The Evolution of WEB Du Bois

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Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education Studies of Migration, Integration, Equity, and Cultural Survival

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From the poverty of culture to the power of politics: the evolution of W.E.B. Du Bois

Kyle Beckham & Shirin Vossoughi

To cite this article: Kyle Beckham & Shirin Vossoughi (2020) From the poverty of culture to the power of politics: the evolution of W.E.B. Du Bois, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 14:2, 75-86, DOI: 10.1080/15595692.2020.1733958 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15595692.2020.1733958

Published online: 24 May 2020.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=hdim20 DIASPORA, INDIGENOUS, AND MINORITY EDUCATION 2020, VOL. 14, NO. 2, 75–86 https://doi.org/10.1080/15595692.2020.1733958

From the poverty of culture to the power of politics: the evolution of W.E.B. Du Bois

Kyle Beckhama and Shirin Vossoughi b aStanford University, USA; bSchool of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

ABSTRACT The culture of poverty thesis did not emerge from the conservative shadows of American intellectual life, but from its most liberal hopes for the future. Most of its earliest champions were committed to the cause of Black uplift, but never escaped the shame and judgment of the culture of poverty thesis. We look to the life and writings of W.E.B. Du Bois for examples of alternative possibilities. We could see Du Bois as an elitist who subscribed to a culture of poverty framework. Though there is some evidence for this view in his writings, the image falters when we examine the evolution of Du Bois’ thinking—the core focus of this paper. We examine key intellectual struggles present across Du Bois’ writings to explicate: 1) his changing thoughts on leadership (the “Talented Tenth”); and 2) his move toward an ever-broader advocacy of political engagement as the primary motor for Black liberation.

The culture of poverty thesis did not emerge from the conservative shadows of American intellectual life, but from its most liberal (Harvey & Reed, 1996; Lewis, 1963). Most of its earliest champions were committed to the cause of Black uplift, however conditional (Frazier, 1949). Yet, these same proponents were never able to work out of the shame and judgment that came with the culture of poverty thesis, and did more to stymie Black progress than further it. The core argument – that Black people in particular, and poor people in general, play a fundamental role in their own oppression, that there are members of these communities that cannot change because of their culture, their values, the very things that make them who they are – lives on, and contains many internal tensions its advocates rarely address. As critics of the concept, we believe that examining the intellectual currents of its emergence and reproduction are essential to pushing back against contemporary manifestations of its core ideas. This paper traces the intellectual trajectory of W.E.B. Du Bois, a man whose work has not been directly linked to the larger culture of poverty thesis, but whose early ideas parallel its structure, as a way to move beyond the thesis’ seductiveness, simplicity, and reductiveness. Our intervention, which intersects with the work of Joy James (1997), aspires to erode the widespread over-emphasis on Du Bois’ early work and theory, particularly the tendency to treat his early views on racial leadership (in the form of the Talented Tenth) and Black aspirations for membership in the American polity (in the form of social and political assimilation) as settled (see Gooding-Williams, 2009, pp. 246–256 for examples). We believe that much can be gained in the perennial argument over variations of the culture of poverty thesis by examining Du Bois’ changing views of Black people, their capacities, and optimal avenues for liberation. We could easily see Du Bois as an elitist, a thinker who subscribed to a proto-culture-of-poverty framework, who was primarily concerned with Black people accepting a narrow form of leadership

