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DuBois's “Double Consciousness”: Race and Gender in Progressive Era American Thought*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Adolph Reed Jr
Adolph Reed Jr
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Extract

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

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Articles
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Spring 1992 , pp. 93 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

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2. I borrow this phrase from David Hollinger, “How Wide the Circle of the ‘We’?” unpublished.

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30. Ibid., p. 24.

31. Ibid., p. 15. Because West consistently refers without clarification to Afro-American “philosophy,” “critical philosophy,” “critical thought,” and “religious philosophy” when discussing his program, my use of “secular” here may seem ambiguous. I use the term to denote activity and phenomena situated outside self-contained, specialized discursive communities associated with academic disciplines and subdisciplines.

32. Ibid., p. 23.

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34. Gates, Henry Louis Jr, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 276Google Scholar. Other scholars of Afro-American literature recently have made use of DuBois's formulation in arguments concerning the status and character of black literary tradition. Michael Awkward sees double consciousness as “the merging of the binary opposites ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ for which the Afro-American strives” and as a precursor of Toni Morrison's dual voices of narrator and protagonist in The Bluest Eye; see Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Women's Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 12. Barbara Johnson endorses the premise of a distinctive racial two-ness; she then criticizes DuBois and James Weldon Johnson for having assumed the black voice's maleness, noting that women also have been forced to be two-voiced. See her “Metaphor, Metonymy and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 214–15Google Scholar.

35. Gates, Signifying Monkey, p. xxv. Tropological revision is one of four types of “double-voiced textual relations” that Gates identifies in the black tradition.

36. Gates, Figures in Black, pp. 56–57.

37. Ibid., p. 44.

38. Gates, Signifying Monkey, p. 207.

39. Gates, Henry Louis Jr, “Introduction” to The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1989 Bantam, ed.), p. xivGoogle Scholar.

40. Carr, Edward Hallett, What Is History? (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 28Google ScholarPubMed.

41. Broderick, Francis L., W. E. B. DuBois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 102–3Google Scholar; and Moore, Jack B., W. E. B. DuBois (Boston: Twayne, 1981), pp. 68–69Google Scholar. Peter Conn both asserts the source of the two-ness reference in DuBois's personality and credits him with having discovered a generic racial condition; see The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 148f.

42. Levine, Lawrence W., Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-Amencan Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 151Google Scholar.

43. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (1978; rep. New York: Oxford, 1988), pp. 136f. Though he does not focus on the two-ness notion, William Toll also provides a very useful account that situates The Souls of Black Folk in an enveloping black discursive community; see his The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), pp. 118–19.

44. Gooding-Williams, Robert, “Philosophy of History and Social Critique in The Souls of Black Folk,” Social Science Information 26 (First Quarter 1987): 106–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Rampersad, Arnold, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. DuBois (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 74Google Scholar; also see his “Biography and Afro-American Culture” in Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, ed. Baker, Houston A. Jr, and Redmond, Patricia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 200Google Scholar.

46. Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 186–88, 249Google Scholar. Kimberly Benston also indicates an Emersonian connection via William James in “I Yam What I Am: The Topos of (Un)naming in Afro-American Literature,” in Gates, Black Literature, p. 170 n.

47. West, Cornel, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 142–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Religion and Society,” in Young Emerson Speaks, ed. McGiffert, Arthur Cushman (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1938), p. 200Google Scholar.

49. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “The Transcendentalist,” in The Portable Emerson, ed. Bode, Carl (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 106Google Scholar.

50. Emerson, “Fate,” in Ibid., pp. 372–73. He observed that “by the cunning co-presence of two elements, which is throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes you draws in with it the divinity, in some form, to repay.”

51. For a discussion of the ambiguities in James's considerations of consciousness and related issues, see Myers, Gerald E., William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 54–80, 344–86Google Scholar.

52. James, William, The Principles of Psychology (1890; rept. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 148fGoogle Scholar.

