Silencing Ferguson

Michel-Rolph Trouillot in an evocatively named book, Silencing the Past, argued that all narratives are merely claims to the truth and they all, in some ways silence, aspects of the story so that they can make sense to their narrators. In other words, all narratives are by their essence only partial testimonies, leaving out things that don’t seem to fit, or even that the narrator is incapable of seeing owing to their particular vantage point, physical or ideological. The key question, then, as we try to understand an event is not which narrative is true, but what makes some narratives more powerful than others?

These thoughts come to mind in the wake of the Ferguson Grand Jury, which rested on precisely this issue. In his explanation for the Grand Jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson, Robert McCulloch, the Prosecuting Attorney for St. Louis County, Missouri, suggested that, “Many witnesses to the shooting of Michael Brown made statements inconsistent with other statements they made and also conflicting with the physical evidence. Some were completely refuted by the physical evidence.” One might imagine Trouillot responding to this by saying that it is likely that, in fact, all witnesses’ testimony was inconsistent to some degree or other, and that all such testimonies could be contradicted by the physical evidence; they would all be incomplete transcripts of the event, shaped by silencing parts that didn’t seem to fit in the narrator’s mind, and further shaped by influences that would have come into play based upon subsequent knowledge and the even the political landscape.

So the question would not be, which witnesses were speaking the truth and which were lying? It would rather be, which testimonies did the Grand Jury (and the media) tend to privilege, and why did they do so? George Orwell might say, “All witness testimonies are equal, but some are more equal than others.” This is why we have a court system after all, one that employs prosecuting and defense attorneys. These attorneys develop narratives from a range of ALWAYS conflicting testimony, and the jury decides which one it finds most believable. To say, as the otherwise usually reliable Jeffrey Toobin did on CNN, that in the end it is lucky that the case against Darren Wilson didn’t go to trial, because there would have been no way to convince a jury, is fatuous nonsense. If the existence of conflicting testimony was the measure of whether something should end up in the courtroom, nothing would.

Our concern, rather, is that “all the evidence” was laid at the door of the Grand Jury members and they were left to develop their own understanding of what happened. In this situation, certain narratives ended up being silenced and others weren’t – certain inconsistencies were latched upon to suggest falsehood, while others were overlooked or accepted as truth in spite of themselves (even the nonsense and lies reported by Witness #40 were given credence, when their veracity would have been easily disproven by the most poorly trained of prosecutors). Indeed, the Grand Jury was being asked to act as a jury in a trial would do, but in this case without any direction and narrative formation from the prosecution. And the result, as McCulloch would have been well aware from the beginning, was that they were highly unlikely to return an indictment. Putting it in basic terms, the inconsistencies of someone like Dorian Johnson (a member of the public, a friend of Michael Brown, and a person with his own concerns about his culpability) were placed alongside the inconsistencies of Darren Wilson (a policeman and representative of law and order), and the latter inevitably walked.

Of course, it didn’t have to be this way. The oft-heard adage that a prosecutor can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich, is obviously borne out be the facts. Very few Grand Juries fail to return an indictment. But Toobin’s point has some truth, only to the extent that one can say it would have been a waste of time for someone who was unable to get a Grand Jury to return an indictment to actually pursue a guilty verdict in court. The bar is so low in the Grand Jury – is there a case to be answered? for which the obvious answer was yes – that if you cannot get even that, you are really not going to be able to persuade a regular jury to convict (whatever the charge – first-degree or second-degree murder, voluntary or involuntary manslaughter – you might be reaching for). This is why creating an Independent Prosecutor to take cases that involve policemen – the same people who a regular prosecutor might be relying on to make her or his other cases – is absolutely essential if any of these cases are going to end up tried in a court of law in front of real juries.

But what would that ham sandwich have looked like in the Ferguson case? What minimal amount would the two prosecuting attorneys working for McCulloch have needed to do in order to get a Grand Jury to indict? It would not have been very much. It can be laid out very simply first by relying on one of the inconsistencies in the police officer’s testimony, and then in considering the implications of this.

Regardless of who started the fracas that was going on between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson in the vehicle, regardless of who was the aggressor in the conflict, and putting aside any consideration of what Michael Brown may or may not have deserved for his behavior (whatever that was), there is one incontrovertible fact (well, there is one about which both Wilson and Johnson agree) that a bullet was fired inside the car. What follows is of some dispute. According to Wilson, Michael Brown was briefly surprised by this and then came back into the window and started assaulting him again, until a second bullet was fired, at which point he took to flight. According to Johnson, however (and Witness #10, who otherwise supported Wilson’s version of events), when the first bullet was fired, Brown immediately started to run. Wilson then climbed out of his vehicle and, according to Johnson (but not Witness #10) fired after him, hitting him. Which version of this story seems the more credible?

Darren Wilson’s story is both inconsistent and difficult to fit with the evidence; Johnson’s story has some problems too, and also doesn’t quite match the evidence. We should not take either story at face value, but try to determine what is the most believable narrative that we can construct from the two (lining them up with other witness testimonies and forensic evidence). The most glaring issue to deal with first is the problems inherent in Wilson’s story, and this comes to light from the testimony of the police who first came to the scene. The Sergeant at the scene reported back the information given to him by Wilson, ending with: “[Brown’s] assault [of Wilson] escalated to the point where the subject tried to take P.O. Darren Wilson’s firearm and P.O. Darren Wilson fired at least one gunshot while inside the vehicle.” This seems like odd language if there really had been two gunshots from inside the vehicle, but on its own is not proof of anything. But if we examine the first detective’s interview with Wilson, we find further problems. Wilson said this about the immediate aftermath of the first gunshot: “The first thing I remember seeing is glass flyin’ and blood all over my right hand on the back side of my hand. Um, he [Brown] looked like he was shocked initially, but then he came back into my vehicle and attempted to hit me multiple times.” Clearly, Brown was hit by the bullet in some fashion, since there was blood on Wilson’s hand, which was not his own, and which he later claimed to have washed off. In light of the autopsy, the likely injury that this could have been would have been to Michael Brown’s right thumb (Wound #11) – especially if he was attempting to grab the gun, as Wilson claimed.