CONTACT Shirin Vossoughi [email protected]; Kyle Beckham [email protected] Stanford Graduate School of Education, 485 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, CA 94305 © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 76 K. BECKHAM AND S. VOSSOUGHI in which natural betters dictated the direction of the race to the natural lowers. This view would certainly hold if we limited our examination of Du Bois to his political and academic work before his break from the NAACP in the mid-1930s and his movement toward Marxist internationalism (Darian-Smith, 2012). One could look at his classical early texts, like the Philadelphia Negro (1899) and The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and come away with an understanding of Du Bois as a researcher and thinker who was quite sympathetic to arguments linking structural racism to Black poverty and pathology, and this view would not be incorrect (Gooding-Williams, 2009, pp. 54–57, 61–65). Yet the popular conception of Du Bois as defined largely by his early empirical and theoretical work does a disservice to his full intellectual legacy and limits the utility of his ideas. We understand Du Bois as a dynamic thinker, one willing to revise and change his positions. In his later life, Du Bois saw that the myriad problems faced by Black Americans could only be truly solved through protracted political struggle aimed at securing greater Black independence and security within, and beyond, American society. Black people would be part of America, but only on their terms, as equals, rather than as inferiors lacking core “cultural” components that held them back from political and social equality. Even after his departure from the United States proper, Du Bois still believed that the United States would live up to its ideals vis Black people, or it would destroy itself. While recognizing Du Bois’ participation in deficit ideologies, we examine how the seeds of this more radical view were present in his early writings, and came to fuller bloom toward the end of his life. Du Bois came to believe there was nothing lacking in Black life that was not tied, first and foremost, to the material and political conditions in which Black people lived. Even when extremely critical of Black people, his position was rooted in a faith in Black potential. Black “culture” provided if not the seeds of Black liberation (Du Bois, 1903), then at the least, a firm foundation for full participation in broader American life. Unlike E. Franklin Frazier, who argued that Black communities would be stabilized the more they conformed to the dominant patterns of “American” White middle class family life (1948, p. 438), Oscar Lewis (1966), who argued, “Once it [the culture of poverty] comes into existence it tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation because of its effect on the children” (p. XLV), or Moynihan's 1965/1967) “tangle of pathology,” Du Bois never fully saw the problems facing Black communities as requiring a fundamental shift in who they were as a people. As we witness attempts to breathe life into old cultural explanations for issues that face diverse Black communities (Patterson & Fosse, 2015), the legacy of Du Bois becomes increasingly relevant. His commitment to revision, structural analysis, and democratic political engagement built on universal human rights, directly challenges those who argue that Black people play a decisive role in their own oppression. Gooding-Williams (2009) interprets Du Bois’ approach to political engagement as group leadership or rule; political expressiveness rooted in Black spiritual identity; and struggles against White supremacy as social exclusion. Though instructive, such interpretations risk treating Du Bois’ political thought as settled, and focus more prominently on his early work. By examining Du Bois’ thinking over time, we came to see his theory of political engagement more broadly as: an ever expanding view of who would lead that shifted how leadership itself was conceptualized; an expansive faith in the capacity of Black people to solve intra-communal problems independently; a structural view that saw the destruction of White supremacy as necessary for the liberation of not just Black people, but all people; and the increasing importance of cross-class solidarity and the centrality of the working class as prime movers of history (James, 1997). A focus on the necessity of political engagement by all classes of Black people underwent significant evolution throughout Du Bois’ life, emerging first as The Talented Tenth (1903) and later expanding to a much broader and Marxist-influenced notion of working-class leadership – a stance that included its own tensions and hierarchies. Contemporary “culture matters” theorists like Wilson (2009), Patterson (2006), and Small regularly de-emphasize, or outright ignore, the need for political engagement and mobilization of those in poverty as part of any plan for Black uplift (Patterson, 2006, 2014; Patterson & Fosse, 2015; Small, Harding, & Lamont, 2010; Wilson, 2009). DIASPORA, INDIGENOUS, AND MINORITY EDUCATION 77

Instead, their arguments often focus on the behaviors of the most disenfranchised segments of Black America and how those behaviors – rather than the very fact of their disenfranchisement – play primary roles in their ongoing oppression. Their solutions rest in changing the patterns of being of some Black people, rather than changing their relationship to political life and demanding greater voice for them in those endeavors. In what follows, we examine key intellectual struggles present within the range of Du Bois’ writings in order to explicate 1) how his thoughts on leadership evolved over time; and 2) his move toward an ever-broader advocacy of political engagement as the primary motor for Black liberation. By analyzing Du Bois’ efforts to grow beyond “culture of poverty” assumptions, and by attending to his literary works and writings on education as fundamental sites of political analysis, we aim to provide an antidote to those who use nebulously defined notions of culture as a cudgel against those most in need of radical social and political transformation.

