Beard, Shane 2020 PSCI Thesis

Title: The Search for Cohesive Consciousness: Du Bois’ Theory of Double Consciousness in a Contemporary ContextThe Search for Cohesive Consciousness: Du Bois’ Theory of Double Consciousness in a Contemporary Context Advisor: Nimu Njoya Advisor is Co-author/Adviser Restricted Data Used: None of the above Second Advisor: Release: release now Authenticated User Access (does not apply to released theses): No Contains Copyrighted Material: No

The Search for Cohesive Consciousness: Du Bois’ Theory of Double Consciousness in a Contemporary Context

By

Shane Emmanuel Beard

Senior Honors Thesis

Submitted to the Faculty of

The Department of Political Science of

Williams College

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Bachelors of Arts with

Honors in Political Science

May 8th, 2020

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Acknowledgements

This thesis owes its existence to an innumerable amount of people. Foremost, I want to thank my advisor, Professor Nimu Njoya. Every conversation in her office was a demonstration in patience, kindness, and wisdom, and I can’t thank her enough for her guidance (and for chewing me out when I didn’t send her emails in time). I hope that I can keep learning from and with her for years to come, and I couldn’t have had a better advisor.

I would like to thank all of my peers and friends at Williams College, especially my sisters in the Good Morning Gang (Dominique, Jazmin, and Evette) and every single member of the Black community, who inspired me to undertake this project. I also want to thank my wonderful girlfriend, Jasmine, whose boundless support and encouragement helped me pull through many rough nights and rougher drafts. I also want to thank

Rocky, who convinced me I could take on writing a thesis. To the faculty, associates, and affiliates of the Africana department, your teachings and commitment to the study and celebration of Black identity has changed my life, and I can’t think every one of you enough.

Finally, I want to thank my family, especially my mother and grandmother, who have guided and loved me throughout my entire education. You taught me to love every dimension of myself and inspired a love of learning within me. You are my heroes.

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Introduction: On Being A Problem

“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."

- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls Of Black Folk ​

Being a Problem

What does it mean to a problem? Seeing the difference between myself and my white peers at predominantly white institutions like Williams College has made this a recurring consideration in my life. In this thesis, I explore what it means to live within the paradox of

Black American life, and what it might mean to stabilize the material and psychic realities of that life. To do so, I identify three of Du Bois’ strivings for “cohesive consciousness”, or the resolution of the paradoxes of Black American life. They are as follows: the striving towards ​ freedom, the striving towards political power, and the striving towards education. I find that each ​ has a contemporary manifestation: Black capitalism, the fight for reparations, and the leadership of Black movements by Captive Maternals, respectively. Each contemporary striving is paired with what I find to be most representative of the contemporary strivings: the rise of Jay-Z as hip-hop’s first billionaire, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case For Reparations”, and the life and death of Erica Garner. In each, new paradoxes emerge: as exemplified in Jay-Z’s economic ascension, 3 the liberatory goals of Black capitalism may be warped by the desire for personal profit, or limited by scale. In “The Case for Reparations”, Coates challenges the nation’s own double consciousness, which prevents it from offering full restitution to those it’s harmed. Joy James’

Captive Maternal theory, which I believe is complementary with double consciousness, suggests that Black women face the paradox of caring for Black life when that life is extinguished by the state.

Each new paradox goes beyond Du Bois’ vision. If the problem of the 20th century is the color line, I’d argue that the problem of the 21st is the collective under neoliberalism. Today, the market commodifies all people, not just the indigenous and the enslaved (even though they bear most of the consequences). This new problem may not define the rest of the century, given its fragility in our current crisis, but it certainly affects how Black psychic life operates post-Reconstruction in ways Du Bois couldn’t have imagined. This reality unravels Du Bois’ vision that there are just two consciousnesses; there are many, and I believe that the friction between them generates identities that are cohesive in their own right, identities that may never consider that their existence is a problem at all.

A State of Twoness

To live as a problem is to never be oneself. Such a status condemns the soul to a perpetual state of seeing oneself through the eyes of others, seeking an answer to the legal, social, and spiritual predicament that is your skin. This contradiction is double consciousness.

W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term double consciousness in his 1903 book “The Souls of

Black Folk” to describe a consistent condition shared by Black people in America. Du Bois finds 4 that the condition that the phrase denotes emerges from a revelation following a racialized encounter. When his white classmate harshly refused to exchange greeting cards with him as a child, he writes, “it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the ​ others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast

1 veil." In recognizing the congenital veil between himself and the world of whiteness, Du Bois finds himself in “a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see ​ 2 himself through the revelation of the other world." This is double consciousness, a state of ​ “twoness” that springs from the clash between being Black and being an American. “One ever ​ feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn

3 asunder."

Du Bois sees this dogged strength as a singular, distinct striving. While the clash between two souls produces “a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes,” double consciousness is also the psychic manifestation of the African American social

4 and political struggle, driven by a desire for unified consciousness. The project of emancipation is extended to the psychic self, and the endpoint of this freedom project is a singular self-consciousness that is both undeniably Black and wholly a citizen of America. Du Bois argues that the striving toward Freedom—the concept of liberation from slavery and systemic injury towards citizenship and equality—is so worshipped by Black people because it holds the promise of cohesive personhood. But with the freedom to enter the white world, the tension of

1 Du Bois, W. E. B.. The Souls of Black Folk : The Oxford W. E. B. du Bois. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ​ Incorporated, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central. p. 3 2 Du Bois, Souls, p. 3 ​ ​ 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 96 5 double consciousness grows more intense. The struggle of the Black American, Du Bois finds, is a collision of contradictory goals that pull one in opposing directions. For example, in becoming educated, “the would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his ​ people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would

5 teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood." The beauty of the music the black artist loves “was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not

6 articulate the message of another people."

At the dawn of Black Reconstruction, Black people are denied unity of consciousness, at least through any large-scale national project, by coordinated terror from a coalition of rich and poor white people and the nation’s failure to follow through on social reform. Du Bois cites these as the reasons that the legal emancipation of enslaved people failed to truly free Black people.

The Reconstruction era, which begins after the Civil War, stretches from 1861 to 1872. This period is anchored by the nation’s attempts to grapple with the social conditions of race for the first time, starting with institutions like the Freedmen’s Bureau. Simultaneously, Black people begin the work of the striving for emancipation post-slavery, and while the aforementioned focus on education was a component of this movement, the more dominant movements, attempts to develop political and economic power, also failed to create a unified Black consciousness in the decades following the war. By 1903, 40 years after Black Reconstruction, Du Bois saw no progress on the front of a unified Black consciousness. Double consciousness produces a yearning to create a coherent sense of self, a task that Du Bois' suggests is futile given the condition of his present, that being Black Reconstruction after the American Civil War.

