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62 Of Color and Culture 62 4 Of Color and Culture: Du Bois’s Evolving Perspectives on Race WITH REGARD TO HOW RACIAL IDENTITY SHOULD be defined, Charles Chesnutt’s certainty surpassed that of his younger, formally educated friend, W. E. B. Du Bois. I partly question Chesnutt’s certainty, while I remain struck by Du Bois’s evolving perspectives on race. Throughout his life, Du Bois affirms—through dozens of articles, essays, and several books—particular constructions of race, only to subvert them later. This process of affirming and subverting racial designations constitutes another essential component in rethinking racialized voice. In other words, an alternative paradigm of racialized voice must be open to the flexibility represented in Du Bois’s shifting takes on racial designations. Additionally, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that Du Bois recognized but came short of adopting the word civilization as a more fitting descriptor of group identity than race. Given Appiah’s contention and my own interest in black folk culture, I must also explore how Du Bois’s understanding of American culture generally and African American culture specifically correlates with his evolving racial ideologies. Therefore , I will examine selected writings by Du Bois from two vistas: what they say about race and what they say about culture in relation to race. An artist, historian, and sociologist, Du Bois was conversant in myriad approaches to analyzing the race question. Arnold Rampersad observes that Du Bois’s personal complexity befits the complexities of this question: Of Color and Culture 63 The task of understanding Du Bois is not easy. As I pointed out in 1976, he was a mass of paradoxes, “a product of black and white, poverty and privilege, love and hate. He was of New England and the South, an alien and an American, a provincial and a cosmopolite, nationalist and communist, Victorian and modern. With the soul of a poet and the intellect of a scientist, he lived at least a double life, continually compelled to the challenge of reconciling opposites.” (vii) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was among the first persons of African descent to comprehensively address the “Negro question.” From the search for black consciousness in the classic Souls of Black Folk to the retelling of his own experiences with the problems of the color line in his first autobiography proper Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois’s public voice represents a prodigious effort to honor African Americans.1 Indeed, this tension between the public and private Du Bois functions as the crowning paradox of his career. He elevated, for example, his personal experience with racism to representative status with Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of the Race Concept. Like Frederick Douglass and Charles Chesnutt (both of whom Du Bois admired ), Du Bois exemplifies the problem of one black person presuming , or being presumed, to speak for the race. Revising Race: Personal Odyssey and Public Revelation One aspect of Du Bois’s ever-changing takes on race is the movement of intratextual revision within his writings. By “intratextuality” I mean the dialogue, the overt or covert rhetorical interchanges that occur between two or more writings by the same author. An intratextual analysis of Du Bois’s work will foster, to some extent, the type of questioning, critique, and reformulating one would expect to find from an intertextual analysis of works by two authors. One example of this process emerges in Du Bois’s account of his upbringing in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and his initial encounter with the South. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington in 1868. Although he was not to witness firsthand the harsh racism southern blacks experienced until he attended college and taught in the South, he always recognized himself as black. Never mind that his complexion was a clue to 64 Of Color and Culture his partial white ancestry. He was—as the one-drop rule of his time dictated —black. Still, an optimism marked Du Bois’s childhood. Du Bois says of Great Barrington in Dusk of Dawn, “The color line was manifest and yet not absolutely drawn.” To illustrate this point, Du Bois provides a telling incident about a cousin who brought home a white wife. Surprisingly, the only two objections Du Bois’s family raised were that this cousin did not have enough money to support a wife nor did they know anything about this woman’s background. More important, in The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, published some twenty years...

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