But what follows is important. Wilson continues: “He had, after I had shot and the glass came up, he took like a half step back and then realized he was okay still I’m assuming. He came back towards my vehicle and ducked in again his whole…top half of his body came in and tried to hit me again.” The Detective interrogator asks for clarification at this point, “How is he tryin’ to hit you?” he says. Wilson replies: “Fist, grab, I mean just crazy. Just random, anything he could get a hold of swingin’ wildly.” And yet, with all this craziness from a man who had produced blood from either an arm or a thumb, there is no blood on any part of P.O. Wilson’s head, neck, or uniform (at least as revealed in the images of the same)?

It is at this point that Wilson indicates that he “tried to fire again.” “I took the slide,” he says, and he begins to say “and cleared the chamber,” but he stops in the middle of this last word, and instead says, “[cleared] the round out thinking it [the gun] was jammed.” This is peculiar, to say the least. First of all, since the gun had just fired, why would he assume that it was jammed? But, even if we ignore this, what is involved in clearing out the round? If he fired twelve times during the whole incident, had one bullet left in the gun, and one round was cleared out, does this not suggest something altogether impossible, a fourteenth bullet? Additionally, surely doing what he described doing would have taken both of his hands? So, while he was doing this with both his hands, Brown apparently was “swinging wildly” at the unprotected body and head of Wilson, and yet, in spite of Brown seeming to have the strength of the “incredible hulk,” he made as little impression as was evidenced in the medical examination (see Witness #62), and there was no blood left on Wilson whatsoever (see images of his uniform and the car).

Wilson claims that he did manage to fire and this is what he says about doing so: “When I shot that time I was still in this position blocking myself and just shooting to where he was ‘cause he was still there. Um, when I turned and looked, I realized I had missed I saw a. like dust in the background and he was running eastbound on Canfield.” It is really amazing that such a large man who was coming in his window could have been missed under such circumstances, “’cause he was still there.” But Wilson claims that he saw some dust in the background so he knew that he had missed. What Wilson then says is that Brown was off down Canfield, and he pursued him and didn’t shoot until Brown turned around and charged him.

The Sergeant’s report of the crime scene, however, doesn’t support this testimony. The Sergeant reports:

During the investigation at the scene, Detective X also noted and directed his attention to the apartment building known and numbered as 2960 Canfield Drive. Detective X observed this building’s exterior consisted of brick and vinyl siding. On the north side of this building, was damage consistent with have [sic] been struck by a projectile. The damage was to the vinyl siding above the easternmost window on the first level. Detectives from the Saint Louis County Police Department’s Crime Scene Unit attempted to extract a possible projectile from the building but were unable to do so due to the construction of the building and the significant structural damage that would have been required to remove an item. The interior of the building was checked and there was no penetration to the interior of the apartment.

This projectile in the side of 2960 Canfield was clearly a bullet from Darren Wilson’s gun (you can find the picture on line), and this Sergeant’s description (along with the location of the building and where the bullet was lodged in the vinyl siding) fits what Johnson had to say – namely that Wilson got out of the car and fired a bullet at a fleeing Brown.

Johnson indicates that he saw blood with the first shot, which was fired from within the car and which struck Brown, and that the latter then took off. He then continues:

At the time and seeing the fire come out of the gun and shot go off, when I see big mike I see the blood come down his, where the officer had his right side.  I’m on his right side, I see the blood come down… [Brown] looked at my face and saw my eyes and at that time, that was when the officer let go and we were both able to run.  That’s when I turn and run.  He was right behind me.

Then, Johnson claims, Wilson got out of the car and followed them, “…his weapon is drawn and he’s walking in a fast manner. He’s not saying anything, he’s not saying freeze, he’s not saying anything at this time while still just concentrating, he is walking.” Johnson continues:

I’m watching the officer, he’s walking and Big Mike gets past the third car, the final car before the second shot was fired. It was the second shot fired, pow, the officer shot. I don’t know if it hit, I wasn’t that close to see that it struck Big Mike, but the manner that he jerked and just stopped in his track, I sense that he was hit again.

The forensic evidence matches part of this description. If we look at the evidence left on the ground around the car, we can see that there was one shell casing consistent with a gun having been fired from within the car (it is right by the driver’s side door), and another one that is found at some distance from the car by the side of the road, which would be consistent with a man standing outside the car and firing at a fleeing individual. Why the Grand Jury decided to overlook the consistencies here between what Johnson said (corroborated by what the Sergeant reported), and the forensic evidence at the scene, in favor of a story from Wilson that is at best incredible, can only be explained by the fact that they had a proclivity to believe a white policeman, and to disbelieve (thereby silencing) a young African American like Dorian Johnson.

The fact that Wilson clearly did shoot at Brown while he was fleeing would be enough to lead to an indictment, no more questions asked. And this was all that the prosecuting attorneys needed to show for the Grand Jury to come back with an indictment for one of the four charges. This was their ham sandwich.

But there is more to the tale still, more discrepancies that surface in Wilson’s testimony, and so the prosecutors could have added cheese and pickle to their ham sandwich, had they chosen to do so. With regard to his statement that he did not fire at the fleeing Brown, there are numerous problems beyond that single bullet lodged in 2960 Canfield. Many have claimed that no bullets hit Brown from behind, and this proves what Wilson has said. However, this is not what the autopsy evidence reveals. Two bullets entered the right arm, one entered from the front and exited from the back, and one entered from behind and exited from the front – same arm, two different directions. This meant that Brown had to have turned around at some point during the shooting, and that Brown was not always facing towards him when he fired, as Wilson claims. Take a look at the evidence from the autopsy with regard to the two bullets – #6 and #7 corresponding to the first bullet, #8 and #9 to the second:

#6. There is a gunshot entrance wound of the upper ventral [front] right arm…20.0 cm below the level of the right shoulder…. The wound track shows deeper hemorrhage…. The path of this shot is slightly upward, backward and leftward…. #7. There is a gunshot exit wound in the upper dorsal right arm….

#8 There is a gunshot entrance wound of the dorsal [rear] right forearm. The wound is located 16.0 cm below the level of the right elbow… The wound track show[s] deeper hemorrhage… The path of this shot is slightly upward, forward, and leftward…. #9 There is a gunshot exit wound of the medial ventral right forearm….

These two shots could not have been fired from a single gun located in one spot, without the man who was wounded turning around.