5 Ibid., p. 4 6 Du Bois, Souls, p. 4 ​ ​ 6

This thesis argues that in our present moment, the Veil of Color remains a component of

American life, and as such, double consciousness continues to present a persistent rift in identity for Black people in the United States. Du Bois’ framing of the paradox—that being the conflict between being a Black subject and a citizen of a nation that denies that subjectivity—gestures towards two paths towards a Black self-consciousness: internal striving for cohesive identity, or externally realized revolution against an anti-Black world. In practice, the strivings for consciousness have tended to include components of both. His language around the former path—pretence and hypocrisy—suggests that he found the project of internal cohesion to be one that would easily fall apart, if unaccompanied by any external changes. After all, the desire for cohesive identity emerged from the tension between two incompatible ideas of what the product of that fusion should be. On one hand, you have those that become pessimistic and self-defeating, sneering at a world that seems to seek their destruction; on the other, there are

7 those who recognize the world’s prejudice but seek upward mobility within it anyway. These opposing ideas of Black uplift, while maintained under the system as it is, simply can’t exist together, so the project of cohesive consciousness following Black Reconstruction falls apart.

These strivings appear to be personal, but the larger historical context surrounding them suggests that the burden of double consciousness is a historical inheritance. The double life of the American Negro is “swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the

8 eddies of the fifteenth century." The ramifications of centuries of slavery had hardly been

7 In reference to a passage from Chapter X: “Conscious of his impotence, and pessimistic, [the Negro] often becomes bitter and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is a complaint and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith. On the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder and keener and more tortuous too, sees in the very strength of the anti-Negro movement its patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no ethical considerations in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the black man’s strength." (Souls, 96) ​ ​ 8 Ibid. 7 addressed when newly minted Black Americans were thrust into the nation, which leads to “a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is

9 fatal to self-confidence." Du Bois defines the inward yearning to be a coherent self, while also outlining its impossibility.

How relevant is his analysis today, over a century later? Over one hundred years after the publishing of The Souls of Black Folk, perhaps now is an appropriate time to revisit Du Bois' ​ ​ framing of double consciousness, and placing it in conversation with the strivings of Black political life today. There are now several generations of Black Americans that have had access to voting rights, education, and even known a Black president. At the same time, Black

Americans make up a disproportionate amount of those incarcerated, Black death from police violence is made highly visible via the internet, and the debilitating effects of late-stage capitalism are felt most by the Black underclass. In the 21st century, the paradox of Black identity is more complicated than it has ever been, and as such, it deserves an analysis beyond a binary of Black and American. This thesis investigates three contemporary "strivings" that address the paradox of double consciousness: Black capitalism, the striving for reparations via

10 legal activism , and the work of Black feminist collectives, especially those centering Black

Motherhood. I take these to be the dominant ways in which double consciousness expresses itself in our own time. In this inquiry, the hitherto unexplored connections and intersections between these strivings for cohesive identity will be illuminated. Unlike the opposing strivings between

Blackness and Americanness in Du Bois' construction in Souls, this thesis suggests that there is ​ ​

9 Ibid. 10 The most recent and well-known examples of this striving is found in the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates, esp. “The Case for Reparations”, an article published in The Atlantic in 2014. ​ ​ 8 space for reconciliation and identity building in the overlap of the contemporary strivings, as well as tensions between them.

The following questions are addressed in this thesis: is the creation of a coherent self, perhaps via the pursuit of Black exceptionalism through academia or otherwise, still infeasible, as Du Bois suggested? How does the embodied resistance to white male rule embodied by Black women awaken public consciousness, and how does this interact with demands for state-granted legal reparations? Better yet, what can be unearthed by putting the work of writers like Joy

James in conversation with cases for reparations and Black capitalism? What new or overlooked

11 options for liberation might be made visible?

Just Two, Dr. Du Bois?

Before proceeding, it's worth examining critiques of double consciousness, and why Du

Bois and I both look to cohesive consciousness as a desirable goal for Black Americans. One significant critique of the theory’s persisting legacy is that Du Bois doesn’t explicitly write much about double consciousness. He first uses the term in an 1897 article that was later adapted into the beginning Souls in 1903, and the phrase never returns to his writing. Why does his use of the ​ ​ phrase entail such a bevy of interrogation in the last century if he only used it twice?

Adolph Reed Jr.’s 1997 book on Du Bois’s political philosophy, W. E. B. Du Bois and ​ American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line, Reed asks this question, and takes it ​ further by suggesting that the modern imagination of the theory was never Du Bois’ “a definitive

11 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. The Crossing Press Feminist Series. Trumansburg, NY: ​ ​ ​ Crossing Press, 1984. ​ 9

12 element, a key organizing principle of [Du Bois’] thought." Redd writes that double consciousness is “a proposition alleging a generic racial condition [...] that millions of individuals experience a peculiar form of bifurcated identity, simply by virtue of common racial

13 status [...] the notion seems preposterous on its face." Instead, Reed figures that double consciousness (and cohesive consciousness as a result) became emphasized in the 1960s, following the emergence of “an ideological current within the post-segregation-era black petite bourgeoisie”, who found their own (uniquely privileged) existence within predominantly white

14 academia reflected in the phrase. Reed’s critique suggests that Du Bois’ vision of split consciousness is far from a universal descriptor for all Black Americans.

Another critique of double consciousness can be summed up in this question from

15 Professor Brent Edward: “Just two, Dr. Du Bois, we are forced to ask today? Keep counting."

By focusing on just two spheres of identity, Black and American, the conflict Du Bois describes between the two is two dimensional. That isn’t to say that Du Bois’ critique of the United States lacks depth, but its scope is limited by double consciousness' focus on the clash between merely nation and race. In fact, Souls’s examination of Black life post-reconstruction investigates at ​ ​ least three additional spheres of Black life in the 20th century to some degree: education, class, and gender (which are further explored in contemporary terms in Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of this thesis, respectively). Not all of these facets are examined with equal weight or clarity, especially gender. What would happen if each of these spheres were understood as full, additional

12 Reed, Adolph, Jr., 1997, W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line, Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 12 13 Ibid., p. 124 14 Ibid., p. 130 15 Edwards, Brent. 2007. “Introduction, W.E.B. Du Bois.” In The Black Flame Trilogy: Book One, The Ordeal of Mansart, xi–xxx. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10 consciousnesses in Du Bois’ framing? The conflicts that would emerge would surely be much more sophisticated than what he presents in the introduction of Souls, and given the possibility of ​ ​ 16 even more consciousnesses, using just two strikes me as shortsighted.

