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9. John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke: A Case Study in White Ignorance and Intellectual Segregation
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CHAPTER 9 John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke A Case Study in White Ignorance and Intellectual Segregation Frank Margonis Soldier and President Theodore Roosevelt was stridently committed to an international order that Charles Mills calls “global white supremacy” (Mills 1998, 98, 144). Concerned that England and France had already colonized significant portions of Africa and Asia, Roosevelt was anxious for the United States to stake its claim to the markets of China and Latin America. En route to this aim, the nation embarked upon what Alain Locke called “the flurry of imperialism of 1898,” that is, the United States sought to secure strategic real estate by imposing its military might upon Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines (Locke 1992, 30). For Roosevelt, conquest of other nations was partly a matter of attaining a regional military hegemony, but it was also a matter of pushing the nation to a higher level. In Roosevelt’s view, the traits that made the United States great, the vigor and ambition of the “American race,” were forged through conquest , so Roosevelt devoted four volumes of his writings to documenting the process whereby European Americans claimed the West by killing Indian tribes and seizing their land (Roosevelt 1995). For Roosevelt, this history of genocide was something to be cherished, cultivated, and sought in the future. Military conquest brought wealth to the nation as it created the optimal conditions for unifying and elevating a diverse citizenry within the nation. The exploits that Roosevelt sought to make central to American lore and practice have—as Mills has so significantly shown—been edited out of the debates over the character of justice among white philosophers 173 (Mills 1997, 18–19). John Dewey, perhaps the most noted European American philosopher of the progressive era, chose not to write about the imperialism of 1898, and indeed, he writes as though the racial dramas foremost in Roosevelt’s mind did not exist. For instance, Dewey’s retrospective essay on the life of Theodore Roosevelt focuses primarily upon describing a man larger than life, a political personage who could grab the public’s attention with the very audacity of his acts (Dewey 1976–1983, mw.11.143).1 Even though Dewey criticizes President Roosevelt for neglecting economic inequalities, he says nothing regarding Roosevelt’s racism, imperialism, or doctrine of manifest destiny. Cornel West and Paul Taylor call attention to a much more serious omission in Dewey’s social commentaries: the neglect of lynching and violence against African Americans and his unwillingness to take a stand on federal antilynching legislation (Taylor 2004, 232). While W. E. B. Du Bois, as editor of the Crisis , was doing everything within his power to call national attention to events such as the race riots in East Saint Louis, Dewey shows almost no acknowledgment of the phenomena and no awareness of the systematic role that racial violence played in exploiting African American labor in the South and denying African Americans economic opportunities in the North.2 These silences are structured silences, characteristic silences: the epistemology of ignorance that Mills rightly condemns. Seeking to make sense of the profound role that race has played in shaping U.S. foreign and domestic policy and practice, on the one hand, and the virtual absence of race in white philosophers’ discussions of American democracy, on the other hand, Mills argues that we must recognize the dominant group’s unwillingness to attend to and understand historic and ongoing acts of racial subjugation. Racial segregation and the resulting concentration of poverty are not—like the breakdown of communities or the existence of class stratification—routinely discussed by white philosophers as basic obstacles to democracy, because dominant group members have long participated in an epistemology of ignorance .3 Part of this is due to the positionality of white philosophers as members of white communities; in Mills’s (1998) words, Communities systematically privileged by an unjust social order will as a rule be less sensitive to its inequities, and this insensitivity will interfere with their “attainment of knowledge.” Such communities will not usually experience these injustices directly; they will have a vested interest in the system’s perpetuation and thus be prone to evasion, bad faith, and self-deception about its true character. (141–42) Insulated from experiencing racial injustices and benefitting from them, white philosophers, like much of white society in general, perpetuate 174 Frank Margonis [3.89.56.228] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:18 GMT) their ignorance of the...