In addition to the autopsy evidence, there are also the claims of Wilson which seem incredible to believe. Wilson claims that Brown stopped, turned around and gave a stutter step before charging towards him. Wilson claimed to have kept within twenty yards of Brown running down the street, so it stretches imagination to believe that when Brown charged at him from such a close distance Wilson was only capable of hitting him once, and that would have been one of the bullets in his arm. We know that everyone of the last four bullets hit Brown – because of the angle at which they entered the body – so it seems almost unimaginable that a man, supposedly fearing for his life – was unable to hit a very large person running straight towards him, except for one shot that winged him in the arm. Wilson says that he shot several times and he thought that he hit him, but, again, it seems almost unbelievable that he was not aware of the damage that his gun had done from the distance he claimed to have been from Brown.

We cannot know exactly what happened during that second group of six shots aimed at Brown. We don’t know whether Wilson was firing at him while he was running away (helping to explain the number of misses), but we do know that the right arm was hit directly twice during the first eight shots – once from the front, and once from behind. This fact, and a cross-examination of all the witnesses, would likely have produced a more believable narrative of events, and certainly would have challenged the discrepancies in Wilson’s story. Discovering what happened, or at least moving towards a more credible picture of events, was denied by the Grand Jury decision.

This brings us to the highly contentious final few seconds. Two stories exist. The Wilson one suggests that Brown continued to charge and he shot him, resulting in him going down; Johnson and others claim that Brown was surrendering and had his arms up, while going down to the ground, and Wilson fired on someone who was no longer a threat to him. There are certainly grounds for confusion, and justification on the part of Wilson, if he wasn’t able to recognize that Brown was in fact surrendering; but the testimony of several witnesses and autopsy evidence doesn’t seem to support his testimony.

We know that one white on-looker who was caught on a cell phone indicated that Brown had his arms up before the final shots. Other witnesses indicated that he didn’t, and some backed up Wilson’s claim that Brown had his right hand beneath his belt as if he were reaching for a gun. How are these two positions brought together into a single view? It isn’t too difficult, actually, if you turn again to the autopsy evidence. By the time Wilson fired off his last four shots, Brown had been hit on four separate occasions all in the right arm. He had been hit in the thumb, grazed on the right side, hit above the elbow, and hit below the elbow – with the bullet fracturing his right ulna. Both of the two major wounds in the arm hemorrhaged blood, according to the autopsy, and enough blood had been coming from that arm to leave a significant trail along the ground. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Wilson wasn’t aware of these wounds. So, it was unlikely that Brown could have seemed a threat to him with his right arm shattered in this way; but it is equally unlikely that he would have been able to raise his right arm in surrender. And this matches what Johnson indicated in his testimony:

At that time Big Mike’s hands was up, but not so much up in the air because he had been struck already in this region somewhere on this. It was like this hand is up and this hand is kind of like down sort of.

Some people observing the event – particularly those from Brown’s right side and from the front – could well believe that he had not made the gesture of surrender. Others clearly believed that he was doing so. What is certain, though, is that Brown was in great pain before the last four shots were directed at him, and without the use of his right arm he would have been unlikely to have believed that he could do any harm to a policeman standing only a few yards away from him holding a gun that he was clearly prepared to use.

What we do know, however, is the trajectory of the final bullets and what they tell us. The order would have been as follows: Wound #5 in the lateral right chest – direction downward and backward – no exit wound; Wound #4 in the upper right chest – direction downward and backward, no exit wound; Wound #2 in forehead – direction downward back and rightward, with an exit wound (#3) in the right jaw; and Wound #1 in the cranium – no exit wound

Each one of the bullets was going downwards through Brown’s body and this was consistent with a man falling to the ground. Had he been standing upright, Wilson would have needed to hold the gun high, probably above his head, in order to get that trajectory. The gap between the two separate volleys, the first group of six bullets and then the final four bullets, and the fact that the last four were entering a body that seems to have been toppling to the ground, suggest that Wilson should at least be answering questions in a court of law, with a prosecuting attorney actually endeavoring to seek the truth of the matter.

By way of a conclusion, there are quite a few things to be learned from the events in Ferguson on August 9^th, 2014.

•             Officer Wilson fired a bullet at a fleeing Michael Brown, after he exited the car. This bullet missed and ended up lodged in a building. This is enough to lead to an indictment on one of the four counts.

• Police Officer Wilson was certainly guilty of some very bad policing; the kind of policing that was only likely to provoke a confrontation with Brown and Johnson. It seems clear that Wilson did not know about what had occurred in the convenience store, but rather had become incensed by what he believed Brown had said to him, or what he heard him in fact say. He then drove his car into a position where it was impossible to get out of the car without hitting the two jaywalkers, or at least without pushing them aside. Immediately a confrontation was started, and it was one that put Wilson in an exceedingly vulnerable position. Placing a police vehicle as close as he did to a suspect, cannot be considered appropriate policing, and if it is in the Ferguson Police Department, then some serious retraining needs to occur there. Clearly this case resembled that of Cleveland, with the death of Tamir Rice, where a police vehicle was so poorly positioned that a violent outcome was made more likely rather than less, if not inevitable. Wilson believes that he followed his training closely, but it is hard to imagine that after reading his testimony, his superiors would have agreed with this. And just as officer Christopher Manney was fired in Milwaukee for causing the death of Dontre Hamilton, owing to grossly deficient police work, the best one can say for Wilson is that he was an incompetent policeman. [If you want confirmation of this, google map Canfield, and set up the images for the location, and check out the direction Wilson was firing at Brown. At the end of the street is an apartment building housing families, which was likely the end point for all of the shots that failed to hit Brown. Clearly, there was a degree of irresponsibility the only wonder about which is that no one has bothered to comment on it.]

