Du Bois was an elitist most of his political career. Ida B Wells regarded him as a conservative early in his phase in the Niagara movement and he had only just broken w Booker T Washington a few years earlier, and still advocated a ‘Talented Tenth’ approach to race progress. Supported black enlistment in First World War. He was radicalised during the Depression and produced Black Reconstruction, his best work, under the influence of Marxist materialism, but his elitism made Stalinism an attractive option in later years. A genius, no doubt, and a towering figure in Black politics, but problematic also. The Communist Party’s position on founding of Israeli state probably not a million miles from this to be honest. Stalin was looking for a counterweight to British power in the region, and assumed the Zionists were a ‘progressive’ force. Shambles, and a very problematic legacy for revolutionary politics in the region.
Waoah, quite a read from a Du Bois. Were a lot of people generally misinformed?
Also, beyond being a critical 'Black consciousness' writer, I'm seeing elements of coloniality in Du Bois's idea. I'm unsure how a critical scholar would be so settled with embracing coloniality and Western modernity and development project. Is this because of some anti-Arab rhetorics perhaps?
Greetings friend, I’ve been following your work for a little while, and I really appreciate the depth you bring to these topics.
I explore something similar, but from a slightly stranger angle: forgotten travel narratives, old geographies, and the ideas they obscured from modern history.
My latest piece dives into an obscure book that records giant beings with a clarity that raises more questions than it answers.
If that kind of thing interests you, here’s the link:
Our cultivation of what we call “Intelligence” is inherently eugenics. You see it reflected within the colonial mentality of either get with the program under the guise of “education/management” or be left behind/eradicated due to being deemed a hindrance of progress. Shows up in many of our beloved scholars work from Du Bois to Edward Blyden. The way many liberationist viewed not just Palestinians but Africa and the poor as a whole as backward and needing western enlightenment culture as guidance is deplorable. I definitely think as much as Aimé Césaire calls out the white literary bourgeois to account for generating the philosophical justification for colonization, even us the victims to it has to acknowledge how we have been made into conscripts spreading such twisted pathology under the banner of improvement. A text called “Alabama in Africa” really shows you how logic such as this lead to the civil strife in such colonies as Sierra Leone and Liberia. Why I think addressing the human question of being is so vital to everything, or risk duplicating the cruel pragmatic rationality we call intelligence.
Du Bois was an elitist most of his political career. Ida B Wells regarded him as a conservative early in his phase in the Niagara movement and he had only just broken w Booker T Washington a few years earlier, and still advocated a ‘Talented Tenth’ approach to race progress. Supported black enlistment in First World War. He was radicalised during the Depression and produced Black Reconstruction, his best work, under the influence of Marxist materialism, but his elitism made Stalinism an attractive option in later years. A genius, no doubt, and a towering figure in Black politics, but problematic also. The Communist Party’s position on founding of Israeli state probably not a million miles from this to be honest. Stalin was looking for a counterweight to British power in the region, and assumed the Zionists were a ‘progressive’ force. Shambles, and a very problematic legacy for revolutionary politics in the region.
Thanks so much for this
Waoah, quite a read from a Du Bois. Were a lot of people generally misinformed?
Also, beyond being a critical 'Black consciousness' writer, I'm seeing elements of coloniality in Du Bois's idea. I'm unsure how a critical scholar would be so settled with embracing coloniality and Western modernity and development project. Is this because of some anti-Arab rhetorics perhaps?
Yes the conditioning of the western media clearly played its part. Time Magazine - for example - was calling PALESTINE “Israel” from at least 1929.
Greetings friend, I’ve been following your work for a little while, and I really appreciate the depth you bring to these topics.
I explore something similar, but from a slightly stranger angle: forgotten travel narratives, old geographies, and the ideas they obscured from modern history.
My latest piece dives into an obscure book that records giant beings with a clarity that raises more questions than it answers.
If that kind of thing interests you, here’s the link:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jordannuttall/p/the-history-of-giants?r=4f55i2&utm_medium=ios
Our cultivation of what we call “Intelligence” is inherently eugenics. You see it reflected within the colonial mentality of either get with the program under the guise of “education/management” or be left behind/eradicated due to being deemed a hindrance of progress. Shows up in many of our beloved scholars work from Du Bois to Edward Blyden. The way many liberationist viewed not just Palestinians but Africa and the poor as a whole as backward and needing western enlightenment culture as guidance is deplorable. I definitely think as much as Aimé Césaire calls out the white literary bourgeois to account for generating the philosophical justification for colonization, even us the victims to it has to acknowledge how we have been made into conscripts spreading such twisted pathology under the banner of improvement. A text called “Alabama in Africa” really shows you how logic such as this lead to the civil strife in such colonies as Sierra Leone and Liberia. Why I think addressing the human question of being is so vital to everything, or risk duplicating the cruel pragmatic rationality we call intelligence.