W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found
A public intellectual and civil rights leader, W.E.B. Du Bois was the first Black to graduate from Harvard with a Ph.D. and a cofounder of the NAACP. His most influential work came early, especially The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the foundational text for African American sociology. With an optimism that only faded in his final years, Du Bois assumed the capacity for white Americans to refine their moral sensibility and repair the racial conundrums that marred the republic from its inception.
In W.E.B. Du Bois, Elvira Basevich summarizes his life and thought from the perspective of the world of Black Lives Matter. In the darkness of Jim Crow when Blacks approached the public forum hesitantly, when even their full humanity was denied by science (anthropologists, eugenicists, Social Darwinists), Du Bois outspokenly demonstrated that Blacks are morally equal. His mission was to show that Black lives matter. However, as Basevich mentions, he might have frowned on contemporary movements for robbing themselves of sustained momentum through their “democratic leaderlessness.”
Basevich sketches Du Bois’ biography and surveys the evolving trains of his thought through a worldview based on his belief that we can repair the world we inherited and create the society where we ought to live. He was not for assimilation, holding instead that cultures should coexist, that traditions should inform the future. Du Bois called out the contributions already made by Blacks to American culture in an era before jazz, rock and roll, hip-hop and integrated professional sports.
Basevich is sometimes reductive (comparing Barack Obama to Nikolas Sarkozy) and too self-conscious in her role as a white philosophy professor advocating for Du Bois—a Black philosopher, historian, sociologist and storyteller. The eloquent passages of his writing quoted in W.E.B. Du Bois only calls attention to the flatness of most contemporary academic prose.
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Despite its faults, W.E.B. Du Bois is timely and necessary, an eager and well-thought defense of Du Bois against critics from many sides and a testimony to his enduring significance. Du Bois set a high bar for activists and intellectuals, for Blacks, Americans of all backgrounds and the whole of humanity. Basevich has written a reminder of this that should send us in search of Du Bois’ writings.