• It has been heard frequently since this event that the police need to reflect their communities more clearly, and it is hard not to agree with this. What this means is that police forces should be more racially and ethnically diverse; that goes without saying in a place like Ferguson. However, the key to policing in the twenty-first century is that it will need to move beyond seeing the world in highly masculinized terms – as a war between the male policeman, protecting innocent citizens, from male criminals. This is a hangover from the 19th-century roots of policing (a hangover from romantic assumptions about male roles as protectors), and in an age of modern technology and weaponry is no longer necessary. The reality is that all communities are more than 50 percent women, and police forces in no way represent those communities. In employment terms they are gender-enclaves, and they become bastions, if not fortresses, of masculinity. And gender played a role in the August 9th events in Ferguson. One example will suffice: One of the key statements in the whole alleged exchange between Wilson and Brown was the one that occurred when Wilson maintained Brown said to him, “You are too much of a pussy to shoot me.” This, it should be stressed, was not corroborated by Johnson, and it seems a little unlikely to have come from someone who wasn’t under the influence of drugs or alcohol – as it appears Brown was not, from the toxicology report. One could imagine, though, another police officer saying to Wilson fairly regularly that he was a “pussy” because he had never had to discharge is gun; one can also imagine Wilson responded to such a taunt with, “I’ll show you.” His masculinity was questioned by Brown, and like many other policemen, who believe their masculinity is central to their identity, he responded in a violent and, in the end, inappropriate fashion. A policewoman in a vehicle would not have placed herself in such a vulnerable position; she would not have attempted to arrest Brown alone, and Brown would have been apprehended later, most likely without incident. Identifying him for the crime in which he was involved from the camera in the convenience store would not have been too difficult.

• Special Prosecutors need to be appointed to take the cases when police officers are involved. Local prosecutors are tied to the police forces, and their ability to get solid testimony from local officers in cases they are trying, may be linked to whether or not they push for an indictment or not. The result is that in the case of Michael Brown, so much evidence, even completely bogus testimony, was passed onto the Grand Jury with the predictable result of the Grand Jury deciding not to indict. In the Queen’s case of Eric Garner, the prosecutor gave some of the key people in the incident immunity, and a Grand Jury could not simply indict Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo, as the chokehold had clearly been released before and was not the cause of death – which appeared to be a knee digging into the chest. Given the way the case was presented by the Prosecutor, this outcome was also predictable, when clearly a different kind of case could have been presented with a different result. The clear trend that one sees in all these events, from Ferguson (Michael Brown), to Queen’s (Eric Garner), to Cleveland (Tamir Rice), to Beavercreek (John Crawford III), to Milwaukee (Dontre Hamilton), and to many others besides these ones no doubt, is a systematic and virtually transparent unwillingness among local prosecutors to secure indictments of policemen. Only the creation of special prosecutors will solve this.

There are many other lessons to be learned from this and other tragedies, where unarmed people like Michael Brown are shot and needlessly killed. In the end, though, it comes back to the power of different narratives. Some people’s voices are powerful and project beyond the speaker, and their testimonies hold sway in the public and in our law courts. Other voices tend to be silenced, because the veracity of the person speaking is automatically brought into question. We can let this process continue, so that voices are silenced and resentment continues to build; or we can begin to really examine our own presuppositions and prejudices, and look for narratives that can liberate us all, and bring a sense of justice and closure to people who currently only see injustice (whatever the outcome of the cases). And finally, we could all benefit from having police forces that do not see themselves as needing to be in a permanent state of military preparedness, protecting weak and innocent victims from the those they believe only have criminal intent on their minds – indeed, from those whose only narrative is conceived to be one of criminality reaching fulfillment in the blood oozing onto a pavement.

Sixty-six: DuBois Unveiled?

October 29, 2003

Sometime in 1994 or 1995, while I was working at the University of Pennsylvania, I suggested to Michael B. Katz that he bring together scholars to reconsider the importance of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro (originally published in 1899). He had applied for a grant from NEH seeking funding for a group to focus on the urban predicament – an off-shoot of his SSRC funded book on the Underclass debate. The NEH had responded that there wasn’t much new in this idea, so he asked me what the group should be trying to do. I suggested the Du Bois idea and apparently it worked a treat with the foundation. My idea, though, was more in the realm of auto-critique than the idea that went forward. I felt we should be critically examining both the way Du Bois came to his study of the black community of Philadelphia, and the way we undertake such study today, recognizing links between the two, as well as the strengths and limitations of both. The result was a study that did recognize some of the limits of Du Bois’ work in The Philadelphia Negro, but which by and large showed a degree of contentment with the way things have been done since.  A case in point was my essay, “Giant Steps.”  While there was much of value in this essay, and I certainly do not repudiate it, the manner in which it was edited down to fit the volume (W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and the City) was suggestive.  Originally the essay was called “Contesting White Mythologies” and was a meditation on Robert Young’s volume, White Mythologies. Several parts of the essay drew considerable criticism, and largely these were those parts where I was trying to say something radically new. In particular, my comparison of Black Reconstruction and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire incensed Thomas Holt. I was asked to remove it. What follows, then, is a version of what was left out; what one should not say about Du Bois.

In the venturesome spirit proposed by James Clifford in his influential work on travelling culture, I want to consider the impact that this outer-national, transcultural reconceptualisation might have on the political and cultural history of black Americans and that of blacks in Europe....It will require comprehension of such difficult and complex questions as W.E.B. Du Bois’s childhood interest in Bismarck, his investment in modelling his dress and moustache on that of Kaiser Wilhelm II, his likely thoughts while sitting in Heinrich Von Treitschke's seminars, and the use his tragic heroes make of European culture.

– Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic[1] 

I. Contesting White Mythologies

In White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, Robert J. C. Young suggests that the post-structuralist onslaught on the historical narrative was in part a by-product of the Algerian War of Independence. This war awakened some western intellectuals, many of whom had experience living in Algeria, to the limitations of the Hegelian and Marxian historical method. The politics of post-structuralism, which has often been denounced as apolitical and reactionary,[2] was, Young asserts, articulated in the weaving together of ‘capitalist economic exploitation, racism, colonialism, sexism, together with, perhaps unexpectedly, “History” and the structure of the Hegelian dialectic.’

In the wake of the Algerian war, according to Young, left intellectuals began to perceive that Marxism’s universalizing narrative of the unfolding of a rational system of world history is simply a negative form of the history of European imperialism: it was Hegel, after all, who declared that ‘Africa has no history,’ and it was Marx who, though critical of British imperialism, concluded that the British colonization of India was ultimately for the best because it brought India into the evolutionary narrative of Western history, thus creating the conditions for future class struggle there. In short, while ‘History’ for Marxists promised liberation, for others ‘it entail[ed] another forgotten story of oppression.’[3]

Such analysis presents interesting questions for the student of W.E.B. Du Bois. For, as many scholars have noted, Du Bois's own work grew out of the Hegelian tradition.[4] While Du Bois worked in the years preceding the Algerian War, his work dealt with exactly this issue of the limits of white historical mythologies. How did he manage through his own historical writing to transcend these limits? Was he able, as Marx claimed to have done, to turn Hegel upside down through a brand of historical materialism, especially in light of the fact that by the end of his life Du Bois was a self-proclaimed Marxist? Or did some assumptions to be found in the idealist historical method survive intact?

