The Du Boisian Inflection

A dozen years ago, when I was in graduate school, I began to read the works of W.E.B. Du Bois. I first read The Souls of Black Folk, then The Philadelphia Negro, and then the essays and occasional pieces collected in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. I was able to justify my interest in Du Bois because the subject of my M.A. thesis was African-American Islam. Du Bois did not write much about Islam, but he wrote extensively about the problem of race in America; and until one comes to terms with this country's race problem, one cannot begin to appreciate the role that Islam has played in the African-American community.

I completed my M.A. in 2004 and, with it, my scholarly concentration upon Islam in black America (and with Du Bois) drew to a close. Nevertheless, I knew then that I had unfinished business with that extraordinary intellectual. A few months ago, while on Sabbatical, I picked him up again. I have not been able to put him down; I am back under his spell and grateful for it.

Cornel West has argued persuasively that Du Bois was an American anti-philosopher in the Emersonian vein. As heir to Emerson (and William James, George Santayana and, to some extent, John Dewey), he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with those icons of American intellectual life--and, yet, his name is rarely voiced in that august company. His genius is neglected undoubtedly because he dared to speak (and speak forcefully) for those Americans who live, as he put it, "within the veil"--people of color and the poor (who, in the United States, are disproportionately people of color)--whose true plight is obscured to most white Americans.

Along the way, he developed a radical hermeneutic that was both "locative" (concerned with the here-and-now and yet sensitive to historical context) and "utopian" (future-oriented and value-laden) at the same time: one that made it impossible to think about lived American experience without regard to the claim that race makes upon us all.

Absent that Du Boisian inflection, acts of interpretation are easily "white-washed"--the "centrality" of the Euro-American world-view is taken for granted and the "color-line" (Du Bois's term) circumscribes our thinking. We then default to the prevailing (pre-veiling) "view from nowhere" and, in so doing, continually reaffirm the social, cultural, and political status quo: the systemic inequities and persistent (and increasingly violence-prone) bigotries that characterize life in these United States in 2015.

But Du Bois, it turns out, was not simply a "race man." He was also a religious visionary of the first rank. His religiosity, however, is largely ignored today because he eschewed the magical explanations and deus ex machina wishful thinking that characterized most pre-modern (and, regrettably, much modern) religiosity. In other words, what Du Bois expressed as religion didn't "look religious" to many Americans--despite his profound appreciation for the archive of African American religiosity which served as his lifelong resource for ethical, political, and aesthetic reflection.

And so his dream of reviving the American religious imagination in a modernist key, i.e., as a non-supernaturalist imminent eschatology, tasked with the reinvention of our civilization along more equitable lines, has been lost. It has been lost in the glare of the apocalyptic fundamentalisms and in the shadows of the regressive traditionalisms that, decades later, continue to carry the day.

Sic transit gloria mundi.