Page 236 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

race and racism 1537

W. E. B. Du Bois on the Veil

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 dominated across most of Africa and Asia. Thus, there
with second-sight in this American world, —a was little opportunity for most slaves to demonstrate their
world which yields him no true self- intelligence or talents. In fact, once enslaved, their bur-
consciousness, but only lets him see himself dens as laborers, and often their very survival, could
through the revelation of the other world. It is a depend on feigning incompetence or stupidity. “Smart”
peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, slaves were viewed with suspicion by members of the
this sense of always looking at one’s self through planter classes as potential troublemakers who might
the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the rouse others to resist the oppressive existence to which
tape of a world that looks on in amused con- they had been condemned.
tempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an Whatever mix of these factors accounted for the emer-
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two gence of racist attitudes among different European groups
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one operating within the Atlantic slave trading network, on
dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it the plantations of the Americas, or in drawing rooms of
from being torn asunder. Europe where natural philosophers deliberated over the
The history of the American Negro is the his- latest treatise on the divisions within the human species,
tory of this strife—this longing to attain self- racist ideas were regularly enlisted in the defense of the
conscious manhood, to merge his double self enslavement of Africans and the brutal systems of social
into a better and truer self. In this merging he control that were essential to hold them in bondage.
wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He Emphasis on the innate inferiority of the African “race,”
would not Africanize America, for America has or in extreme cases the contention that Africans were sub-
too much to teach the world and Africa. He humans, served to rationalize the lives of humiliation,
would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of servitude, and misery that tens of millions forced to
white Americanism, for he knows that Negro labor in the Atlantic plantation system endured through
blood has a message for the world. He simply over four centuries. In these same centuries, far smaller
wishes to make it possible for a man to be both numbers of Asian peoples, such as the Malays imported
a Negro and an American, without being cursed into the Dutch Cape Colony in South Africa or impov-
and spit upon by his fellows, without having the erished bonded servants from the lower castes of India,
doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. were also enslaved by Europeans overseas. But at least
Source: Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of black folks. Retrieved September until the late eighteenth century, there were few attempts
11, 2003, from http://www.bartleby.com/114/1.html
to argue for the racial distinctiveness of these groups.And
those, such as the effort by sixteenth-century Spanish
jurist Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, who sought to demonstrate
profoundly disoriented and in states of shock and that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were soulless
despair, they had been suddenly and violently snatched subhumans who could legitimately be enslaved, were
from the cultures where their skills were valued and they fiercely contested—most famously by the Dominican
had won respect and social standing. In the Atlantic sys- friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, who energetically disputed
tem, slaves were regarded as chattel, the property of other Sepúlveda’s contention that wars to subjugate Amer-
humans, and merely drudge labor. Even if they served as indian peoples were just. Although in recent decades
house servants on plantations in the Americas, they had there has been considerable debate over the extent to
no chance of becoming full members of the households which North American settler colonists distinguished
and kinship networks to which they were usually con- themselves from the indigenous peoples in racial terms,
nected in the largely domestic systems of slavery that pre- the evidence suggests that until the nineteenth century at