By embracing Marxian categories, Du Bois made a self-conscious effort to test the foundation stones of the historical profession – objectivity and progress, as defined by the ‘White Man's Burden.’ In Black Reconstruction in America, he endeavored to highlight the limitations of American history and to question its propagandist or mythological aspects.[5] In the process, his work has become a valuable guide (along with the work of other anti-colonial and anti-racist writers of the period from C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, George Padmore, and Kwame Nkrumah within the African diaspora, to Jawarhalal Nehru in India), for historians who wish to move beyond strict class and race analyses towards a history that weaves together class, race, gender, and imperialism.[6]

Since much of Du Bois's historical writing highlighted tensions and presaged new ideas and approaches to history, we are brought at the end to consider some of the predicaments of writing history in post-colonial societies. Looking at Du Bois's attempts to contest ‘propaganda’ or ‘white mythology’ almost naturally leads to the question of the degree to which Du Bois himself could represent ‘a race’ when his subject position was in so many ways informed by ‘the Veil’ that he had helped to describe. 

II. Du Bois’s Marx

Du Bois's own criticism of his early work on The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade reveals the degree to which he felt he had adopted Marxist analysis in his work. In 1954, he claimed that he had earlier been ignorant "of the significance of the work of Freud and Marx." After outlining how his education at Harvard and in Germany had made him feel that Marx had already been ‘superseded’ and so he had given ‘little time to firsthand study of his work,’ he wrote:

This was important in my interpretation of the history of slavery and the slave-trade. For if the influence of economic motives on the action of mankind ever had clearer illustration it was in the modern history of the African race, and particularly in America. No real conception of this appears in my book. There are some approaches, some allusions, but no complete realization of the application of the philosophy of Karl Marx to my subject. That concept came much later, when I began intensive study of the facts of society, culminating in my Black Reconstruction in 1935.[7]

Finally, he concluded his assessment of both the earlier work, and implicitly the method of history from which it sprang: ‘What I needed was to add to my terribly conscientious search into the facts of the slave-trade the clear concept of Marx on the class struggle for income and power, beneath which all considerations of right or morals were twisted or utterly crushed.’[8]

In Deromanticizing Black History, Clarence E. Walker has dismissed Du Bois’s links to Marxist analysis. With the dismissive wave of a hand, Walker argues that Du Bois’s one claim to Marxism, Black Reconstruction in America, ‘is not really a systematic materialist analysis of history.’ For, ‘Du Bois never really accepted a key tenet of Marxism, that is, the idea of working-class solidarity. What Du Bois’s personal and intellectual experience told him was that, in America, racial caste and economic class were in conflict. He understood the primacy of race as a “transhistoric” phenomenon in America."[9] And yet, Du Bois’s claim that Black Reconstruction in America was a Marxist history ought to be taken seriously, for a scholar and intellectual of his stature could not have been so easily misled. A man who many now assert (including Walker himself) managed to redefine the history of Reconstruction among his many other towering intellectual accomplishments surely knew what he was doing when he was using Marxian models to describe and interpret Reconstruction. His own ideas had emerged out of his training in German philosophy and he knew the Kantian and Hegelian roots of his own ideas. He also wrote about the relevance of Karl Marx for interpreting the African American experience at this time. As Walker notes, Du Bois maintained that whatever Marx said “concerning the uplift of the working class must...be modified so far as Negroes are concerned by the fact that he had not studied at first hand their peculiar race problems here in America.”[10] But, if (as Walker suggests) this stands as a dismissal of Marx, why would Du Bois have so explicitly embraced Marxism in Black Reconstruction?[11]

Walker implies that any form of division within the working class contradicts Marxist analysis, which he believes is dependent upon the notion of ‘working-class solidarity.’ This one-dimensional reading of Marx, most likely seen through the more political writings (e.g., The Communist Manifesto) as opposed to the more historical works,[12] ignores the fact that Marx clearly delineated divisions within all class groups. Marx accounted for ethnic or ‘racial’ divisions when looking at the Irish in England and the political factions within the bourgeoisie. The fact that Du Bois and Marx would have and did define the proletariat differently is explained by the fact that they were observing different societies. For Du Bois African Americans represented a considerable portion of the American proletariat, and race thus became a key element of his analysis.

In many ways, Black Reconstruction in America can be seen as Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte set in the United States.[13] ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’[14] This oft quoted statement from Marx works for Reconstruction in the United States, except that in America farce and tragedy occurred almost simultaneously. Reconstruction witnessed the farce of a continuing bourgeois revolution occurring amidst the tragedy of a proletarian revolution. According to Marx:

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period. On the other hand, the proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out.[15]

The simultaneity of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions in America accounts for Du Bois’s decision not to entitle Chapter 10 ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in South Carolina.’ Changing the title to ‘The Black Proletariat in South Carolina’ (because ‘it has been brought to my attention that’ this use of ‘dictatorship’ was incorrect) signified that the Prolatariat never gained the status of dictatorship in any meaningful sense. The bourgeoisie was still doing its thing.[16]

In America, northerners played the role of the French petty-bourgeoisie, seeking an alliance with the southern worker, attempting to ‘weaken their antagonism and transforming it into harmony.’ These people – missionaries, northern Republicans, and captains of industry – did not wish solely to enforce ‘an egoistic class interest.’ Rather, they believed that ‘the special conditions of [their] emancipation are the general conditions within the frame of which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided.’[17] How much closer to the situation in America could Marx have approached without himself undertaking a study of Reconstruction? Such a statement can encompass the widespread belief in the benefits of free-labor ideology and the shoals of class division on which it fell apart.[18]  

Moreover, the division between northern capitalists and southern slaveholders could be comprehended as just a division within the American bourgeoisie similar to that found in France and England. Marx wrote:

Each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split – landed property and capital – sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society (p. 48).