The framing of double consciousness is also troubled by Du Bois’ white audience. The late Toni Morrison remained skeptical of the centering of white gaze in American literature, especially by Black men. In a 2012 interview with The Telegraph, Morrison says: ​ ​ “In American literature, African American male writers justifiably write books about their oppression, [...] Confronting the oppressor who is white male or white woman. It’s race. And the person who defines you under those circumstances is a white mind—tells you whether you’re worthy or what have you. And as long as that’s your preoccupation, you’re defending yourself against that. Reacting to it. Reacting to the definition–saying it’s not true.”17

This is in sharp contrast with her approach: “I couldn’t care less [about writing about white

18 men]–I didn’t want to spend my energy refuting that gaze.” Compare this to how Du Bois describes the desire to merge the two consciousnesses: “[The American Negro] simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit

19 upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.” By centering the response of white people (or the “fellows” of Black Americans writ large) as the central measurement of Black cohesive consciousness, Du Bois defines himself, and all Black

Americans by extension, by white opinion. Is such a consciousness “Black” if its cohesion can only be recognized via white approval?

16 Chapter 3 specifically reckons with how those with overlapping identities, primarily Black women, deal with unique tensions and forms of oppression that double consciousness (as described in Souls) does not contend with. ​ ​ 17 Morrison, Toni. 2012. Toni Morrison on love, loss and modernity. Interview by Ariel Leve. Online. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/9395051/Toni-Morrison-on-love-loss-and-modernity.ht ml 18 Ibid. 19 Du Bois, Souls, p. 3 ​ ​ 11

I take each of these critiques of Du Bois to be valid to some degree: as a Black man in academia, I can’t deny that my experiences with white wealth and academic spaces have informed my kinship with the double consciousness, nor can I deny that the white gaze is centered in Du Bois’ presentation of the concept. However, I find modern critiques to be generative: if double consciousness as originally presented is flawed, how must it adapt to new circumstances and old shortcomings? There must be some reason that the idea persists beyond the interests of the black bourgeois, even if Du Bois only deploys it twice and its success is tied to the white gaze. I find that, while Du Bois only uses the words “double consciousness” twice, the phenomenon it describes is baked into the rest of Souls and the issue that informs his ​ ​ fundamental understanding of the Color Line: the “Negro Problem”, or “that complex of social

20 problems, which surrounds and conditions [Black American] life.” The following section delves deeper into the landscape of the Negro Problem when Du Bois was writing Souls, but for ​ ​ our purposes here, we can understand the Negro Problem as the collective consequences of white supremacy on Black life following the end of the Civil War. Given the pervasiveness and conditioning power of the Negro Problem on Black people, it stands to reason that double consciousness describes the psychic consequences of white supremacy, or “the strange meaning ​ ​ 21 of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century.” If double consciousness as an idea is used to establish the psychic effects of the Negro Problem on Black people, then the end of the Negro Problem would be the end of double consciousness. In Du Bois’ eyes, the reverse is also true. The American Negro will know their consciousnesses have merged when they are no longer “being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity

20 Du Bois, William Edwards Burghardt. 1948. "The Talented Tenth Memorial Address." The Boulé Journal 15 (1). https://www.sigmapiphi.org/home/the-talented-tenth.php 21 Du Bois, Souls, p. 1 ​ ​ 12

22 closed roughly in his face.” This merging—this cohesive consciousness—can only exist when dehumanization is no longer intrinsic to the Black American experience. Cohesive consciousness can only exist when there is no Negro Problem, and the achievement of it has a causal relationship with the end of white supremacy.

The preceding logic presents cohesive consciousness as an obvious collective striving for

Black Americans: uniting Black and American consciousnesses means the end of white supremacy. While I find this central aim compelling, and useful for understanding the desire for

Black American uplift in our contemporary context, secondary criticism of double consciousness complicates the striving in necessary ways. In order to envision what the striving towards cohesive consciousness looks like today, double consciousness must be considered in its original context, and revised for our current one. The conclusion of this thesis is my assessment of the striving for cohesive consciousness today, as well as an assessment of the continued utility of using just two opposing consciousnesses as a way to understanding Black American life.

The Problem of the 20th Century

The question of a cohesive consciousness must begin with Du Bois’ original analysis, where he diagnoses the problem with America following the end of slavery. In The Souls Of ​ Black Folk, he seeks to provide a sketch of Black spiritual life in the 20th century. As he ​ establishes in his introduction, there is a "strange meaning" to then-contemporary Black life, and it exists in response to what Du Bois finds to be the defining issue of the century: the Color Line.

22 Du Bois, Souls, p. 3 ​ ​ 13

23 This line is the social and legal separation between two races, white and Black, and placement

24 on either side of this line determines one's subjectivity in American society. Before the 1900s, this line was even clearer, and the level of subjectivity it distinguished between was absolute.

Under slavery, Black people were denied any and all subjecthood, and were hardly considered to be human in any capacity. It is clear that the striving for emancipation—the end of ​ ​ bondage—was the problem of the 19th century. ​ ​ Du Bois identifies the Color Line as the problem of his time because it is a complication ​ of the problem that preceded it, that being slavery. By 1900, Black people were no longer slaves, but they continued to be denied subjecthood and the full suite of rights given to white citizens of the United States. Du Bois calls this “civic death." This civic death began during what should have been a rebirth for Black people in America, the Reconstruction after the Civil War. With emancipation came the reasonable expectation of immediate efforts to remedy the sins of slavery on the part of the nation, and it first, it seemed that there were initiatives in place to do so.

Organizations like the Freedmen’s Bureau education, and employment, and the nation promised to reallocate confiscated Confederate land to the former slaves who labored on it. But the reality was that these promises were poorly implemented or meaningfully presented or thought out.