The talented tenth and the trouble with elite leadership In the early 20th century, Du Bois identified Black-controlled education and schooling as a means for bringing about equality, asserting the fundamentally equal capacity of Black people to engage in political, intellectual, and (high) cultural activity. Central to this argument was his notion of the “Talented Tenth:” gifted members of the Black community who, given the opportunity to rise, would play a key role in training, inspiring, and uplifting the entire community. His call for an elite, educated leadership was not new given the dominant progressive discourses of the time. What was new was his application of these theories and methods of social change and uplift to Black people. The seeds for Du Bois’ concept of the Talented Tenth can be found toward the end of The Philadelphia Negro (1899). In addition to outlining the “duty of Whites,” Du Bois specifically called on the “better classes of Negroes” to engage in the work of educating, helping and guiding their communities:

Above all, the better classes of Negroes should recognize their duty toward the masses. They should not forget that the spirit of the twentieth century is to be the turning of the high toward the lowly … so hard has been the rise of the better class of Negroes that they fear to fall if now they stoop to lend a hand to their fellows (Ibid., pp. 392-3). Rather than focusing on their individual climb up the social and economic ladder, Du Bois beseeched those members of the Black community who had begun to make it into the more privileged classes to fulfill their political responsibility toward the left-behind masses, highlighting the possibility for collective (rather than individual) uplift. Just as turn of the century White social reformers sought to “Americanize” the massive influx of European immigrants and formerly rural urban poor (Tyack & Cuban, 1995, p. 2) so too did Du Bois urge a form of Americanization for those recently freed from slavery and new to urban life. This argument took on new force within the context of Du Bois’ much discussed confrontation with Booker T. Washington. Within a framework that accommodated White economic and political interests, Washington dismissed the need for higher education among Blacks, arguing for the expansion of industrial training as preparation for a world where participation in democratic life was greatly curtailed (Washington, 1900). In the Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois criticized Washington’s approach, insisting on the need for higher education, not merely for economic reasons, but as a necessary step in the preparation of people entering into democratic life as full equals, a position guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. For Du Bois, teachers trained in “high culture” would enhance the quality of education provided in the common school. College trained educators were to become “broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself” (Ibid., p. 67). Du Bois’ vision reflected the broad communal commitment to education that characterized his upbringing in Massachusetts. The influence of Horace Mann (1957), and his privileging of the construction of a common space 78 K. BECKHAM AND S. VOSSOUGHI predicated on the delivery of civic education can be seen throughout Du Bois’ debates with Washington. Both Mann and Du Bois believed that teachers fulfilled a civilizing mission, and saw the forms of intelligence and culture offered by mass schooling as inherently humanist forces. Du Bois believed Black teachers and leaders needed the “wisdom and patience” to solve the “problems of race contact and co-operation” (1903, p. 73). The Talented Tenth was not only an educational proposition; it was Du Bois’ plan to navigate a White supremacist power structure by people recently seen as property and still largely viewed as sub-human. Central to this vision of leadership is the tension between elite control and mass democratic participation. The early Du Bois did not trust everyday unschooled Black people to organize themselves in a manner that would lead to their liberation. Like many of his progressive contemporaries, he believed in the primacy of expert technocratic knowledge, and thought that leadership should be allocated based on a meritocratic sorting system that naturally emerged within capitalist society. This mission to accelerate the advancement of Black people was motivated by his understanding – and unwillingness to accept – that Black people were intrinsically different to White people beyond the historical forces, slavery above all others, that shaped their material conditions. Unlike many of his White contemporaries who believed in innate Black inferiority, Du Bois drew direct connections between the state of Black people of his time and the material disadvantages of slavery. He accepted that the meritocratic ordering of Western civilization had produced its great breakthroughs, and believed that the same process applied to African Americans, where the best naturally rose to the top to take their rightful role as leaders of the mass like any other group. During this period, his political goal was one of proving Black capacity, skill, and worthiness. Black people may have been “behind,” but the fault was not of their own making; it was a direct and dominating consequence of the horrors or slavery. Even with an elite and highly stratified view of leadership, the goal was never to prevent the masses of Black people from entering into political life, nor was it about conditioning Black people to accept a subordinate political and social position in exchange for potential economic independence. Du Bois believed that education, training, and the tutelage of a people systematically denied opportunities for decades would prepare them for their rightful place as true equals in the democratic polity.