This passage brings into question Eugene Genovese's appropriation of Marx, where the Southern planters are described as pre-capitalist and far removed ideologically from northern capitalists.[19] It also enables us to understand the trajectory along which counter-revolution would travel in the United States, a trajectory clearly delineated by Du Bois in his chapter, ‘The Counter-revolution of Property.’[20] Northern capital ‘would thrust debt, concessions and graft on the South,’ divide northern labor into ‘exploiting and exploited groups’ (native-born/immigrant, skilled/unskilled), and transform the ‘laboring-peasants’ of the West ‘into land speculators and investors uniting [the West’s] interests through railways to the Solid South in return for non-interference with Big Business’ (p. 634).

For Marx, bourgeois oligarchy was reestablished in France through the vehicle of Louis Bonaparte and his manipulation of the peasantry. For Du Bois, the corresponding vehicle was President Andrew Johnson, in large part representing the ‘limitations’ of the southern poor white. The promise of reform embodied in the person of Johnson, ‘a champion of the poor laborer’ who demanded that ‘the land monopoly of the Southern oligarchy be broken up, so as to give access to the soil, South and West, to the free laborer,’ came to a halt as the President underwent a ‘transubstantiation’:

He had demanded the punishment of those Southerners who by slavery and war had made such an economic program [free labor] impossible. Suddenly thrust into the Presidency, he had retreated from this attitude. He had not only given up extravagant ideas of punishment, but he dropped his demand for dividing up plantations when he realized that Negroes would largely be beneficiaries. Because he could not conceive of Negroes as men, he refused to advocate universal democracy, of which, in his young manhood, he had been the fiercest advocate, and made strong alliance with those who would restore slavery under another name (p. 322).

This was the ‘tragedy of American prejudice made flesh:’ The ‘rebel against economic privilege’ acquiring the ‘conventional ambition of a poor white to be the associate and benefactor of monopolists, planters and slave drivers.’ How like Marx’s description of Louis Bonaparte as ‘the grotesque mediocrity’ is Du Bois’s description of Johnson as ‘the most pitiful figure of American history?’[21]  

In short, Du Bois might have used the following text as the epigraph for his volume:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.[22]

The manner in which Johnson, the Ku Klux Klan, and eventually even radical republicans ‘conjure[d] up the spirits of the past,’ undermining the democratic promise of this revolutionary period closely paralleled the conclusion of French revolutionary impulses in ‘Napoleon the Little’s’ coup d'etat of 1851. To say that Du Bois was Marxist, then, is to say that were someone like Marx to be writing about Reconstruction in the United States during the 1930s, this might be how he or she would have described it. 

III. Post-Philosophical

Black Reconstruction in America witnessed Du Bois' move from a reliance on a single foundational (transhistorical) category – that of race – to a more fluid position in which race was still important, especially for highlighting the existence of oppression, but was nonetheless mediated by and placed alongside categories of class and gender. [23] Even though he may not have used the discourse of postcoloniality and deconstruction, his position was analogous to that of many Marxists later in the century, from Sartre, Althusser, Foucault, and Jameson to Said, Bhabha and Spivak. He and they differed from Marx in not giving primacy to the category of class, while believing they remained true to Marxism. 

In this vein, Du Bois believed his world revealed different things from that of Marx. While the development of industrial capitalism was seen as the most compelling social and historical force for Marx, Du Bois heralded the centrality of colonialism and imperialism (which clearly had important economic manifestations). Du Bois’s proletariat was necessarily also differently conceived from Marx’s. While the latter had conceived of the proletariat in Euro-American terms (Indians, Africans and others needed to ascend to the level of European capitalism before they could possibly contemplate transcending it), the former saw the proletariat emerging from worldwide struggles in which contesting white mythologies was crucial.

But, if Du Bois eschewed economic foundationalism, how can he be described as Marxist? The key here is not so much Du Bois’ readings of Marx, since he has never been noted as a Marxist scholar. Rather it lies in his background as a Hegelian (loosely conceived) and in the transformation that occurred slowly from the First World War to 1935 when he published Black Reconstruction in America. He, like Marx, endeavored to turn Hegel on his head. As outlined earlier (borrowing from Appiah), Du Bois extended Hegel’s ideas about national destinies to include African Americans. In doing this, he acted in a way rather similar to the Young Hegelians who attempted to incorporate the working-classes into their Hegelian model. But just as Marx had seen that adaptation was insufficient with regard to the downtrodden working class, Du Bois came to see that oppositions between colonizer and colonized, whites and blacks, men and women also brought the Hegelian edifice into question. Hegel saw history as the teleological unraveling of an Idea. While the young Hegel believed that ‘Man’ might still be unable to fathom the nature of that Idea and the providential design (he was, after all, an objective rather than a subjective idealist), thus providing a radical aspect to the dialectical model and enabling it to appeal to later radicals like Marx and Du Bois, the notion that history was driven by an Idea provided a profoundly difficult barrier for radicals to surmount. [24] Hegelians of all stripes, radical or conservative, tended to imagine that the Idea had finally been revealed. Thus Hegel increasingly came to believe that the highest stage could be witnessed in the appearance and ascendancy of the German State and bureaucracy; Marx found it in the urban-industrial proletariat; [25] and Du Bois saw it in the souls of black folk.

Having outlined the full extent of propaganda in American history, Du Bois was unwilling to make the further step to claiming that the very way in which history itself had been conceived was by its nature propagandist. This presented several problems that were evident at the time he was writing, but which have become more so as ‘the problem of the twentieth century’ gives way to or seems about to be refined in the twenty-first. For example, Du Bois searched for African Americans in the historical record who exemplified his notion of upright and worthy contributor to the cause of democratic Reconstruction. But what if he had found none? Would this have meant that all that American historians had said was true? Of course not. The pursuit of ‘Truth’ would always be heavily laden by moral intention; the attempt to deny a lie might verify the question. Just as The Philadelphia Negro had conformed to the model of finding urban poor guilty until proven innocent, Black Reconstruction would valorize resistance (‘general strikes’) and incorruptibility. In accepting such judgments as worthy, social historians have cast shadows on those who do not participate in such narratives (and who may still have their own unrecognized justifications for their actions) – those who ‘pass’, those who commit suicide, those who prostitute themselves, and who might be labeled an ‘Uncle Tom.’

