Dear All,

[NOTE: Because we have a shorter week, a comment reply AND a blog post are due by class Feb 24. To see more of these details, go to the class date in our “Course Schedule” on Cuny Commons”]

This week, I am offering a short video providing an overview of one of W.E.B. Du Bois’s major arguments in The Souls of Black Folk focusing on  “the color line,” “double consciousness,” and “the veil.”

Here is the 3 min video:

Summary or key points of the video:

“The Colorline” and “the veil” are both metaphors, forms of figurative language that make comparisons to describe the Black experience in America.

The video takes ideas from The Souls of Black Folk and describes their meaning through the figure of a Black single mother who is also an executive. (I have some reservations about the creator making the contemporary figure specifically a single mother because it makes assumptions about the formation of the Black family, but it still demonstrates how we might use these concepts today).

Comment Reply Questions (choose ONE and write 2-3 sentences as ):

All that said, for the first comment reply option, draw upon the video and the reading and consider:

1. How might “double consciousness” or “the Veil” be useful terms for thinking not only about the Black experience but other American experiences? Or how might Du Bois’s argument be useful for other groups or other challenges in American soceity?

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Another key aspect of The Souls of Black Folk is that W.E.B. Du Bois includes selections of music before each chapter, which he refers to, in the final assigned chapter, as “the sorrow songs,” or songs sung by slaves during slavery and black people after emancipation. In this way, even though Du Bois’s work is written, it includes other mediums, the medium of music.:

2. What does the incorporation of music in The Souls of Black Folk signify, or what additional meaning does it add? To answer this question, you may consider the following passage from “The Sorrow Songs”:

“They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days⁠—Sorrow Songs⁠—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine…Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past” (Du Bois, Chapter XVI).

HINT and Historical context:

In responding to this question, you may want to consider how literacy was outlawed for slaves in America. In other words, it was a crime for enslaved people to learn and for anyone to teach an enslaved person.

If you are unfamiliar with slave law history (escaped slaves were actually supposed to be returned to their owners by any white citizen who found them in the north; laws against gathering in groups of more than three; laws against traveling on the road without a note, etc) check out the video below:

If you are unfamiliar, watch this video (about 9 mins) to learn more about slave laws. (Note that W.e.B.Du Bois is writing after slavery, which was abolished in 1863, but the laws and social customs still have an impact in 1903 when Dubois publishes his landmark text):

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3. Recall class on February 16 focused onThe Jungle Chapters 22-22, 26 to the end. In class, we discussed how Upton Sinclair describes the “Negro” or Black strikebreakers (you may also refer to them as African Americans).  They are dehumanized and often seem like animals, a disease, or sinful. (If you need a review of these points, check out the Google slides for this session linked here  “Strikes, Scabs, Sexwork, and Socialism”) 

3. Compare Upton Sinclair’s depiction of Black of strikebreakers to W.E.B. Du Bois’s introspective question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” What do you notice?

To answer this question, here is one of the passages describing the black strike breakers in The Jungle: 

“We] might see brawny negroes stripped to the waist and pounding each other for money, while a howling throng of three or four thousand surged about, men and women, young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck negroes with daggers in their boots, while rows of woolly heads peered down from every window of the surrounding factories. The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa; and since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time they were free⁠—free to gratify every passion, free to wreck themselves. They were wanted to break a strike, and when it was broken they would be shipped away, and their present masters would never see them again; and so whiskey and women were brought in by the carload and sold to them, and hell was let loose in the yards. Every night there were stabbings and shootings; it was said that the packers had blank permits, which enabled them to ship dead bodies from the city without troubling the authorities. (Sinclair, Chapter 26)”

and here is the passage from “Of our Spiritual Strivings” in The Souls of Black Folk:

“Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word (Du Bois, Chapter I).”