Place in WEB du Bois's Souls of Black Folk
mapping the violent liturgies of whiteness
In the first few months of the pandemic, cloistered on a hill in Maine and awaiting my first child’s birth, I read through a number of significant works by Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx authors in theory and theology. I was curious how “place” — as a theoretical category and the fundamental matrix of real life and relationships — functioned in their work and imaginations. I wrote out a number of short essays summarizing what I saw in what I read. I’m not a trained academic and they are by no means perfect. But I share them here as part of my ongoing dialogue in the praxis for liberation. Thank you for being part of this community and conversation!
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The poet James Weldon Johnson believed that, with a possible exception in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, no book shaped the African-American literary tradition more than The Souls of Black Folks. W.E.B. Du Bois was the American public intellectual par excellence of the first half of the twentieth century. His training in history, sociology, and economics was for the span of his life bent toward the equality of Black people socioeconomically and as humans beings. In 1909 he provided leadership to the founding of the NAACP before later turning toward socialist movements and Pan-Africanism.
But it was through his awesome skills as an essayist, equally adept in flaying open the seems of human nature and social structures, that Du Bois rattled the conscience of a nation at the heights of the Jim Crow segregation, lynching terror, and economic apartheid. Souls appeared in 1903 with Reconstruction fully in the rearview mirror of American history, though little understood and widely painting in the popular imagination through the supremacist white washing that ushered in a regime of neoslavery.
Du Bois does not theorize place as such. Rather his work is carefully attentive to human experiences in particular places. He both provides empathetic accounts of life for Black people in particular, and scrutinizes life in these places through the tools of social science. Throughout this work, he is brilliant at reflecting on the painful dissonances present in his own experiences to elicit truth. James Cone, recounting his theological and cruciform reflections on lynching and racial violence in America, identifies a core question animating du Bois: “‘Why did God make me an outcast and stranger in mine own house?’ It is a question that runs throughout African American history.”
In a passage on Georgia’s Black Belt, du Bois deploys a center-periphery motif, but subversively inverts the terms: the marginalized periphery becomes the center of the problem and of Black community life.
“And a little past Atlanta, not far from where Sam Hose was crucified, you may stand on a spot which is to-day the centre of the Negro problem,—the centre of those nine million men who are America’s dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade. Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro population, but in many respects, both now and yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State.”
He recognizes that this communal place formed not as “a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,—a massing of the black population for mutual defense in order to secure the peace and tranquility necessary to economic advance.”
Places, as he has shown, can function to exclude or to offer the ground for care, resilience, and belonging.
Souls famously opens by declaring, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” Du Bois illuminates that temporal significance (Twentieth Century) by pointing to the spatial operations of racial society (the line). The color line is both a literal reference to the divisions carving up American communities and a metaphor that seeks to reveal the radically different forms of life and thought between white and Black communities—a difference ignored from the privileged vantage point of whiteness. The color-line is thus a place-image which, as Du Bois demonstrates, became refracted and reactivated upon the world through psychological conditions: what he refers to as “the Veil” and the experience of Black “double consciousness” cultivated in and by Black people attempting to survive their navigation of white spaces.
Many of the best chapters in Souls reads like a sociologist with a novelist’s soul writing a travel memoir. Du Bois is attuned to the problems that — because they were not adequately resolved economically, psychologically, or theologically at the fall of slavery — were recapitulating themselves into the twentieth century.
“For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf states, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile cast, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime.”
A key component for him is that Black people’s freedom did not come with ground to stand on: politically (the vote being rescinded), economically (through the lack of wealth redistribution, adequate work, or access to the means of production), and, crucially for our analysis, literally. Negros were left to wander without any land of their own, thus being forced in many cases to return to the lands of their masters, settling back into debt-wracked tenant farming arrangements that could rise to meet slavery in brutality:
“It is a beautiful land, the Dougherty, west of the Flint. The forests are wonderful, the solemn pines have disappeared, and this is the ‘Oakey Woods,’ with its wealth of hickories, beeches, oaks, and palmettos. But a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land; the merchants are in debt to the wholesalers, the planters are in debt to the merchants, the tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden of it all.”
Ecological beauty is overshadowed by the legacy of plantation capitalism whose logic still reigns, exploiting every member on a descending class-hierarchy at the bottom which Black workers remain buried.
Du Bois begins a six part analysis of “the actual relations of whites and blacks in the South” by focusing on the “physical proximity of homes and dwelling-places, the way in which neighborhoods group themselves, and the contiguity of neighborhoods.” The effect of racism seeps deeper than the frustration of not being able to enter certain places, deeper than the economic hardships segregation generates, or even the threat violence with which segregated places are policed. For Du Bois, it aborts the capacity of genuine relationship, for the exchange of ideas, or the growing of mutual understanding and care necessary to the building of an equal and integrated society.
“Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with thoughts and feelings of the other.”
Placial segregation ensures that true encounter with the other as Thou cannot take place. Empathy is abolished and violence baptized.
“In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and street-cars.”
Du Bois shows us that racialized places do not always function hermetically, as if to seal the two races from ever having contact with one another. Rather place alerts its inhabitants to a particular social habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, which the dominant culture deems appropriate. A place comes to function as a heuristic for how to socialize, and this socialization is always already racialized in the American context.
Theologically, we might say the spirit of a place (de)forms us to the practice of particular liturgies which guide proper, worshipful behavior. And, indeed, Du Bois makes clear that we must think in terms of political theology when reckoning with the problem of the color line. In a separate essay titled “The Church and the Negro,” he writes,
“The church aided and abetted the Negro slave tase; the church was the bulwark of American slavery; and the church to-day is the strongest seat of racial and color prejudice. If one hundred of the best and purest colored folk of the United States should seek to apply for membership in any white church in this land tomorrow, 999 out of every 1,000 ministers would lie to keep them out. They would not only do this, but would openly and brazenly defend their action as worthy of followers of Jesus Christ.”
As liturgy, blacks and whites, women and men, wealthy and poor are assigned dogmatically determined functions, their literal and symbolic social roles or “places,” within the procession appropriate to a particular locale: be it home, market-place, court-house, train cars and buses, sidewalks or movie theaters, or the church itself. In the spaces where whiteness is worshiped, Blackness may enter but as servant only. The upholding of these rituals is sacred. Every place becomes a sacred place within the idolatrous cult of whiteness. To violate the order of worship is, within this religious-liturgical imagination, utterly profane. It is heresy. Refuse to honor whiteness in liturgical deference and its high priests will rend their clothing, shout “blaspheme!” and sound the call for cruxifixction. Du Bois provides a foundational witness to life in the racial legacies of colonial-modernity, where places have been formed within the register of theology to ensure a type of being together that reifies otherness and violently negates relationship across socially concocted difference—a difference meant for the liberating table of just communion.