Du Bois attempted to turn propagandist history on its head, to reveal historical narratives that empowered African Americans and contested the rationalizations of the elite. Nevertheless, even this social historical approach could harbor within it limitations: whose narratives (based on class, color, gender, religion, education, etc.) would come to stand for African Americans or Africans as a group? Would the replacement of teleological histories (‘white mythologies’) lead to other kinds of teleological histories? What hidden ‘facts,’ ‘well-authenticated truths,’ and other ‘raw materials’ might shape historical narratives in ways that privileged some groups and led to the disempowerment of others? [26] Such questions could not necessarily be answered within Social History, which used as its building blocks many of the same ‘facts’ fashioned to advantage by social elites. Merely inverting a paradigm, showing what some African Americans had achieved even after ‘the veil’ had been laid aside and the fullness of the achievement had been made clear, was insufficient. For the search for the ‘real truth,’ beyond that ‘veil,’ disguised the fact that the veil would never actually be removed for everybody. Complimenting one group, in a relational world, meant implicitly downgrading another. Thus, however, close historians flew to ‘historical truth,’ they could not fail but crash to the ground, their wings melting in the heat of ‘propaganda’.

Thus, in adapting and transcending Marx, Du Bois never transcended Hegel’s historicism. His unwillingness to question the notion of historical truth itself, left his own histories continually requiring modification and development, in order to approach more closely the goal of establishing some absolute. In effect, the objective of turning Hegel on his head – positing historical materialism (Marx) or a form of cultural materialism (Du Bois) as a replacement for Hegelian idealism – was in its own way the imposition of a teleology and thoroughly Hegelian. In this regard, it is instructive that Du Bois never fully examined or problematized his own position relative to racial discourse. He clearly saw the problems in the works of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Mr. Carter G. Woodson (as well as his own problems as a young man – before seeing the light), but he didn’t acknowledge that ‘the Other’ might be himself – now. How was it that he, along with Washington and Woodson, might have ‘practically’ accepted racial inferiority, and at what point was one able to lift the Veil, when it lay across the face of American society? If the Veil was as all embracing as Du Bois suggested, what enabled him to peak through? And how could he be certain that his eyes had indeed seen the other side, and had not merely seen further distortions from the Veil? Certainly, Du Bois’ own personal history made his experience different from that of many African Americans, [27] but did that help him see, or blind him to the realities of other members of ‘the race?’ The complexity of African American culture and history that Du Bois had revealed in all his works made ‘speaking for the race,’ or living ‘a biography of the race’ as David Levering Lewis would have it, simultaneously necessary and impossible – necessary because white mythology denied complexity and difference among African Americans, impossible because that complexity made representing the group as a whole an imposition of one person’s or one faction’s vision of its historical meaning and significance over others.  Those who tried to accomplish this feat by hanging onto this swinging pendulum generally fell off as it swung towards reduced complexity: mythology would be inverted or tampered with but reliance on it would continue.

Such a pendulum, swinging between the points of myth and counter-myth, also confounded other theorists grappling with the desire to appropriate Marx for the post-war, anti-colonial world. Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to fashion a single ‘History’ with one meaning through the exclusion of others. [28] In his attempt to create a Marxian narrative, Sartre would exclude all histories except that of the West so ending in a state of ‘determined ethnocentricity.’ Robert Young writes, ‘the lesson of Sartre's Herculean attempt to make history truth, and to give it one meaning, was the relation of such history to Western cultural imperialism.’ [29] Du Bois’ own efforts to marry Marx and ‘the rest’, would evade such problems of overt ethnocentricity, but they would be fraught with their own difficulties. For Young notes that while Sartre may have been renowned for his opposition to the Algerian War, even so:

[His] courageous intervention against French and other Colonialisms could not have a corresponding theoretical impact so long as he retained his historicist Marxist framework. For his unitary theory of history was the effect of disallowing radical attempts at rewriting or retrieving other histories excluded by the West.[30]

Such difficulties plaguing unitary theories remained on whatever side of the Veil a historian was located.

At the other end of the pendulum's trajectory, a theorist like Edward Said, whose use of the notion of Orientalism seems to closely resemble Du Bois’ use of the Veil, would argue that the object of Orientalism, Islam, was more complex than Orientalists’ projections suggested. [31]   And yet, locating the post-Orientalist, characterizing the nature of Islamic culture outside Orientalism, has become hazardous. [32] Just as Said’s ‘analysis of Orientalism comes to seem remarkably close to an Orientalist work itself,’ [33] so also Du Bois’ analysis of the Veil could be seen as a product of a particular racially inflected society. After all, ‘how does any form of knowledge – including Orientalism – escape the terms of Orientalism’s critique?’

And yet, such questions, such difficulties, have become evident in part because Du Bois’ historical writings made clear the propagandist nature of the practice of history. Recognizing the significance of this genealogy, Homi Bhabha ends The Location of Culture with a tribute to Du Bois. [34] In endeavoring to open up a space that is not predetermined by the veil or by Orientalism, to move ‘beyond’ them, Bhabha turns to Toni Morrison's Beloved and finds that ‘a battle has been waged on hybrid territory, in the discontinuity and distanciation between event and enunciation, in the time-lag in-between sign and symbol.’ From this terrain, Bhabha attempts ‘to constitute a postcolonial, critical discourse that contests modernity through the establishment of other historical sites, other forms of enunciation’ (p. 254). Those ‘who have seen the nightmare of racism and oppression in the banal daylight of the everyday,’ he writes, those behind ‘the veil’ in Du Bois’ words, can ‘represent an idea of action and agency more complex than either the nihilism of despair or the Utopia of progress. They speak of the reality of survival and negotiation that constitutes the moment of resistance, its sorrow and its salvation, but is rarely spoken in the heroisms or the horrors of history’ (p. 255). Clearly this need not be the case: in Morrison’s Beloved the characters find resistance in survival; but, for much of his career, Du Bois’ history represented an attempt to reach for the heroic. 