Early 20th century hierarchies and tensions The concept of the Talented Tenth rests on a number of hierarchies along the lines of intelligence, culture and leadership. There is a tension, for example, between the notion of talent or giftedness, which conveys a sense of inherent ability, and the idea of providing the opportunity to develop to one’s fullest potential. In other words, where does talent end and opportunity begin? This tension becomes apparent in the distinctions Du Bois made among Black people: higher training was reserved for the “brighter minds” while industrial training was fit for the less bright. This hierarchy is reflected in Du Bois’“law of inequality:”

They forgot, too, just as their successors are forgetting, the rule of inequality: that of the million Black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talent and capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of Blacksmiths; and that true training meant neither that all should be college men nor all artisans, but that the one should be made a missionary of culture to untaught people, and the other a free workman among serfs. And to seek to make a Blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making a scholar a Blacksmith; almost, but not quite (1903, pp. 59-60). Rather than drawing a distinction between the talented and the untalented, Du Bois suggested that there are different kinds of talent – an attempt, it seems, to honor different capabilities and types of work. At the same time, Du Bois’“rule of inequality” reflects an almost Platonic division of labor – wheresomearesimply“fitted to know and some to dig.” Thus, the naturalized caste distinctions Du Bois adamantly rejected in the context of a racial hierarchy appeared to exist unproblematically DIASPORA, INDIGENOUS, AND MINORITY EDUCATION 79 among Black people. Moreover, his description of a Blacksmith-scholar as “silly” mirrors Washington’s comment on the absurdity of a “lone Black boy poring over a book of French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home” (Ibid., p. 35). While Du Bois called for offering Black students the “loftiest ideals of life,” his rejection of racial caste distinctions did not prevent him from taking a caste-like view of intelligence, one that(fornow)leftthequestionofnaturaltalentand ability unexamined. This was the scientific consensus of the time, one reflected in the allocation of educational opportunities. Very few people – regardless of race – were given the opportunity to attend high school, let alone university, and most schooling experiences were overtly designed to weed students out (Snyder, 1993; Tyack, 1974). Though anything but natural, this view of competition as essential to the emergence of a deserving elite was quickly naturalized through social scientific work, particularly in education (Tyack, 1974). Du Bois, ever the scientist, accepted the social scientific conclusion that hierarchies within a group were inevitable. However, this inevitability did not necessitate political inequality. For Du Bois, all were entitled to the maximization of whatever their potentials may be, as was plainly written in the founding documents of the nation. The civilizing mission of the Talented Tenth also positions the “high” culture of the educated above the presumably “low” (or non-existent) culture of the masses. Early Du Bois often depicted African Americans as empty vessels to be filled with the high cultural knowledge and practices that university training affords. The key mission of the university was to “disseminate civilization among the untaught masses” (1905, p. 2). As Cornel West argues, this view prevented early Du Bois from acknowledging everyday people as producers of culture with their own knowledge and wisdom to share: “he was reluctant to learn fundamental lessons about life – and about himself – from [ordinary Black people]. Such lessons would have required that he – at least momentarily – believethattheywereormightbeaswise,insightful,and‘advanced’ as he; and this he could not do” (West, 1996,p.58).Thus,whileDuBoiscommunicatedastrongsenseofBlackself-assertion and self-development in relation to Whites, the language of “civilization” reproduced the notion of a “White man’sburden” among Black communities. This view of leadership is not unlike that displayed by the purveyors of the culture of poverty, both old and new. However, it differs in its call for Black elites to take action and uplift those who have been positioned – by politics and economics – as their social lessers. Du Bois aimed upwards, at holding accountable those who had advanced, either through luck or skill, and had the social capital to help those who had not risen up. The primary agent of change was not the poor Black person, be they someone trapped in the predatory relations of Southern sharecropping, or in the quickly urbanizing industrial North. For the Du Bois of the early twentieth century, the engine of change was located in top-down, university-defined, expert political and social leadership. From this view, all of the raw materials for liberation existed within Black America, they merely needed a skilled set of craftsmen (women were included, but not central, to this vision; see James, 1997) to forge them into a vehicle that would achieve it. Yet even during this time period we see Du Bois wrestling with such hierarchies of intelligence, culture and leadership, particularly within his more creative literary works. In his 1911 novel Quest of the Silver Fleece, Du Bois narrates the development of two young people: Bles and Zora. Whereas the character of Bles exemplifies the “desire to know the cabalistic letters of the White man,” Du Bois’ Zora complicates this desire by questioning the supremacy of White forms of knowledge. In response to Bles’ insistence on the importance of reading books, Zora affirms Black knowledge:

‘Zora,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘you must learn to read.’

‘What for?’

‘So that you can read books and know lots of things.’