Instead of granting land to emancipated Black people, the land was leased, claimed for amnesty,

25 or simply sold off, quickly putting it back into the ownership of former slave-owners. Black laborers across the country effectively became slaves again, being thrown from slavery into an

23 Du Bois, Souls, p. 1 ​ ​ 24 The Color Line as described by Du Bois specifies the dynamic between white and Black people, but there are populations that do not neatly fit into this dichotomy, but for whom the consequences of white settler colonialism–stolen land, appropriated labor, social subordination, and genocide–also apply (see Asian, Latinx, and esp. Indigenous populations). 25 Du Bois, Souls, p. 13 ​ ​ 14 underclass that had them working lands they were once enslaved upon for little pay. This is all while facing the terror of Southern whites enraged by the new status quo and the indifference of the nation at large. The conflict of race did not end with emancipation, and instead evolved to encompass a civic, social, and economic life radically distinct from the imagination of freedom post-slavery.

This status of continuing strife for the American Negro continues, a profoundly disappointing outcome of the emancipatory vision. It seemed that the end of slavery would remove the primary force of Black subjugation. As Du Bois muses, “To [the American Negro], so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty

26 than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites." Yet in the forty years that followed the Civil War, the plight of the Black person was still very much a plight. Du Bois described the

Color Line as American society’s “vastest social problem”, in which “The Nation has not yet ​ found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment

27 rests upon the Negro people." The “years of change” point towards Reconstruction, when finding a place for those newly freed Black people seemed to be the nation’s mission. That place ended up being at the bottom of society, despite attempts at uplift, due to the dominance of the

Color Line in both the North and South. The Color Line produces “the all-pervading desire to ​ inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom

26 Ibid., p. 4 ​ ​ 27 Du Bois, Souls, p. 5 ​ ​ 15

28 ‘discouragement’ is an unwritten word." This social and material disdain is “anti-blackness”, a concept that is central to the analysis of this thesis and is examined later in this introduction.

In Souls, the Color Line is the ever lingering division between white and Black, and the ​ ​ failure to secure a future where Black people can fully and equitably be citizens of the nation that was their home. Notably, Du Bois doesn’t see the problem of his century as “The Negro

Problem”, as many of his white peers may have identified it (after all, he is “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil”), instead assigning the dissatisfying

29 paradox of Black life to the construction of race itself. It is the veil itself that is the problem, ​ not the disenfranchised race behind it. This is in stark contrast to other African American leaders of Du Bois’ generation, who emphasized uplift through strategies of Black self-reform. As Du

Bois writes in his critique of Booker T. Washington in Chapter 3 of Souls, “His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the

Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to

30 righting these great wrongs.”

The Color Line is an objective phenomenon. It is invested in the material conditions of

Black life in contrast to that of white life, accounting for economic disparity, a gap in education,

31 legal and civic protections and rights, etc. The Veil is a metaphorical schema that is born from

28 Ibid., p. 6 29 Ibid., p. 1 30 Du Bois, Souls, p. 72 ​ ​ 31 Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader, "The New African American Inequality," The Journal of ​ American History 92, no. 1 (2005): 75-108.; John B. Diamond, "Still Separate and Unequal: Examining Race, ​ Opportunity, and School Achievement in "Integrated" Suburbs," The Journal of Negro Education 75, no. 3 (2006): ​ ​ 495-505.; Rene R. Rocha and Tetsuya Matsubayashi, "The Politics of Race and Voter ID Laws in the States: The Return of Jim Crow?", Political Research Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2014): 666-79. ​ ​ 16 this division. While the Color Line is an objective demarcation, denoting the division between black and white on a political and economic level that is clearly observable, Du Bois’ veil is more internal in its aims. The Veil is the spiritual and relational consequence of the Color Line on the human experience, or, put another way, it is the murky mist through which Black people become unknowable and illegible to others and themselves. Du Bois recognizes this form of self ​ perception as “second sight”, “which yields [the American Negro] no true self-consciousness,

32 but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” Essentially, the veil is ​ what is discovered when the possibility of Black self-consciousness, which was once repressed, is realized in the form of fragmented, double consciousness. It is the realization that there is not one world of human beings, but two, one for White subjects and one for the Black underclass.

Black subjects live in both worlds at once, and because Du Bois' writing is rooted in his own identity, he does not write of the world of Black people as the "Other"; he instead notes that the

33 “other” world is that of white people.

Through the Veil, the early Black subjects saw their “soul rise before [them] for the first time”, and though its form was ambiguous in the dark fog of their spirit, “[they] began to have a dim feeling that, to attain [their] place in the world, [they] must be [themselves], and not

34 another." But which self to be? Self-consciousness was emerging, but existing within this otherness is an inherently alienating experience, and it’s within this internal space of alienation where a split in consciousness occurs. To live in two worlds, there must be two consciousnesses: one that sees through the lens of those who rule as a peer (the eyes of an American citizen,

“second sight”) and another that exists as the outsider who is ruled (the eyes of a Black subject,

32 Du Bois, Souls, p. 3 ​ ​ 33 “Between me and the other world” opens the first chapter, framing the other world in this context as the white one. 34 Du Bois, Souls, p. 40 ​ ​ 17 the implied “first sight”). The “Color Problem” is centered on the conflict that this hierarchy is built on: Black Americans are legally recognized as both humans and citizens of the nation after the Civil War, but how must society shift to accommodate this recognition (or lack thereof)?

This is how the Veil splits consciousness; with the realization of the white world they exist in but can’t fully access, a Black person recognizes how they become “murky”, or indecipherable, to white subjects, living as they are behind this barrier. The veil represents the impossibility of reciprocal human relationships across the Color Line.

With this split arises two simultaneous conceptions of the Black self. Black people are born with a Veil, which grants them “second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the

35 other world." In Du Bois estimation, Black people must evaluate themselves through the lens of a white imagination, internalizing those perceptions as if it was their own: "this sense of [...]

36 measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." But Du

Bois also sees double consciousness as a level of insight that Black Americans have that

America itself does not. This insight allows Black Americans to truly understand the inner promise of the American project, and Souls functions as both an introspective examination of ​ ​ Black spiritual life and a plan for America’s redemption. This thesis is not a story of that redemption, and instead focuses on the introspective dimension of Du Bois’ analysis. If, as Du

Bois suggests, the strife of double consciousness is inseparable from the history of Black people in the United States, then double consciousness can be used as a framework to understand the

37 place of Black Americans today.

35 Ibid., p. xiv ​ ​ 36 Ibid. 37 “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife”, Souls, p. 37 ​ ​ 18

Du Bois’ Strivings

In Souls, the clash of these two forms of consciousness creates three distinct strivings ​ ​ following emancipation. These strivings are roughly defined by their respective categories: the striving towards freedom, the striving towards political power, and the striving towards education. The manifestations of these strivings are roughly chronological, beginning with the ​ striving towards a vaguely defined freedom.