Nevertheless, as Bhabha proceeds to point out, Du Bois captured some of this spirit of resistance and survival also: never defeatism, but ‘the enactment of the limits of the “idea” of progress, the marginal displacement of the ethics [and propaganda] of modernity.’ For Bhabha, this came from his ability to speak ‘across the veil’, becoming the ‘great prophet of the double consciousness of modern America’ (ibid.). In the foregoing, I have suggested that it also derived from the dialectical quality of his work – the emergence of alternate readings, space, within his analysis. The Philadelphia Negro held within it The Souls of Black Folk, which then released Black Reconstruction in America. Each stage of Du Bois’s writing would represent a release or step from the limitations of the previous one, while from its confines the next one would appear like a defeat – the chiliasm or nihilism of despair. As such, it comes as no surprise that we find Bhabha (or Paul Gilroy for that matter) employing Du Bois, even though from the confines of his brand of social history Du Bois might have scorned notions of postcoloniality, in the way that so many historians dismiss it as ‘not history.’

Bhabha makes Du Bois the ‘prophetic precursor of [his] discourse of the time-lag’ and he quotes from The Souls of Black Folk:

So woefully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of swift and slow in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should Aeschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe and flickered, flamed and died in Africa? So long the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty? (ibid.)[35]

For Bhabha the Sorrow Songs resound once more in the way that Du Bois intended them to do, ‘their eloquent omissions and silences’ concealing ‘much of real poetry beneath the conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody.’ [36] This ‘unmeaning’ ‘discloses a symbolic vision of a form of progress beyond modernity and its sociology.’ This Not-history, has within it ‘an indeterminacy which is also the condition of being historical.’ In this passage at least, Du Bois commands ‘the certain shores of “modern” science to recede’ (ibid.). Bhabha closes with a postcolonial rendition of Du Bois' work:

The problem of progress is not simply an unveiling of human perfectibility, not simply the hermeneutic of progress. In the performance of human doing, through the veil, emerges a figure of cultural time where perfectibility is not ineluctably tied to the myth of progressivism. The rhythm of the Sorrow Songs may at times be swift – like the projective past – at other times it may be slow – like the time-lag. What is crucial to such a vision of the future is the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical. (255-56)

Where else might we end?

Notes

[1] Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993) p. 17.

[2] See, for example, Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

[3] Robert J.C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990) pp. 1-3.

[4] David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1993); see also, Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1976).

[5] Young, White Mythologies.

[6] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic.

[7] Du Bois, "Apologia," 1954, p. xxxi-ii.

[8] Ibid., p. xxxiv.

[9] Clarence E. Walker, Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991) p. 77.  Walker's assumption that Du Bois could not be Marxist derives in part from the general lack of attention to the work of African diaspora scholars in the Marxist tradition.  Walker treats the notion of "Black Marxism" as an oxymoron, which Cedric Robinson reveals to be far from the truth.  Even Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin (not to mention Marx himself, who followed closely events in India, the United States and Ireland), considered the implications of Marxist theory for non-white proletarian populations.  This is how, as Robin D.G. Kelley shows in Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1990), their writings could appeal to Southern black laborers and sharecroppers.

[10] Du Bois, “Karl Marx and the Negro,” in Crisis 40 (March 1933), p. 6; quoted in Walker, Deromanticizing Black History, p. 79.

[11] The two contributions to the historiography of Reconstruction that Walker attributes to Du Bois's text are profoundly Marxist: the international context within which Reconstruction was occurring and the significance of economic developments in shaping the outcome of reform.  Moreover, Walker contradicts himself by extolling Du Bois's departure from the idea of American exceptionalism, for he himself claims Marx's irrelevance to American history precisely because of the exceptional nature of race relations in America as compared to Europe. Deromanticizing Black History, p. 86.

[12] Though this is mere supposition, since Walker does not cite a single work of Marx's.

[13] It is unknown whether Du Bois used Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.  In a letter written in October 1934, as he was working on Black Reconstruction, Du Bois noted that he had "a fair library of Marx."  He lamented, however, that he had "only one or two of Lenin's works."  For Aptheker, this accounts for his persistence "in using the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat'--even in the very limited way in which he did use that term -- as pertains to the Radical Reconstruction governments."  Aptheker, Afro-American History: The Modern Era (NY: Citadel Press, 1971) p. 57.  Aptheker's comment tells us more about his own Leninist assumptions than it does about Du Bois's Marxism.  Moreover, Du Bois's discussion of "the weakness of French democracy in Black Folk: Then and Now (NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1975), shows a remarkable reliance on Marx's analysis of Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat: particularly, Du Bois's description of "the French peasant" as "a small, jealous reactionary landholder...with interests bound up in a national land patrimony" (p. 375).

[14] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1984) p. 15.

[15] Ibid., p. 19.

[16] Herbert Aptheker, Afro-American History, p. 63.  Aptheker claims that Du Bois was not Marxist but was instead "Du Boisian."  Unwittingly, this idealistic reading of Du Bois is appropriate insofar as Aptheker is correct that "to the end of his days [Du Bois] remained an idealist, philosophically speaking, in key areas of his thinking.(p. 57)  But to describe Du Bois thus is to make analysis of his development as a historian meaningless.  It also misses the fact that Marx himself was unquestionably "idealist, philosophically speaking," in spite of claims to materialism made by himself and historians like Aptheker.

[17] Ibid., p. 50.

[18] David Montgomery, Beyond Equality.

[19] Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (NY: 1969), Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (NY: Pantheon Books, 1974) pp. 3-25.

[20] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, pp. 580-636.

[21] Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 8; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, p. 322.

[22] Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 15.

[23] Gender was very much submerged beneath race and class in Du Bois's work, though he was very much in advance of many male social theorists of his time.  See for example, "The Damnation of Women," in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (London: Constable & Co., 1920).

[24] Lawrence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807 (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

[25] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) pp. 155-223; Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's `Philosophy of Right' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp. 141-2.

[26] Many of these questions and others are considered in Gyan Prakash's "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories," Comparative Studies in History and Society (1990).

[27] Gilroy, Black Atlantic.

[28] Young, White Mythologies, p. 46.  "It is one history because it is (only) one history."

[29] Ibid., p. 47.

[30] Ibid.  E.P. Thompson's own attempts to defend the empirical method did not preclude his own anti-colonial political position.

[31] Edward Said, Orientalism.

[32] Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories."

[33] Young, White Mythologies., p. 132.

[34] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge Press, 1994), page numbers appear in parentheses in the text.

[35] quoting from The Souls of Black Folk, p. 275.

[36] here Bhabha quotes from The Souls of Black Folk, p. 271.