasn’t changed much. DuBois looks at imperialism and how nations extending into non-European nations have elected despots and turned the people in slaves for the lands resources. Another book written more recently, The Great Escape, points out while this practice doesn't happen as often today, what does happen is going to these former countries and handing them a large wad of money to "be a capitalist nation". This incentives the current ruler to change nothing, and forces their country into further poverty. In fact, Darkwaters is a good companion to The Great Escape because Darkwater asks for better education and democracy while The Great Escape shows how those things makes a nation better off and more equal.
I do want to touch on democracy, because both DuBois and Russell draw conclusions that don't work. DuBois contradicts himself within a few paragraphs, as well. He argues that when people are given the right to speak for themselves in government manners, then the lower class will rise up and the oppressors will be overthrown. There is this common thread in all socialist philosophy from the time period that all workers and the oppressed will see their common plight and will vote accordingly. I feel that's it was an academic problem where all academics felt that hard labor was beneath them and academic life was the pinnacle of the good life. DuBois is not nearly as bad as Russell in this thought, but it's there. I'm talking about goals of groups of people, and I say it's a contradiction because while DuBois mentions the socialist utopia idea several times, he talks about how unions of workers drove black workers out of their cities.
There is so much more in this book. How the government ignored the WW1 veterans. A bunch of short stories illustrating various points. It's very intense, and hard to get through because it tackles such big concepts. Overall, if you want to understand how racism is talked about on civil rights and philosophical level, this is the place to start. -
Lyrical and quite moving at points.
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'Darkwater' is a spirited and imaginatively dense work of African-American political philosophy, consisting of semi-autobiographical reflections on race from DuBois's own experiences as a child, student in Germany, and professor in North America, along with Marxist calls to action and even short poetic and didactic prose pieces. It's a rich and sometimes spiteful, though ultimately immensely optimistic political treatise, and marks some important insights into the darkest elements of the racist white Christian psyche.
While some of Dubois's core theses strike the modern sensibilities as painfully obvious - the stylism that pervades his theory nevertheless drives a poignant emotional tenor: Darkwater is full of elegiac cries for political change. "But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" he writes acerbically in "The Souls of White Folk", questioning the essential properties of whiteness such that blackness should be precluded from moral consideration. In a more contemplative and adoring reflection on his mother, he rhapsodizes: "She did not try to make me perfect. To her I was already perfect." In a Marxist mood, he remarks on the universality of solitude: "We must get rid of the fascination for exclusiveness. Here, in a world full of folk, men are lonely. The rich are lonely. We are all frantic for fellow-souls...". In a fierce battle hymn moment of 'The Shadow Years" he calls for unison amongst black people: "The unity beneath all life clutched me. I was not less fanatically a Negro, but "Negro" meant a greater, broader sense of humanity and world-fellowship."
The best part of 'Darkwater' is its positive aspirational ideals: written in the wake of criticism after having encouraged black men to join in America's efforts in WWI, Dubois was disillusioned from the destructive nihilism of war, and burdened by his sense of guilt in the role he played in the loss of black lives. Yet, instead of wallowing in the cynical perspective, he takes the opportunity to encourage a brotherhood of all men: Dubois, even in the depths of racial hate, poverty, loss and prejudice, maintains a joy and deeply moving love for justice. Less effective activists, I think, would remain firmly in the grips of the negative agenda: hating injustice and endlessly criticizing the unjust. We see Dubois's fervent commitment to joy from the opening pages of the preface: having suffered in health during the writing of 'Darkwater', Dubois had every reason to suspect this would be his final work. Yet, without the slightest twinge of self-pity, he concludes the preface: "dreaming or dreamless, I shall, I am sure, enjoy death as I have enjoyed life."
Some chapters are mysterious to me and worth criticizing however - while very much well-intentioned, Dubois's view of gender strikes me as distinctly 20th century, even when its ostensibly committed to a feminist stance. In "On the Damnation of Women" he affirms the autonomy of women, in particularly bodily autonomy, writing, "The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have knowledge. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion", and goes on to praise the role of black women in the domestic sphere, giving credit to them as capable mothers. Yet, his view on women is in some ways distinctly restricted - he grants them bodily and perhaps even sexual autonomy, even the right to vote, but goes no further in affirming their political agency. We can see subtle hints of an outdated patriarchal mindset in his short stories such as "The Princess of the Hither Isles" and "The Comet" in which women, and in particular white women, are used as plot devices to affirm the humanity and masculine entitlement of black men (which not only relegates women to sexual objects but also excludes black women entirely). 'The Comet' in particular left a bad aftertaste - the plot follows a post-apocalyptical event where a black man and a white woman are left alone on the earth and seemingly given the task of repopulating the earth - in which our black protagonist immediately feels a sense of entitlement over the white woman. This approach struck me as a telltale example of Charles Mills' observation in "Do Black Men have a moral duty to marry black women?" in which he remarks, "A white woman on your arm shows that you have made it." It's a somewhat sinister observation in an otherwise bona fide piece of activist literature, but I think is undeniable and brings into conversation the cross-analysis between black feminists such as Audre Lorde and Harriet Jacobs. The core issue, I think, is that Dubois is an essentialist about gender - he thinks there is *something* about womanhood, be it white or black, that is in itself beautiful and virtuous.
