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Chapter3 Raising the Veil: Racial Divides and Ethnographic Crossings in The Souls of Black Folk Objectivity, Authority, and Epistemologies of Difference Like Franz Boas, W. E. B. Du Bois profoundly helped shape modern American thought on race and culture. As I have already mentioned, DuBois's 1897 speech "The Conservation of the Races" was a landmark moment in the development of cultural pluralism. Biographer David Levering Lewis credits Du Bois with first articulating the principles of cultural pluralism in this speech to the American Negro Academy, long before the terminology to describe cultural pluralism even existed.1 Lewis writes: The writings of James and Dewey would point the way for the "cultural radicals;' the pluralists of the near future, but the boldest signpost was first erected by Du Bois when he asked rhetorically of the seventeen attentive men in the Washington church: "[W]hat after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my Black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?" (172) In asking these questions, he began to unravel notions of citizenship and national identity, work that would contribute to a project of making America more inclusive and pluralistic. I will go on in this chapter to argue that Du Bois would prove to be a driving force in the New Negro movement, not only as a theorist of race and culture, but also as a literary figure. But in order for me to argue for his influence as a theoretician and social scientist, we must consider how the disciplines of anthropology and sociology paralleled each other at a time when both he and Boas embarked on their careers. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, sociology, like anthropology, broke with Raising the Veil 45 the less professional standards of writing upheld by earlier generations, by emphasizing empiricism and objectivity as proof of the disciplines' scientific legitimacy.2 Each centered on the study of "primitive" societies-abroad in the case ofanthropology and at home in the case ofsociology-with ethnography functioning as a privileged mode of inquiry.3 Trained at Harvard primarily as a philosopher, historian, and political scientist, Du Bois acquired the skills and methodological approach necessary to conduct the empirical research that informed his earliest writings during his years at the University of Berlin (1892-94). Although he considered majoring in philosophy at Harvard, he eventually studied history because his professors warned him of the impracticality of the philosophy major, particularly for an individual committed to the work of racial uplift.4 When he turned as a graduate student more decisively to the social sciences, buoyed, in part, by his studies at Harvard with the philosopher William James, Du Bois revealed a pragmatist's concern with the tangible application ofideas to the material world.5 The years he spent studying at Humboldt University reinforced this approach. Carved above the university's entrance was the maxim, "until now philosophers have only explained the world, our task is to change it" (Lewis 142). Under the tutelage of Gustav Schmoller in Berlin, he learned to privilege inductive reasoning and analysis built on objectively accumulated historical and descriptive material. Schmoller "saw the goal of social science as the systematic, causal explanation ofsocial phenomena, and he believed that social scientific facts, based on careful, inductive analysis, could be used as a guide to formulate social policy."6 Until1910, DuBois's sociological works show ample evidence of Schmoller's influence, including his emphasis on empirical data collection, the use of facts as the basis for creating social policy, an underlying interest in social justice, and an emphasis on an historical approach, of which The Philadelphia Negro (1899) is a stellar example (Lewis 201). After returning to the States in 1896 and a short stint teaching classics at Wilberforce University, DuBois was offered a temporary position at the University of Pennsylvania to study the social condition and urban problems of Philadelphia's African American population. At that time, Philadelphia contained the largest community of African Americans in the North. Du Bois produced...

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