53. See, e.g., James, William, “Does Consciousness Exist?” in The Writings of William James, ed. McDermotttt, John J. (Chicago, U. of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 169–83Google Scholar; Kuklick, Bruce, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 169–70; and Myers, William James, pp. 72–80Google Scholar.

54. James, William, Varieties of Religious Expereince (1902; rept. New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 190Google Scholar.

55. James, Principles of Psychology, p. 377.

56. Ibid. , pp. 377–78. In exploring the extent to which the “splitting up of the mind into separate consciousness may exist in each one of us”—that is, critically examiningjanet's claim that it appears only in mental disorder—James took an experimental, empiricist route. He argued, albeit tentatively, that normal subjects demonstrate a similar, though less extreme, process: “namely, an active counting out and positive exclusion of certain objects” (p. 209). His argument was rigorously empirical and physiological: “The mother who is asleep to every sound but the stirrings of her babe, evidently has the babe-portion of her auditory sensibility systematically awake. Relatively to that, the rest of her mind is in a state of systematized anaesthesia. That department, split off and disconnected from the sleeping part, can none the less wake the latter up in case of need…As glands cease to secrete and muscles to contract, so the brain should sometimes cease to carry currents, and with this minimum of its activity might well coexist a minimum of consciousness. On the other hand, we see how deceptive are appearances, and are forced to admit that part of consciousness may sever its connections with other parts and yet continue to be” (p. 210).

57. Myers, William James, p. 376. See also James, William, Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Dutton, 1971), pp. 262–64fGoogle Scholar.

58. James, William, The Will to Believe (1897; rept. New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 320–21Google Scholar.

59. Ibid., p. 321.

60. James, , Human Immortality (1898; rept. New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 22–23Google Scholar.

61. Ibid., pp. 24, 27. Also see Myers, William James, pp. 383s–86.

62. James, Varieties, p. 92.

63. Ibid., p. 143.

64. Ibid., p. 146. James acknowledged that religion is not the only way to establish that unity. He noted that “the new birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion” (p. 150).

65. Ibid., p. 85.

66. Ibid., p. 81.

67. Ibid., p. 85.

68. Ibid., p. 114. James recognized mind cure as an instance of this sort of religion (p.90).

69. Ibid., pp. 118–19.

70. Myers, William James, p. 468.

71. James, Varieties, p. 135.

72. Ibid., p. 144.

73. Ibid., pp. 144–45.

74. Ibid., pp. 163–64.

75. Ibid., p. 148.

76. Ibid., p. 398.

77. Ibid., p. 396.

78. Ibid., pp. 393–94.

79. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Bode, Portable Emerson, p. 210.

80. Myers, William James, p. 19. Of course it is possible that James changed his mind after influencing DuBois or that DuBois may have accepted the idea over James's skepticism, or perhaps that DuBois found the notion useful or attractive as a trope that stimulated him to formulate his own nonbiological, racial idea. Each of these possibilities, however, requires assumption warranted only by acceptance of the proposition that is to be demonstrated. If accepted, moreover, each possibility posits a set of conditions that beg questions as to whether “influence” reasonably describes the relation between the two ideas or the extent to which they reasonably can be viewed as similar.

81. Dunn, John, “The Identity of the History of Ideas,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Laslett, Peter, Runciman, W. G., and Skinner, Quentin (New York: Blackwell, 1972), p. 160Google Scholar.

82. Adolph L. Reed, Jr. Fabianism and the Color Line: The Political Thought of W. E. B. DuBois (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), ch. 1.

83. Skinner, Quentin, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (First Quarter 1969): 26Google Scholar. This essay has been reprinted—along with others by Skinner, several criticisms, and his reply—in Tully, James, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Skinner's argument concerning imputations of influence has not provoked the sort of critical debate or dissent among historians of ideas as have other of his methodological views.