‘Don’t White folks make books?’ 80 K. BECKHAM AND S. VOSSOUGHI

‘Yes – most of the books.’

‘Pooh! I knows more than they do now – a heap more.’

‘In some ways you do; but they know things that give them power and wealth and make them rule.’

‘No, no. They don’t really rule; they just thinks they rule. They just got things, – heavy, dead things. We Black folks is got the spirit.We’se lighter and cunninger; we fly right through them; we go and come again just as we wants to. Black folks is wonderful’ (Du Bois, 1911/2004, p. 46) Du Bois – through Zora and Bles – presents two different kinds of intellectual power: the power of “book learning,” grounded in a wider understanding of the workings of an oppressive, White world, and the power of “second sight,” born from the unique experiences and perspectives of subordinated groups. It is this second power that offers self-affirmation – a recognition of the knowledge developed by Black people to struggle and survive. Zora ultimately draws on these powers to defend herself in a White court, winning land that she uses to help serve and develop her community. Du Bois crafts the story in a way that makes it difficult to separate her original valorization of Black knowledge and resistance to the supremacy of normative ways of knowing from her ultimate bravery in the face of a violent and racist legal system. Her political engagement comes, first and foremost, from her deep recognition of Black worth and knowledge. Du Bois ends his story with Bles’ realization that he too must now follow Zora’s lead:

His mental attitude toward Zora had always been one of guidance, guardianship, and instruction. He had been judging and weighing her from on high, looking down upon her with thoughts of uplift and development. Always he had been holding her dark little hands to lead her out of the swamp … Now his attitude was being revolutionized. She was proposing to him a plan of wide scope – a bold regeneration of the land. It was a plan carefully studied out, long thought of and read about. He was asked to be a co-worker – nay, in a sense to be a follower, for he was ignorant of much (Du Bois, 1911/2004, pp. 399-400, emphasis added). Bles’ reflections on his previous attitudes toward Zora mirror the kinds of attitudes present in Du Bois’ Talented Tenth: a judging and weighing from on high, a mind-set of uplifting and developing the lowly. Counter to these views, Du Bois argued: it is Bles who must be led by Zora. Thus, even in this early period, taking a more expansive approach to Du Bois’ writings reveals the depth and dimensionality of a thinker who was wrestling deeply with constructs of assimilation – a view occluded by more reductive interpretations.

The Du Boisian demand for political engagement: an antidote to the culture of poverty 1935 proved a pivotal year for the evolution of Du Bois’ position on culture and education, and illuminates his fundamental belief in the power of political engagement with the material world. Here Du Bois broke with the leadership of the NAACP and openly rebuked its reformist political positions and also published his seminal Black Reconstruction in America. What sealed the break for Du Bois was the organization’s insistence on maintaining a position of privileging racial integration in the realm of education. The particularities of a strategy that sought to cast segregation as inherently unequal – and through which Black children would be sent to White schools – were placed above efforts at equalizing the material conditions in which Black children lived and learned. Du Bois’ Does The Negro Need Separate Schools? (1935), also serves as a key marker of the evolution of his complicated relationship with deficit thinking, showing Du Bois’ affirmation of Black people’s ability to solve their own problems, while reminding his audience that the ultimate source of those problems was White supremacy and the material and political conditions that held it together. Du Bois understood White supremacy as a structural force rooted in European colonization, and as a “religion of Whiteness” that presumed the superiority of White culture, knowledge and life (Du Bois, 1920/1969, p. 23). Characteristic of his growing internationalism, Du Bois argued in Darkwater that “Europe has never produced and never will in our day bring forth a single human soul who cannot be DIASPORA, INDIGENOUS, AND MINORITY EDUCATION 81 matched and over-matched in every line of human endeavor by Asia and Africa” (Ibid.) The shift from “matched” to “over-matched” further evidences an evolution in Du Bois’ thinking that we argue directly shaped his stance on integration. Does the Negro Need Separate Schools? Strongly testifies to Du Bois’ belief in Black potential, locating the sources for the intellectual and political development and thriving of Black youth within Black institutions and communities themselves. His prior editorial work in the Crisis, particularly his initiation of “Children’s numbers” and later a full series (The Brownies Books; see Harris, 1989) aimed at the political education and existential nourishment of Black children, further supports the emergence of a shift from cultural to political uplift. Brownie Books included literature, games, photographs, poetry, and direct discussions of lynchings and other violent attacks on Black people, all aimed at supporting Black children in the development of their racial and political identities. By 1935 Du Bois expressed a fundamental commitment to education, organized and executed by Black people, as the foundation for Black political, social, and economic liberation. Yet he argued a pervasive gap existed in many of their minds:

As it is today, American Negroes almost universally disparage their own schools. They look down upon them; they often treat the Negro teachers in them with contempt; they refuse to work for their adequate support; and they refuse to join public movements to increase their efficiency (Du Bois, 1935, p. 330). This stance shows a willingness to psychologize what he saw as a core problem within Black America. At the same time, Du Bois did not individualize the issue. He focused primarily on the collective psychology that impeded potential progress. The deficit he writes of was clearly a matter of collective political will, a will that transcended social class; it was a gap that would be (and in many cases was) erased through sustained political engagement aimed at providing better opportunities for Black children and youth of all social classes. However, the solution to the deficit is clear in his advocacy of membership in public movements to improve Black schooling. Political action by all classes of Black people, not an amorphous “cultural” change amongst the poor, would provide a true remedy to the situation. Du Bois’ rejection of integration as an end showed just how disillusioned he had become with the rhetoric of American opportunity and how he had essentially given up on White America being able to facilitate the conditions necessary for full human development for all Americans. The solution to Black problems would be found at the hands of Black people, attending pre-collegiate institutions that would be open to all. He would go on to demonstrate his frustration with Black disbelief in Black capacity, arguing that:

If Negroes could conceive that Negroes could establish schools quite as good as or even superior to White schools; if Negro colleges were of equal grade in accomplishment and in scientific work with White colleges; then separation would be a passing incident and not a permanent evil; but as long as American Negroes believe that their race is constitutionally and permanently inferior to White people, they necessarily disbelieve in every possible Negro Institution (Du Bois, 1935, p. 330). Black democracy, and Black ideological shifts would be the solution. Poor black people were not excluded from this vision, they were no less entitled to its fruits or exempted from the labor to build and sustain these institutions than the Black wealthy. Key to this change in mind-set was demanding tangible, material improvements in the conditions under which Black teachers taught and Black students learned through political means. Du Bois saw folly in simply calling for Black people to have faith, without giving them the conditions on which that faith can be built. Black people would need to be better organized to make demands on the American democratic system if the potential inherent in Black schools was to be fully realized. What was missing was not White people, their “culture,” or any other metaphysical advantage that they might provide within an integrated environment. Missing were the material and political conditions under which Black people could build their own independent communities to the point where White supremacy could not take root and cause what Du Bois saw as a political hopelessness that slowed Black liberation. Simply decrying the conditions of Black educational spaces was not enough, 82 K. BECKHAM AND S. VOSSOUGHI political agitation by as many Black people – regardless of their social class position – was what was necessary to create the conditions that Black children deserved, and frequently obtained (Walker, 2000) from under resourced Black schools. In advocating for fully equipped separate schools, Du Bois inverted the logic of the culture of poverty. The culturally impoverished were not the poor Black students denied the material conditions given to White students, but rather the White society that perverted and rejected its own purported political ideals. White people in practice, outside of the larger American rhetorical commitment to democracy and equality, were for Du Bois, nothing to be equal to, especially in schools. Whatever harms White society inflicted on Black children from afar would only be magnified through integration. It was not Black America that was not ready for democracy, and it was not Black people’sneed for leadership that fundamentally slowed their development; it was the poison of White supremacy that did the slowing, and schools were the vehicles where White supremacy would be transported in its most direct and grand scale to those most vulnerable to it: children. We might therefore see Du Bois’ 1935 stake in the ground as cause for wrestling with the tensions present in his own theories of intelligence and leadership, and as a window on a thinker deter- minedly working to address the political realities of his day. Yet the seeds for these ideas were present in Du Bois’ early writings. In his 1898 The Study of the Negro Problems, Du Bois argued for “first-class fully equipped institution[s] devoted to the higher education of Negroes” that would become a center of careful historical and statistical research on social problems (p. 22). His relentless call for independent Black education and mass political engagement ultimately shows his faith, however shaky and sometimes elitist, in Black people’s capacity to address the problems forced upon them by a White supremacist society.

