W. E. B. DuBois's Family Crisis

James was aghast. “But Helga! Good heavens! Don’t you see that if we—I mean people like us—don’t have children, the others will still have. That’s one of the things that’s the matter with us. The race is sterile at the top. Few, very few Negroes of the better class have children, and each generation has to struggle again with the obstacles of the preceding ones, lack of money, education, and background. I feel very strongly about this. We’re the ones who must have the children if the race is to get anywhere.”

“Well, I for one don’t intend to contribute any to the cause.”—Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)

The mission of racial uplift has a long, rich, but problematic history. Although the idea of racial improvement has been in place since the beginning of the African American literary tradition, writers have constructed the means and ends of the improvement process differently depending on their personal, historical, social, and political circumstances. In the 1770s Phillis Wheatley did not use the term uplift, but she promoted correction of what she considered “errors” engendered by the paganism of Africa.¹ She suggested that conversion to Christianity was essential if “Negros, black as Cain” were to become “refin’d.”² With Frederick Douglass’s Narrative in 1845, Christianity as a prerequisite for freedom and racial advancement was supplemented with, and perhaps supplanted by, literacy and resistance. By the late nineteenth century, the term uplift was not only common in intellectual and literary parlance, but it had also found a more clearly intraracial expression, due in part to the emergence of segregation as the nation’s dominant social, political, and legal modality.

A number of scholars have begun to limn the sometimes troubling history of uplift in the late 1800s. In his wide-ranging and impressive Uplifting the Race, Kevin Gaines argues, as I do, that uplift and “self-help” ideology at the turn of the century “functioned,” to a degree, “as an accommodation to blacks’ noncitizenship status.”³ The intraracial, or class, distinctions at the heart of this version of uplift allowed many African American intellectuals to view themselves as racial exemplars, constituting, in Gaines’s words, “evidence of what they called racial progress.”⁴ Recently Hazel Carby has pointed out that as of 1893 W. E. B. DuBois, for one, explicitly linked the “advancement of the race” with “his own personal achievements as an intellectual.”⁵ She also delivers a compelling critique of DuBoisian uplift, as envisioned in his 1903 Souls of Black Folk, finding it both patriarchal and highly moralistic.⁶ Indeed, in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras many African American activist-writers, both male and female, constructed uplift as a middle-class leadership’s bestowal of enlightenment—represented by literacy, bourgeois sensibility, and standard English diction—upon a dialect-speaking “Negro” folk.⁷

Then, from about 1900 to 1930, uplift took on a more disturbing quality as the period’s notions of racial improvement (for both white and black people) became ever more tightly entwined with the emerging science of genetics. As Laura Doyle puts it, the “era of the Harlem Renaissance and of modernism was also the era of eugenics.”⁸ Doyle specifically exempts W. E. B. DuBois from eugenic thinking, however, arguing that he, along with Franz Boas, “spoke openly against racialism of all kinds throughout this period.”⁹ But eugenics was not solely a racialist or interracial ideology; it found a ready partner in the period’s class-based, intraracial ideologies of improvement—that is, uplift.¹⁰ In other words, one could speak out against racialism yet embrace some form of eugenic (and, indeed, even racialist) thinking. As Gaines observes, in the modern era “the majority of writers and intellectuals [both black and white] inescapably drew on deeply problematic varieties of knowledge about race.”¹¹ Often overlooked by literary critics and cultural historians alike is the fact that modern African American writers...