84. Rodgers, Daniel, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic, 1987)Google Scholar. In a critique of Raymond Williams's Keywords, which provided some of the inspiration behind Rodgers's exemplary study, Skinner stresses the distinction between different forms of politically significant contestation over proper use of terms (over whether agreed-upon meanings are being applied to the proper practices, whether the normative appraisal of an agreed-upon meaning should change, etc.) and their differing implications for the conceptual and ideological content of the contestation. Unfortunately, Skinner overstates the need for and usefulness of speech-act theory as a technique for making such interpretive distinctions. See “Language and Social Change,” in Tully, Meaning and Context, pp. 119–32. Among others, Ian Shapiro has criticized effectively the intellectual inadequacies and conservative (i.e., depoliticizing) bias in Skinner's, approach in “Realism in the Study of the History of Ideas,” History of Political Thought 3 (11 1982):535–78Google Scholar; also see Shapiro's, review of Meaning and Context in Canadian Philosophical Reviews 10 (07 1990): 291–94Google Scholar.

85. Vesey, Laurence, “Intellectual History and the New Social History,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. Higham, John and Conkin, Paul K. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1979), p. 11Google Scholar, passim.s.

86. In this case as well, Emerson's and James's references have more in common with each other than either does with DuBois's. See Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” p. 221; James, Human Immortality, p. 26; and DuBois, Souls, p. 3, passim. For Emerson and James the veil surrounds transcendental inner experience; for DuBois it is the wall of racial exclusion.

87. DuBois, , The Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 168Google Scholar. Julian West, the protagonist of Bellamy's much-read magnum opus, observes: “The idea that I was two persons, that my identity was double, began to fascinate me with its simple solution of my experience” (Looking Backward [1888; rept. New York: Penguin, 1982], p. 78).

88. Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965)Google Scholar; Lears, T. J.Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); and Conn, Divided MindGoogle Scholar.

89. Lasch, New Radicalism, p. 101.

90. Ibid., p. xiii.

91. Ibid., pp. 100–101.

92. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 26.

93. Conn, Divided Mind, p. 1

94. Ibid., p. 4.

95. Ibid., p. 13.

96. Gillmore, Inez Haynes, “Confessions of an Alien,” Harper's Bazaar 46 (04 1912): 170Google Scholar.

97. Cited in Hill, Mary A., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 74Google Scholar.

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99. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 290.

100. Ibid., p. 75.

101. Ibid., pp. 210–11.

102. Luhan, Mabel Dodge, Edge of Taos Desert (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), pp. 301–2. This memoir was published when Luhan was in her fifty-eighth yearGoogle Scholar.

103. Addams, Jane, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910Google Scholar; rept. New York, 1938), p. 59.

104. Ibid., p. 64.

105. Ibid., p. 72.

106. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 174. James pointed out that he was prohibited by his “constitution” from experiencing mystical states directly and could “speak of them only at second hand.” See also James, Varieties.

107. Meyer, Donald, The Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 75Google Scholar.

108. James, Varieties, pp. 89–91, passim; also see Meyer, Positive Thinkers, pp. 83–88.

109. Meyer, Positive Thinkers, pp. 79–92.

110. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 170.

111. Addams, Hull House, pp. 64–65.

112. Gillmore, “Confessions,” p. 171.

113. Ibid., p. 210.

114. H.Jessie Taft in fact argued directly that the experience of alienation among women was structurally and institutionally based; see The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915), pp. 53–54. In Democracy and Social Ethics (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1902), Jane Addams had been equally explicit; esp. pp. 71–101. Also see Rosenberg, Rosalind, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New York, Yale 1982), pp. 142–44Google Scholar.

115. Gillmore, “Confessions,” p. 170. She repeated the description more than a decade later in the Nation, noting that she had missed the “thrill of haphazard picturesque slum existence”; see “The Making of a Militant,” in These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties, ed. Showalter, Elaine (New York: Feminist Press, 1989), p. 35Google Scholar.