In the immediate wake of slavery’s end, this desire for freedom was less about the exploration of newly granted rights and liberties as much as it was a response to the lack thereof:

“The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered

38 serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom." The means of enacting this desire are unclear, precisely because slavery’s end failed to represent a material and political freedom for Black people. While legally free, Black subjects had no civic power or property, and had few clear means to develop these qualities. This murkiness is why freedom fails as a striving: it’s an abstract end that requires a concrete set of solutions.

So this unrefined striving evolves into the next, a striving for political power through civic engagement. The Fifteenth Amendment represented the means through which the striving of freedom could be realized. After all, the mark of a full citizen in America’s democracy must be the right to vote. “And why not?", muses Dubois. "Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that

38 Du Bois, Souls, p. 39 ​ ​ 19

39 had done all this?." In the second chapter of Souls, “Of the Dawn of Freedom”, Du Bois ​ ​ outlines the period between 1861 and 1872, in which institutions like the Freedmen’s Bureau, a government body meant to secure political power for Black people at the end of the Civil War, were in place.

The Bureau was established through a Congressional act in March of 1865, and was meant to provide food, shelter, clothing, medical services, and land to displaced Southerners and emancipated Blacks, as well as manage confiscated land, connect freedmen with employers, and establish schools for Black people. Land in particular represented a massive amount of political power for freed slaves, and the land confiscated from the South at the end of the war seemed primed for reallocation to the families that had worked it for generations. The intent to resettle

Southern land for Black Americans was also famously outlined in Special Field Orders, No. 15, ​ ​ of “forty acres and a mule” fame, which explicitly promised that “The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of

40 Negroes now made free by act of war." With such orders and acts in place, it almost appears as if there was a carefully considered plan in place for the integration of emancipated Black people

41 into American society as the “ward of the nation”, but that illusion falls apart under inspection.

Under the act that established it, the Freedmen’s Bureau was only meant to operate

“during the present war of rebellion, and for one year thereafter,” meaning that it had to pursue

39 Du Bois, Souls, p. 39 ​ ​ 40 Special Field Orders, No. 15, Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, 16 Jan. 1865, Orders & Circulars, series 44, Adjutant General's Office, Record Group 94, National Archives. Published in The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South, pp. 338–40. 41 Du Bois, Souls, p. 49 ​ ​ 20

42 all its goal of creating equity for emancipated Black people in just two short years. In pursuit of such a lofty end with little time to work with, the Bureau settled on securing voting rights for

Black men as a total solution: “It came to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro

43 suffrage as a final answer to all present perplexities." The Bureau ended up lasting for a good while longer, but ended in 1876, just 11 years after the end of the war. The work of establishing equity of property ownership in the South would take much more time and effort than the Bureau was willing to extend. The promise of “forty acres” by the nation turned out to be a categorical lie; abandoned lands were merely leased to Black tenants, and private lands were “opened for

44 settlement to the very few freedmen who had tools and capital." Ex-slaves had to buy back the very land that was promised to them, a shameful inversion of the poetic justice promised to them.

With that pursuit of political equity recorded as a clear failure, the Bureau went all-in on suffrage. While the Fifteenth Amendment, and thus suffrage, was secured in 1870, it represents the bulk of the Bureau’s legacy to Du Bois: “the Freedmen’s Bureau died, and its child was the

45 Fifteenth Amendment." In time, it became clear that suffrage itself was not enough for political equity; newly enfranchised free Blacks continued to face the fact that “there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical

46 nullification as a duty." Black men could vote, but with little access to capital or property, the striving for political power during Reconstruction fails.

Following the formal end of Reconstruction following the Compromise of 1877, which saw the US government pulling the last of its troops out of the South, a new striving began to

42 Freedmen's Bureau Act, 13 U.S.C. § 90 (1865). ​ ​ 43 Du Bois, Souls, p. 61 ​ ​ 44 Ibid., p. 56 ​ ​ 45 Ibid., p. 61 46 Ibid., p. 60 ​ ​ 21 emerge. “Book learning”, the longing to educate oneself in the ways of the Western scholars, ​ came to replace the striving for emancipation, and existed alongside the striving for political representation. Through time, this became the central principle of the Black American imagination. While it was a path longer and harder than law and emancipation, it was “straight, ​ 47 leading to heights high enough to overlook life." Like the striving for political power, this pursuit of education diminished significantly with the decline of government initiatives like the

Freedmen’s Bureau.

The Bureau sought to establish free elementary education for Black Southerners, and Du

Bois found promise in a national system of Black schools under a more permanent Bureau, “with ​ ​ a national system of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions for social

48 betterment as savings-banks, land and building associations, and social settlements." But, like ​ with suffrage, this striving only partially succeeded, due to the short-term nature of the body that would have implemented a larger network. The end of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the formal end of Reconstruction, was also the end of the promise of a larger network of schools with government support. The striving for book-learning that followed centers internally motivated uplift through education, an initiative that is more individual than collective. While this individual striving fit in neatly with the vision of American meritocracy, it also alienated Black

49 subjects from themselves, furthering the divide in Black consciousness instead of unifying it.

47 Du Bois, Souls, p. 40 ​ ​ 48 Ibid., p. 60 49 Again in reference to the passage from Chapter X referred to in footnote 7: the Negro becomes “Conscious of his impotence”, a self-awareness of one’s condition that may give way to self-loathing (Souls, 168) ​ ​ 22

These new strivings all failed to create a cohesive consciousness for Black people, at least by Du Bois’ estimation. The difficulty of the pursuit of education and civil rights had yet to provide a meaningful outcome by the start of the 20th century, despite decades of concentrated effort through the end of the 19th century. And what had been gained held troubling consequences, which are examined in detail in the folloqing chapters. The weary pursuit of education granted Black subjects an emergent self-consciousness through self-reflection, but only through the Veil. Du Bois writes that, as the Black scholar educated themselves, “[They] began to have a dim feeling that, to attain [their] place in the world, [they] must be himself, and

50 not another."

In this passage, Dubois locates the paradox of the education of the dispossessed. The ​ more one pursues education, the more education transforms and reshapes one into a societally appropriate mold. Of course, this “civilized” effect is only in terms of the white world, and this process can alienate the Black subject from their race and themselves. In short, as the Black ​ subject pursues an education in the ways of the world, the clearer it becomes just how large the burden of their life is. This transformation, which allows for one to understand their place in a collective struggle, is isolating.