Beautifully optimistic, mystical, and spiritually devoted, 'Blackwater' is the deeply honest reflections after a long life of difficult activism. I particularly recommend the short story 'Jesus Christ in Texas', which brings to question difficult questions about the essential features of white nationalism and Christianity after Jesus Christ himself fails to prevent a lynching in Texas.
4.5/5 -
Bet yall didn't know Dubois wrote a novel...check it out it is quite good...
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I feel so mixed about this book! While I think he makes some good points in The Souls of Black Folk, I didn't find his essays in this book as compelling. The one point I did find interesting was when he goes into the difficulties of traveling during Jim Crow. If this book only had the essays, I would probably just do a 2, but his poems and short stories are so compelling! His "Litany at Atlanta" is both beautiful and a timely response to recent injustice in Charleston. He has two stories about Jesus returning to the American South as a mixed-race man during segregation. I think Du Bois has more of these elsewhere and I really want to track them down and read them! "The Prayers of God" is another lovely poem. Du Bois ends with a fascinating short story "The Comet," which reminds me of The Omega Man or other post-Apocalyptic movies. It makes a sad, but interesting point that some people are so set on racism that only the complete breakdown of society will make them reconsider. The white woman in the story didn't even imagine a romantic relationship with a black man until they were the last two people alive. Du Bois' stories and poems were beautiful and energizing, but the book dragged whenever it got to an essay. It may be because many of the issues Du Bois mentions were specific to the 1910s. If you stick to the stories and poems, this book is amazing!
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A few quotes I enjoyed:
"But beyond all this must come the Spirit - the Will to Human Brotherhood of all Colors, Races, and Creeds; the Wanting of the Wants of All. Perhaps the finest contribution of current Socialism to the world is neither its light nor its dogma, but the idea back of its one mighty word - Comrade!"
"... the suffragette is accused of wanting to be a man, the socialist is accused of envy of the rich, and the black man is accused of wanting to be white. That any one of these should want to be himself is to the average worshiper of the majority inconceivable..."
"There has arisen among us a movement to make the Public School primarily the hand-maiden of production. America is conceived of as existing for the sake of its mines, fields and factories, and not those factories, fields and mines as existing for America... We must seek not to make men carpenters but to make carpenters men." -
As a primary source on Jim Crow America, this collection of essays and poems stuns in its persistent relevance. This is the first book I’ve read by Du Bois, and really I know little about him, so I was a little surprised at first by his socialistic tendencies (but then upon reflection, not surprised). There are profound and horrible and beautiful insights within, and it’s well worth the time to read, even 100 years later.
“Pessimism is cowardice. Then man who cannot frankly acknowledge the ‘Jim-Crow’ car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either of himself or of the world. There is not in the world a more disgraceful denial of human brotherhood than the ‘Jim-Crow’ car of the southern United States; but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautiful in the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay in far Jamaica. And both things are true and both belong to this world, and neither can be denied.” -
The word "voices" from the subtitle feels appropriate. Essays, poetry, stories: his book is more experimental and fragmented than much of Du Bois's write before or after. Published in 1920, the Great War hangs heavy over every page. He's exploring race, gender, enfranchisement, masculinity, education, etc. all as the world is trying to put itself back together again. Some sections—the "Credo", "the Souls of White Folk", and "The Servant in the House"—bowled me over with their beauty and lyricism. Many of the poems and stories between the essays, however, feel less essential and far too meandering. Others still, like "The Damnation of Women" and "The Immortal Child" blend the hyperbolic with the facile. Du Bois is foundational and the book, as a whole, will yield some beautiful excerpts for teaching; but feels too uneven to be considered indivisible.
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At times melodramatic to the point of being comical, Darkwater is still filled with relevant and insightful commentary on American society and politics, and, of course, race. I liked the essays best, but some of the fiction was also interesting. I wish Du Bois had written a book of fairy tales, as many great authors have, because “The Princess of the Hither Isles” shows promise in that area.
I was most impressed with Du Bois’ strength of character and deep pride. -
A powerful collection of writing on a number of important subjects. I found this both clearer and more impactful than "The Souls of Black Folk," and particularly appreciated the vivid imagery conjured by the "poetic appendices" to each of the chapters. The last chapter was also arguably science fictional, which was both unexpected and very interesting.