116. Addams, Hull House, p. 169.

117. Ibid., p. 176.

118. Bourne, Randolph, “Trans-National America,” in The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne, Selected Writings 1911–1918, ed. Hansen, Olaf (New York: Urizen, 1977), pp. 253–54Google Scholar.

119. Ibid., p. 254.

120. Ibid., pp. 250, 259.

121. Luhan, Taos Desert, p. 34.

122. Ibid., p. 62. Her usage here illustrates the appropriation of Emerson and James by popular psychology and mysticism.

123. Ibid., p. 60. She succeeded, this passage shows, in eliminating the tension between phenomenon and concept but exactly opposite from the way she thought she had. Rather than transcending intellection, she so completely objectified her surroundings that they existed only as a set of banal abstractions.

124. Ibid., pp. 221–22.

125. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 52. They also commonly believed that prolonged expo-sure to tropical climates produced moral degeneracy. Even open-minded racial liberals like Josiah Royce, who was skeptical of racial essentialism, accepted that premise matter-of-factly. See Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Problems (1908; rept. Freeport, N. Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1967), pp. 18–19.

126. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 274.

127. James, Varieties, p. 80. James also understood Tolstoy's conversion experience as a transcendence of overcivilization; he cautioned, though, that “not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps, of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones” (pp. 157–58).

128. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 159.

129. Ibid., pp. 129–31.

130. James, Varieties, pp. 84–85.

131. William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in The Writings of William James, ed., p. 661.

132. Ibid., pp. 667–68.

133. James, Will to Believe, p. 301. Also see James, Varieties, p. 79.

134. James, “Moral Equivalent,” p. 661.

135. Ibid., p. 668.

136. Ibid., p. 669.

137. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 136.

138. Crunden, Robert M., Ministers of Reform: The Progressives 'Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 32Google Scholar.

139. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 255. Santayana made a similar claim; see his 1911 essay “The American Philosophy,” in The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana, ed. Wilson, Douglas L. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), esp. p. 40Google Scholar.

140. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, p. 42. Hall believed that the progress of civilization rested on ever-widening sex differentiation; therefore, coeducation or any practice that threatened to “virify women and feminize men…would be regressive” (Hall, G. Stanley, Adolescence [New York: D. Appleton, 1904], vol. 2, p. 569)Google Scholar.

141. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 249.

142. I recognize that, as Cott, Nancy F. (The Grounding of Modem Feminism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987], pp. 3–10)Google Scholar notes, use of the term “feminism” to describe the strains of women's activism prominent much before World War I is anachronistic and glosses significant shifts in foci and objectives. I use the term here not to refer to support for or opposition to concrete movements, but more generically as a shorthand reference to stances reinforcing or opposing women's subordinate status in society.

143. Kraditor, Aileen S., The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Doubleday, 1971), esp. pp. 82—104Google Scholar. The tendency to appeal to such constructions of women's “nature” also appears commonly in contemporary feminist arguments by both scholars and activists. Leonardo, Micaela di discusses this phenomenon critically in “Morals, Mothers, and Militarism: Antimilitarism and Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies 11 (Fall 1985): 599–617Google Scholar.

144. Johnson, Emily Cooper, ed., Jane Addams: A Centennial Reader (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 115Google Scholar. The essay originally appeared in Newer Ideals of Peace New York: Macmillan, 1907.

145. Addams, Jane, “The Larger Aspects of the Woman's Movement,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (11 1914): 1–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

146. Addams, Jane, “Why Women Should Vote,” Ladies' Home Journal 27 (01 1910):22Google Scholar. She argued the negative consequences of disfranchisement in similar terms, noting that “many women today are failing to discharge their duties to their own households properly simply because they do not perceive that as society grows more complicated it is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her own home if she would continue to preserve the home in its entirety” (p. 21).