The strains of elitism and the expansion of leadership Finally, juxtaposing his earlier and later writings on leadership, we ask: to what extent did Du Bois revise his earlier thesis based on subsequent reflections and historical and intellectual movements, and to what extent did the central tenets of the Talented Tenth remain the same? And what are the implications of these questions for our critical engagement with contemporary “culture of poverty” frameworks? James (1997) answers this question by pointing to Dusk of Dawn’s (1940/1975) “retract[ing] Du Bois’s construction of black elites as a cure for White racism and black poverty” (p. 23). However, she notes that, “Du Bois was not willing to demobilize the elite vanguard,” arguing for a more differentiated leadership between those with material wealth, and those with “political and moral leadership.” The latter, though still elitist, was far more meritocratic and far more open to the emergence of class- independent leadership than any of his other figurations of the concept. Du Bois would go on to critique the hierarchies present within the concept of the Talented Tenth in his 1948 Memorial Address:

It has been said that I had in mind the building of an aristocracy with neglect of the masses. This criticism has seemed even more valid because of the emphasis on the meaning and power of the mass of people to which Karl Marx gave voice in the middle of the 19th century … I want to then re-examine and restate the thesis of the Talented Tenth which I laid down many years ago (1948, p. 159). If the NAACP strategy for integration forced a reckoning with notions of inclusion, Marx’s identification of the working classes as the key engines of revolutionary change, and his recognition of workers’ unique epistemological position, unsettled the foundations of Du Bois’ Talented Tenth. Thus, rather than “civilizing” the masses, the Du Bois of 1948 envisioned a re-definition of civilization “founded on a wide human base,” one that necessarily included the masses (Ibid., p. 163). Du Bois also admitted a certain naïvete with regards to the selfless sacrifice of Black leadership for the betterment of the community. “My Talented Tenth,” he re-stated, “must be more than talented, and work not simply as individuals” (Ibid.,p.163).TheDuBoisof1948 DIASPORA, INDIGENOUS, AND MINORITY EDUCATION 83 recognized the assimilationist tendencies that accompanied his valorization of “high culture,” advocating for a renewed pride in a diverse Black culture, with its own “habits and manners,” born of a shared history of struggle and survival (Ibid., p. 164). Black cultural forms, Du Bois argued, have much to offer the “greater world of human culture” (Ibid., p. 165/168). The Talented Tenth therefore became internationalized and aimed at a newer form of “scientific” organization, built upon an honest and self-sacrificing leadership that Du Bois set against Marxist- Leninist versions of proletarian dictatorship (Ibid., p. 172). Although Du Bois was still concerned with the “exceptional quality” of what he now called the “guiding hundredth,” he insisted that they “recognize the fact that their own place in life is primarily a matter of opportunity, rather than simply desert or ability” (Ibid., p. 174). This admission, though seemingly innocuous, had rather dramatic implications for how Du Bois viewed the development of leadership. Those who did not ascend to the heights of leadership failed to do so not because of some intrinsic or individual lack of talent, but because society failed to provide avenues of opportunity. One might respond, as Reed (1997) has, that despite these self-reflective comments, Du Bois’ concept of the Talented Tenth did not change significantly between 1903 and 1948:

The change of position in Du Bois’ thought that is most apparent in the post-World War II period turns out on examination not to constitute so much of a change at all. Such change as did occur in this regard reflects a reasonable adaptation of his basic premises to a new historical context and a desperate attempt to identify an appropriate historical lever, a critical agency to effect social reorganization. This change took two forms: (1) reformulation of his decades-long assertion of the Talented Tenth as bearers of the collective subjectivity of the Afro-American population, and (2) identification of the international proletariat as the embodiment of universal reason in the current period (Reed, 1997, p. 68).