The pursuit of education produced a paradox. With education came the knowledge that there was value in resisting assimilation into the nation and embracing one’s status as the Other.

On the other hand, this comes with the knowledge that there is a seemingly insurmountable gap between themselves and their white peers. This paradox is the seed of double consciousness itself; perhaps a fitting biblical metaphor would be the burden of shame that follows

50 Du Bois, Souls, p. 40 ​ ​ 23 consumption of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. With the emergence of self-consciousness comes the acceptance of massive societal disadvantage, and Black consciousness is split by this contradiction. Du Bois notes how the work of healing this injury will never be done by those who inflicted the injury. Instead, those Black people pursuing education or political power are silenced, ridiculed, destroyed, and systemically humiliated, and end up sinking into bottomless despair. Reed’s critique of double consciousness would suggest that this despair is localized to the lives of the Black educated elite, of which Du Bois was a member. Du Bois’ focus on education as an opportunity for both empowerment and reflective despair is likely informed by the contrast between his time studying at Fisk University (a historically Black college in Tennessee) and at Harvard University (a white college in his native

Massachusetts) in the late 19th century. While this potential projection is plausible given his own life, Du Bois writes as if this despair affects all Black subjects, which is an agreeable

51 presumption to me given the continued significance of Black education in the last century.

In response to this despair, Du Bois writes that the striving for education shifted, and he describes what followed as “the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of

52 progress." Given the context, it seems clear that the “social responsibilities” he describes—preparing people to work, forming families, voting, and becoming civic ​ ​ subjects—emerge from double consciousness, and the reality of embodying contradiction in all ​ ​ areas of life; faith, in emancipation or education, exists alongside doubt in the possibility of

Black uplift. But Du Bois thinks this is because the strivings had existed separately, operating as

51 See Brown v. The Board of Education’s overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson’s “Separate But Equal” precedent for segregated public spaces, esp. schools 52 Du Bois, Souls, p. 42 ​ ​ 24 singular movements dedicated to one goal at a time. While it was stated earlier that Du Bois thought the project of a cohesive consciousness would be unsuccessful, that stance concerns the pursuit of just one striving (political, emancipatory, or educational) as the primary solution for

Black uplift. Du Bois imagined that pursuing all three strivings at once, instead of one by one, was the path that had been overlooked. “The bright ideals of the past,—physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,” had waned, yes, but the pursuit

53 of work, culture, and liberty in unison, instead of successively, would win the day. Du Bois’ ​ ​ working solution would be pursuing the development of a skilled Black labor force, an educated

Black population, and civil rights at the same time, as opposed to focusing purely on labor (in opposition to the thought of his contemporary, Booker T. Washington). Through this unification, and an eye on long-term solutions, a mending of the wound of double consciousness and securing a future for Black Americans would be reached. After all, “the Negro Problem” is

“merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic”, and Du Bois was confident that what he puts forward in the rest of Souls addresses establishes how a unified Black ​ ​ 54 consciousness would be realized in an anti-black state.

On Anti-Blackness

The use of the phrase(s) “anti-black”, “anti-blackness”, or any of its variations in this scholarship is deployed as a description of a state that is premised upon the aforementioned

55 “desire to inculcate disdain for everything black,” in Du Bois’ words. It is important to note ​

53 Du Bois, Souls, p. 42 ​ ​ 54 Ibid., p. 43 55 Ibid., p. 41 25 that this use of anti-black is used specifically to describe the American state and the mechanisms within (police, prisons, and capitalism), and not the world in its entirety. In the estimation of Du

Bois, whom I agree with, the strivings that emerge from double consciousness always manifest as a kind of resistance to the despair of living in an anti-black state, and this is different from

Afropessimism because Afropessimism suggests that white supremacy is inseparable from all mechanisms of the contemporary world.

This is outlined clearly in Anthony Paul Farley’s Afropessimist argument in Perfecting ​ Slavery. Farley writes that “Requests for equality and freedom will always fail”, because “the ​ 56 fact of need itself means that the request will fail." The hierarchy that produced slavery in the ​ ​ first place is also the only mechanism that can end it, and having to effectively plead for one’s humanity is the same act as surrendering it in Farley’s eyes. The mark of race is the system, and ​ ​ property and law will always follow that mark. The domination of white-over-black is all-encompassing, and asking for equality only reifies one's submission to becoming "animate

57 things" in that system.

In keeping with Du Bois, this thesis finds truth in the notion that the mark of race makes

Black subjects “strangers to ourselves”, but find that such an assumption of perpetual slavery does not recognize the possibility of resistance against conditions of white supremacy, like the

Color Line or the Veil. The genealogy of these resistances are at the heart of this thesis, so while this text is in conversation with Afropessimist thought and writers, it is not an Afropessimist text in and of itself. Instead, this text is more closely related to Christina Sharpe’s work in her book

58 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. In that text, Sharpe places contemporary Black existence ​

56 Anthony Paul Farley, "Perfecting Slavery," Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 36 (2005): 226. ​ ​ 57 Ibid. 251 58 Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. 2016. In The Wake. Durham: Duke University Press. 26 in the “wake” of slavery and white supremacy, a climate where premature death is made normative and the specter of the past ripples through the present. Haunted and animated by the echo of slavery, Black people in the wake find a means to persist, resist, and exist in a state that is set after that initial trauma, even though they reckon with its continued consequences. In this ​ ​ wake, set before true Black emancipation but after a point in which freedom could not be imagined, a small amount of hope can exist.

The systemic oppression of the Color Line and the psychic disembodiment produced by the Veil limits the project of cohesive Black consciousness for all but a few Black people, who are exceptions to the rule of a double, undeveloped consciousness. This scholarship engages directly with how Black Americans wrestle with double consciousness and antiblackness, and as such, antiblackness and Afropessimist thought and thinkers play a significant role in this work.

The Problem of the 21st Century

Double consciousness, and Souls as an extension, are worth revisiting a century later ​ ​ precisely because the conditions of Black self-consciousness today are radically different from what Du Bois dealt with, and as such, yield mutations of prior strivings for cohesion. If the problem of the 20th century is the Color Line, the problem of the 21st is the collective under neoliberalism. The collective—as a corporation, ethnic group, class, gender, sexual identity, ​ ​ etc.—is at the root of contemporary American existence. Double consciousness is further ​ ​ complicated in this context because collective association now needs to (but does not always) play a greater role in the spiritual strivings of Black Americans. The supposed class mobility of an educated Black elite bears an actual legacy in the form of black celebrities, after school 27 programs, and a generation of Black legacy students at elite institutions. Black Americans now enjoy a level of participation in civic life that was unprecedented a generation ago, to the point where serious conversations about reparations for slavery are a part of legal recourse. It seems that it is fully possible to succeed on one’s own, escaping the Black underclass as an individual, while systemic boundaries to uplift intensify. For some, “Black” can be thought of as a market label, and not a marker of a specific kind of material existence.