147. See Newman, Louise Michele, ed.,Men's Ideal/Women's Realities: Popular Science, 1870–1915 (New York: Pergamon, 1985)Google Scholar, especially essays by Alice Tweedy, Olivia R. Fernow, and Frances Gordon Smith. Also see Sewall, May Wright, ed., The World's Congress of Representative Women, 1893 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894)Google Scholar. One might argue that those who adopted that stance did so tactically, which is no doubt to a greater or lesser extent true for given individuals. The distinction between tactical and principled adoption of a position, however, is not a very neat one, even in the mind of the agent in question. In addition, willingness to concede a point tactically can imply that the agent had no strong opposition to the point in the first place. Finally, even if activists adopted the rhetoric of essential gender dichotomy in a purely tactical way, they did so because they believed that the presumptions of that rhetoric were hegemonic as “respectable” opinion among the constituencies they wanted to influence or enlist.

148. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: The Economic Factor Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898; rept. New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 126.

149. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (New York: Ayer, 1935), p. 187Google Scholar; Gilman, , Herland (1915; rept. New York: Pantheon, 1979)Google Scholar; Rosenberg,Beyond Separate Spheres, pp. 36–40; and Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, p. 230.

150. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South (1892; rept. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 60.

151. Ibid., p. 58. She made a similar claim concerning the importance of “an elevated and trained womanhood” in the effort to “elevate the Negro” (p. 29).

152. Ibid., p. 73.

153. Ibid., p. 84.

154. Ibid., pp. 54–55.

155. Ward, Lester F., The Psychic Factors of Civilization (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1893), p. 179Google Scholar.

156. Ibid., pp. 193–94.

157. Ibid., p. 180.

158. Ibid., p. 189.

159. Hall, Adolescence, pp. 566–67. He contended, though, that differentiation is greatest among “highly civilized races” (p. 569).

160. Thomas, William I., “On a Difference in the Metabolism of the Sexes,” American Journal of Sociology 3 (07 1897): 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

161. Ibid., p. 40. He already had pointed to women's “infantile somatic characters” (p. 34).

162. Ibid., p.50.

163. Ibid., p.41.

164. Ibid., pp.41–42.

165. Ibid., pp. 31–32. By 1907, interestingly, Thomas had forsaken biologism altogether and argued that apparent race and gender differences were artifacts of social injustice and bigoted observation; see “The Mind of Women and the Lower Races,” American Journal of Sociology 12 (January 1907): 435–69.

166. Ross, Edward A., “The Causes of Race Superiority,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (07 1901): 72–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

167. Ibid., p. 75.

168. Ibid., p. 83.

169. Ibid., p. 76. Ross's argument was a combination primer, jeremiad, and forecast of likelihood for success on behalf of Anglo-Saxon world supremacy under prevailing conditions of capitalist imperialism. Not surprisingly, therefore, he found the apotheosis of contemporary civilization in practices and institutions of predatory capitalism; see also Ward, Psychic Factors, pp. 183–84. Ward saw the putative qualities of the businessman as the most highly evolved existing form of an “intuitive reason” originating in the natural world. Unlike Ross, though, his vision of a melioristic society led him to define that tendency as the highest articulation of prehuman forms that would be surpassed in the new order.

170. Hall, Adolescence, p. 561. 171.

171. Ibid., p. 564. Just as Ross's description of primitives brings to mind Banfield's, characterization of “lower class” and “backward” societies (The Moral Basis of a Backward Society [New York: Free Press 1958]Google Scholar and The Unheavenly City [New York: Little Brown, 1970]), Hall's characterization here seems uncannily like Gilligan's, Carol argument concerning gender-based reasoning (In a Different Voice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982])Google Scholar.

172. Robert Ezra Park, “Education in Its Relation to the Conflict and Fusion of Cultures,” reprinted in Race and Culture, p. 280.

173. Jordanova, L. J., “Natural Facts: A Historical Perspective on Science and Sexuality,” in Nature, Culture and Gender, ed. MacCormack, Carol and Strathern, Marilyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 61Google Scholar; also see Leiss, William, The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

174. See, for example, Gould, Stephen Jay, Ontogeny and Phytogeny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), esp. pp. 126–55Google Scholar; and Stocking, George W. Jr, “Lamarckianism in American Social Science,” in Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 234–69Google Scholar.

