The Elite Card

Kenneth Mostern The Elite Card (onAdolph Reed. W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought [New York: Oxford UP, 1997]) Adolph Reed has recently become a prime spokesperson for a laborist and anti-elitist position in African American Studies, more through his popular writings in the left press, including the Progressive , the Nation, and the Village Voice, than for his scholarship. His accurate criticisms of prominent of African American "public intellectuals " resonate with the needs of a non-African Americanist left that would like to believe that scholarly study of African Americans and also the organization of anti-racist movements require no special set of tools such as those provided by critical race theory. This essay argues that Reed's recent book, W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought, portrays Du Bois as an unchanging and archaic elitist in order to dismiss the entire project of African American Cultural Studies. Reed, however, does not demonstrate any substantial engagement with the variety of positions that characterize the field. The effect is to permit the middle-class leftist to stand in pseudo-populist relation to "the people." This in turn positions Reed as the person telling supposedly difficult truths as, at last, the left's African American academostar. Reed claims at the outset of his 1997 book W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line that its key merit will be the exploration of the "normative underpinnings" of Du Bois' work, since Du Bois is "perhaps the most systematic thinker" in African American intellectual history. These normative underpinnings, Reed argues, are a conventional Progressive era corporate-collectivism, socialist only in the Fabian, elitistsense. Thus, according to Reed, Du Bois' often-discussed changes—for example, oscillation between "integrationist" and "nationalist" political strategies —reveal no development in his basic methodological assumptions . Additionally, since positivist information retrieval to strategize racial uplift was his mode ofresearch, Du Bois' practice is unrelated to either idealist or materialist dialectics. Reed makes these claims because a carelessly theorized populism and "anti-elitism," itself ultimately positivist, is his moral reference point for all political action . The two epigraphs to W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought claim Marx and Hegel as Reed's methodological precursors . The first is the eighth thesis on Feuerbach which states the "essentially practical" nature of social life; the latter concerns the 324 the minnesota review retrospection of philosophy, that "philosophy always comes on the scene too late to give [instruction]." Taken out of their original contexts , these two quotes bypass the dialectical problem of mediation. They permit Reed to see any "philosophical" argument as distancingexperience from ideology, which therefore "deprecat[es] the subjective , volitional realm of human experience" (20). This, for Reed, is a sign of intellectual elitism. One might have thought it marxist to demonstrate that certain apparatuses of capital—say the media, elections , or Du Bois' most specific dialectical object, "race"—do stand between the specific experience of, for example, work (the knowledge of the specific injury-causing dangers of the specific factory) and the comprehension of how the conditions of production came to be (the requirement of capital to seek its highest rate of return). Cultural studies scholars, marxist or not, tend to see such media as contributing to the volitional realm ofhuman experience, positively or negatively; Du Bois was perhaps the first scholar to elaborate phenomenologically on how race does so as well. Reed contends that Du Bois was dedicated throughout his life to historical "progress," positivist information-retrieval, corporate industrialization, and collectivism. Reed demonstrates that in The Philadelphia Negro (1897) racial uplift and moral teaching are consistent with a basic acceptance of the capitalist division of labor. This is also consistent with the concern that professional African Americans not be forced to mix with those below their class. Reed also points out that Du Bois' temporary attachment to the Socialist Party in 1910-11 and his support for Wilson's call to arms in 1917 are consistent with the decisions of the white liberals who supported the NAACP, Hull House, Chicago school sociology, and temperance, but opposed genuine labor organization. Indeed, in Du Bois' own later account in Dusk...