Though Reed argues that these shifts merely represented a rearrangement of Du Bois’ previous prejudices, we believe it is no small shift to position working people as a world-historic force, rather than merely a mass to be led. It is a rather radical realignment, one that builds on and directly contradicts the ways in which Du Bois saw Black working people in The Philadelphia Negro. Social reorganization would still require leadership, but it would be centered on working people, newly recognized as the force that drove any substantive political or social change (Gregg, 1998). As James argues, many references to Du Bois “disregard his evolving radicalization of agency … and his conviction that those with the least to lose, and therefore the most to gain, are most likely to provide exemplary leadership in liberation struggles” (1997, p. 28). To elucidate the investment (from across the political spectrum) in interpreting Du Bois as a supporter of vanguard elitism, James (1997) recounts how Du Bois’ stepson, David Du Bois, wrote a piece for the Black Panther Party newspaper in 1972 on his stepfather. When the piece was published, references to Du Bois’ rejection of the Talented Tenth had been removed (James, 1997, pp. 27–28). Though the expansion of social movements informed by Marxism and decolonial politics undoubtedly pushed Du Bois to revise his prior thinking, wrestling with the tension between elite leadership and the agency of everyday people had been core to Du Bois’ evolving radicalism for decades. Reflected in our prior discussion of Quest of the Silver Fleece, as early as 1911, Du Bois appeared to be challenging his own assumption that “highbrow culture is inherently humanizing, and that exposure to and immersion in great works produce good people” (West, 1996, p. 68), troubling the idea that his post WWII stances were merely adapting “his basic premises to a new historical context” (Reed, 1997). Du Bois undoubtedly maintained some deficit views of the masses, whose values and viewpoints are in need of fixing by a more intelligent and refined (but greatly expanded) leadership. However, these deficits were not permanent, inherent, nor detachable from the political and material realities that spawned them. Du Bois’ continued emphasis on rational, scientific planning from above also indicates a persistent dichotomy between expert knowledge and mass ignorance. Yet the political power the Zora of Quest derived from epistemic heterogeneity (Du Bois, 1911/2004, Roseberry, et. al., 2010), the 84 K. BECKHAM AND S. VOSSOUGHI explicit identification of democratic leadership as rooted in working people’s experiences in Darkwater (Du Bois, 1920/1969) and Du Bois’ steadfast support for independent Black institutions (1935) complicate an oversimplified read. Leadership was no longer an end in and of itself, but a process that helped accelerate the development of a people.

Conclusion Much of the research on culture and poverty de-emphasizes or ignores the political dimensions of such work, favoring amorphous cultural explanations for individual failure over the possibility of political engagement. Du Bois reminds us that education can and should be an engine for political empowerment, and that the problems oppressed communities face can be solved not by merely changing their daily habits of life, but by changing their relationship to politics. As he argued in his later writings, it is politics that will provide an ongoing context for critically analyzing the roots of material deprivation, and it must be in schools and communities where the changing of this relationship begins. Du Bois’ 1935 pivot, that separate schools are necessary so long as America cannot offer Black students “Sympathy, Knowledge, and the Truth” (Du Bois, 1935, p. 335), offers us a way to think about not only education, but provides a possible antidote to the ever shifting and metamorphosing deficit thinking that empowers those who believe in a culture of poverty. Du Bois’ affirmation of collective responsibility rooted in sustained political action allows the focus to be where it belongs: on the systems that impact both individuals and collectives, and on the forms of educational activity and political agency necessary for radical change, rather than on individual responses to poverty. Though he earlier believed in a top-down leadership, his positions in 1935 and 1948 show that he was reflectively and intentionally moving away from this view toward one that was more radically democratic. That Du Bois’ evolution may not have followed a linear path from “elitist blindness to anti-elitist insight” (Gooding Williams’ critique of James, 2009, p. 212) need not circumvent serious attention to the substantive ways he was wrestling with hierarchies of culture, intelligence and leadership, and the critical resources he offered for contemporary debates on culture and poverty. For Du Bois, liberation for Black people would come not through individual responsibility judged against a narrow set of middle-class behavioral norms, but through the recognition that communities who had been maligned and marginalized can ultimately achieve equity on their own terms, independent of White society and its “tape measure,” if they mobilize politically and self-affirming education as a means to secure the material conditions on which that belief could sit. As politics has been routinely left out as a stated possibility for those who are trapped in poverty, Du Bois shows that, above all else, mass political engagement that struggled over notions of who would lead – if anyone, and under what circumstances —was and is the best hope for change for the oppressed.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ray McDermott, both for his astute feedback on this paper and for building expansive intellectual space among his students. We also wish to acknowledge Victor Wolfenstein's seminar on Du Bois at UCLA as a birthplace of some of the key ideas developed here.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor Kyle Beckham is a lecturer at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. DIASPORA, INDIGENOUS, AND MINORITY EDUCATION 85

ORCID Shirin Vossoughi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4338-7551

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