175. Gould, Ontogeny, pp. 155–64. Gould also discusses the centrality of Jung's and Ferenczi's recapitulationist beliefs in their respective psychoanalytic theories.

176. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, p. 265. 177. Ibid., p. 238.

177. Ibid., p. 238.

178. Gilman, Women and Economics, pp. 331–32. For discussion of Gilman's particular mode of evolutionism, see Egan, Maureen L., “Evolutionary Theory in the Social Philosophy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Hypatia 4 (Spring 1989): 102–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

179. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, p. 255.

180. DuBois, W. E. B., Heredity and the Public Schools (Washington, D. C., 1904), p. 7Google Scholar. By the time of this address, however, he at least formally acknowledged the soundness of Weismann's critique.

181. DuBois, W. E. B., The Conservation of Races (Washington, D. C: American Negro Academy, 1897), p. 6Google Scholar.

182. Thomas, William I., “The Scope and Method of Folk-Psychology,” American Journal of Sociology 1 (01 1896); 438fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

183. Ross, “Causes of Race Superiority,” pp. 67–68. DuBois's “The Relation of the Negroes to the Whites in the South,” which appeared in the same Annals issue as Ross's article, was reprinted as the ninth chapter, “Of the Sons of Masters and Man,” of The Souls of Black Folk.

184. DuBois, Conservation of Races, p. 6–7.

185. Appiah, Anthony, “The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 23–25Google Scholar.

186. Moses, Golden Age, p. 135.

187. Appiah, “Uncompleted Argument,” p. 25. Appiah takes DuBois's statement that racial differences “perhaps transcend scientific definition” as evidence that he contraposed scientific and sociohistorical conceptions. That interpretation overlooks the extent to which DuBois understood himself to be engaged in a scientific project as a sociologist; it imputes to DuBois Appiah's equation of science and biology in this context. DuBois's statement is more likely an expression of the cautious attitude of the practitioner who feels his technical arsenal — his “crude social measurements,” as he put it in another context — to be inadequately developed for his task.

188. Thomas, “Folk-Psychology,” p. 439; and Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, pp. 244–17.

189. DuBois, Conservation of Races, p. 9.

190. Ibid., p. 10; and Thomas, “Folk-Psychology,” p. 440.

191. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, p. 164.

192. Ibid., pp. 11, 179.

193. Ibid., pp. 163, 179.

194. Ibid., p. 257.

195. Ibid., p. 198.

196. Ibid., p. 5.

197. DuBois, W. E. B., Efforts for Social Betterment Among Negro Americans (Atlanta: Atlanta University Publications, 1909), p. 133. Rampersad, pp. 62–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

198. DuBois, Souls, pp. 4–5.

199. Ibid., p. 4.

200. Ibid., p. 202.

201. Ibid., p. 5.

202. Ibid., pp. 11–12.

203. See, for example, Reed, Adolph L. Jr, “W. E. B. DuBois: A Perspective on the Bases of His Political Thought,” Political Theory 13 (Summer 1985): 431–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

204. This challenges Holt's contention that the “two-ness” problem, which he characterizes as the effort to achieve “mature self-consciousness and an integrity or wholeness of self in an alienating environment… would become the dominant focus — political and cultural — of DuBois's life and work” (Holt, Thomas C., “The Political Uses of Alienation: W. E. B. DuBois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903–1940,” American Quarterly 42 [06 1990]: 304)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

205. W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940; rept. New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 98

206. Ibid., p. 99 207.

207. Ibid., p. 116. Compare this observation to Moses's and Appiah's frustration at DuBois's apparent inconsistency.

208. Ibid.

209. Ibid., p. 153

210. Fields, Barbara Jeanne, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review (05/06 1990): 95–118Google Scholar.