And yet the visibility of state-sanctioned Black death is on the rise, voter suppression persists, Black people are still more likely to be impoverished, and for-profit prisons have ~2.3

59 million Black Americans in a state of bondage. And in the face of a global pandemic like

COVID-19, it's evident that Black Americans are disproportionately affected: we are four times more likely to die of the virus, independent of health and economic factors, than white

60 Americans. Such a contradiction suggests that while race no longer fully dictates one’s economic destiny in the same way as it once did, it still predicts the most likely outcome. The psychic life of the Black American, as it was in 1903, is still compromised, even more so now that strivings can be seen as both individual and based in shared collective identity, or even the absence of one. Black Americans still yearn for cohesive consciousness, especially as police brutality becomes increasingly visible and neoliberalism’s privatization of the prison system echoes the de facto plantations of Du Bois’ time (see Parchman Farm, where “state officials would use prison labor to work on public and private projects cheaply, often timing arrests and

59 NAACP, “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/. 60 Robert Booth and Caelainn Barr, "Black People Four Times More Likely To Die From Covid-19, ONS Finds," The Guardian, May 7, 2020, ​ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/black-people-four-times-more-likely-to-die-from-covid-19-ons-fi nds. 28

61 imprisonments to coincide with corporate labor needs”). Given these paradoxes, the framework of “strivings” used in Souls can be applied to a contemporary context as a result. ​ ​ A second problem of the 21st century is that, although intersecting axes of identity have always existed, as have those Black people deemed exceptional, the intensity of the possibility for individual upward mobility in the 21st century is beyond what Du Bois imagined. The existence of Black billionaires, or a Black president, were not just improbable in his imagination, but likely the stuff of science fiction. And yet this level of success has been repeated, and is demonstrable by those individuals who reach that level of capital in a way that Du Bois simply could not account for.

This thesis argues that scholarship on Black existence must also take into account the multiple axes across which identity is split in the 21st century. While aspects of gender and sexuality have always been present in formations of Black identity, the world of Blackness (itself a concept that contains the double consciousness paradox) has historically been conceived as an all-encompassing existential crisis. In an interview about his experience as a Black gay man,

James Baldwin muses, "I feel like a stranger in America from almost every conceivable angle except, oddly enough, as a black person [...] The sexual question comes after the question of

62 color; it's simply one more aspect of the danger in which all black people live." The privileging ​ of Black identity over other collective associations may also play a part in the strivings for cohesive consciousness in the 21st century, and at least one dimension of this phenomenon—the

61Spence, Lester K. 2015. Knocking The Hustle: Against The Neoliberal Turn In Black Politics. Brooklyn, NY: ​ ​ punctum books. p. 16 62 James Baldwin and Quincy Troupe, James Baldwin: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (Brooklyn: ​ ​ ​ Melville House, 2014). 29 labor of social movements organized by Black mothers—is explored as one of the 21st century strivings.

In 2020, the construction of the “American Dream” has been achieved by several Black people, while also failing millions of them, at a scale that Du Bois couldn’t have imagined. The problem of collectives isn’t so different from a mass of several different “Color Lines”, as they intersect and reveal how atomized and contradictory the self—especially the Black self—is ​ ​ ​ ​ today. With this shift from Color Line to collective comes complications of Du Bois' prior ​ strivings. What are they now, and how do they interact with one another? In a general sense, they maintain the loose thematic grounding of what Du Bois presented, in that they are aligned with the emancipation, education, and political empowerment of Black people. But they are no longer so clearly distinct from one another, and have also taken on the complexity that comes with the development of Black American identity in the last century. Being racialized as "Black" continues to denote a life of contradiction, but as previously mentioned, it no longer suggests that poverty and dehumanization are guaranteed; such statuses are more likely, but not promised.

This is mostly due to the landscape of Blackness in America as Black people have found visible agency and success in the nation’s history, cultural engines, and economic structures.

Contemporary Strivings

The strivings for cohesive consciousness have evolved into the pursuit of Black exceptionalism via capitalism, the legal pursuit of reparations for slavery, and the deployment of

Black social movements that center the experience of Black motherhood. These are the evolutions of the strivings for education, political power, and emancipation respectively, and while they are built upon the same foundations as those prior initiatives, their approach to the 30 persisting contradiction between consciousnesses is distinct from their forebears. This thesis evaluates how these new strivings fail or succeed in the work of creating cohesive consciousness, and examines how double consciousness lingers as a reality of Black psychic life.

Chapter 1, “Black Exceptionalism and the Possibility of Blackness as Property”, investigates what I believe is the contemporary reimagination of Black exceptionalism, the pursuit of Black capitalism. Chapter 1 is a critical analysis of both Black capitalism and the

Talented Tenth, a concept that Du Bois endorsed in The Souls of Black Folk and rejected later in ​ ​ his life. There are clear parallels between the two concept’s visions of class mobility: using one’s academic talents to gain a formal education vs. the pursuit of capital at all costs, as demonstrated by hip-hop media mogul Jay-Z and other rich Black celebrities. Supporters of the latter path propose that the accruement of material wealth is the path to Black uplift and, implicitly, unified consciousness on a collective scale. Key texts include Herbert Gans Race as Class, Du Bois’ ​ ​ Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, and Cheryl Harris’ "Whiteness As Property." At the end ​ of the chapter, I give my conclusions on how feasible Black capitalism is as a step towards collective cohesive consciousness and the development of Blackness as a protected property interest.

Chapter Two, “Cohesive Consciousness as the End of Reparations”, is an analysis of

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case For Reparations”, and how its breakdown of reparations addresses the continuing burden of Black psychic and social life by the state, an analysis that is in direct conversation with Du Bois' thought on America's responsibility to Black people. While it’s far from the first published work on reparations for slavery, “The Case for Reparations” has undoubtedly the most popular in the 21st century since its publication in 2015. The second 31 chapter interrogates the concept of reparations as both a redistribution of wealth and political power, and puts Coates’ article in conversation with Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, his ​ ​ examination of the last major project that pursued those ends for Black Americans. It concludes with my thoughts on how I think reparations should manifest in order to produce cohesive consciousness, versus how I think they will be implemented.

The third chapter, “Gendering Double Consciousness, Black Maternals, and the Striving for Freedom”, operates as an exploration of feminist readings of Du Bois, as well as an investigation into the organizing of social movements by those that Professor Joy James calls

“Black Captive Maternals”, particularly the late Erica Garner. Chapter 3 is primarily a critique of

Du Bois’, and other male theorists in the African American canon, male centered perspective, which often erases Black women in the same way that they are delegitimized in the Western canon. It turns to Du Bois’s profeminist work in Darkwater, and integrates James’ Captive ​ ​ Maternal theory into Du Bois’ double consciousness, in order to generate a form of double consciousness that accounts for the unique position of Black women in America. Together, these frameworks elucidate why civil rights leaders like the late Erica Garner embody the desire for cohesive consciousness, and the feasibility of adapting double consciousness into modern pursuits of Black freedom.

Each chapter assesses the function and feasibility of these 21st century strivings, and the conclusion of the thesis examines how successful I find them to be in their pursuit of cohesive consciousness. In placing each striving against one another, evaluating how they interact with one another, and discussing how valid the project of a cohesive consciousness, the conclusion is my evaluation of if a Black collective consciousness at all can (or will) exist.

32

33

Chapter 1: Black Exceptionalism and the Possibility of Blackness as Property

“We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility?”

- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls Of Black Folk ​

Double Consciousness and the Pursuit of Exceptionalism

Living under double consciousness is a state of constant tension between two radically different conceptions of the self, and resolving this problem of the self, if it could be resolved at all, drove Du Bois’ analysis throughout the later chapters of The Souls of Black Folk. The tension ​ ​ between the split consciousnesses that make up Black American psychic life— being American vs. being the descendant of slaves and reckoning with its consequences— produce a numbering of strivings towards said resolution, and chief among them in Du Bois’ eyes was the education and uplift of Black Americans. The pursuit of education synthesized the components of what Du

Bois found to be at the root of initial post-Reconstruction movements: work, culture, and liberty.

63 Through access to Negro schools and colleges, Du Bois envisioned that those willing to cultivate their spiritual and intellectual curiosity would develop a wider culture of uplift, and lead

63 Du Bois, Souls, p. 43 ​ ​ 34

America’s Black population to true freedom. This striving is ultimately centered less on education and more on the cultivation of a select population of Black Americans to lead the race.

This chapter investigates how this communal investment into an exceptional portion of Black

Americans has developed as a striving, from the focus on education of Du Bois’ era, to its gradual shift towards the general accumulation of wealth as the primary mode of uplift. This shift represents not just the assimilating power of capitalism, but the allure of reappropriating oppressive power formations for (seemingly) liberatory ends.

The Talented Tenth

In order to understand Du Bois’ vision of an educated and uplifted Black population with a cohesive consciousness in Souls, his concept of the “Talented Tenth” must be examined. ​ ​ Chapter 6 of Souls, titled “On the Training of Black Men," describes a training that seeks to ​ ​ resolve the double consciousness produced by the veil, specifically when it comes to the angst of deserving to be seen as human. This fear is deeply internalized in Black subjects, a dark ​ 64 possibility that perhaps “the World is right and [Black people] are less than men." This fear is indicative of just how pervasive the Veil is in distorting the consciousness of Black people, such that they might struggle with accepting their own humanity. Du Bois himself may not have been immune to this kind of self-loathing. It’s worth noting that, perhaps by the nature of his assumed audience, Du Bois often speaks about the condition of Black people with a level of distance and a tone of condemnation that can be surprising. He’s consistently willing to call out the moral

64 Du Bois, Souls, p. 93 ​ ​ 35 crookedness at the heart of White society, but it’s worth revisiting moments in Souls where his

65 critiques of Black people echo or explicitly refer to the words of white critics.

Du Bois finds that the only way to address these “curious kinks of the human mind” is

66 via “the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture." Du Bois makes the case for a Black population that has access to a universal and excellent education as the solution to a number of the nation’s ills. In fact, he finds that it that the ills of Blackness and the nation can only be solved through study: ​ ​ “The foundations of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the college and university if we would build a solid, permanent structure. Internal problems of social advance must inevitably come, —problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true valuing of the things of life [...] the Negro must meet and solve largely for himself, by reason of his isolation; and can there be any possible solution other than by study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of the past?”67

Instead of being denied the intellectual curiosity they would always have, this “Talented Tenth” of the Black population would find their natural desire to be enlightened satisfied, quelling their conflict of consciousness. Du Bois finds that this healing, through the establishment and support of Black colleges, is critical to the survival of the nation. From his position at the dawn of the

20th century, Du Bois sees that higher education for Black and white men as the key to creating

68 a unified culture for the nation as a whole.

This is a fundamentally different approach than Du Bois’ rival in the matter, Booker T.

Washington. Washington believed that the place of the Negro post Reconstruction was in the

65 See Chapter 6 of Souls, the paragraph that opens with “I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,—I will not insist that there is no other side to the shield," where he implies that there is some validity in claims that Black people are backwards. (p. 105) Perhaps this is a consequence of Du Bois’ own struggle with double consciousness. 66 Du Bois, Souls, p. 94 ​ ​ 67 Ibid., p. 105 68 See Chapter 6, page 103: “ If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are to live for many ​ years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, [...] if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history." 36 labor force, and he envisioned a program of “industrial education” that would foster the transition of African Americans into trades. Washington’s focus on labor was, in Du Bois words, the synthesis of “industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to

69 civil and political rights” into “a veritable Way of Life." His hope was that, by educating Black people in trades, the vast majority of Black people will have a secure income and place in society, if a lowly one. The subject of Washington and his project is the subject of Souls’ third ​ ​ chapter (“Of Booker T. Washington and Others”), and the conflict between his and Du Bois’ projects is further explored in later chapters of this thesis.

Both Washington and Du Bois’ initiatives reckon with the concept of black ​ exceptionalism, and this chapter explores both the original intent of this phrase and an alternative ​ definition that can be applied to the state of Black Americans in the 21st century. Both conceptions of black exceptionalism begin with the Color Problem, and thus double consciousness, which began with Reconstruction in 1865 and has continued well into the following centuries. How could it not? America’s position as the most prosperous nation on

Earth was built upon the exploitation of human beings under slavery, and now that those slaves

70 are considered citizens in the eyes of the law, their humanity can not be so easily disregarded.

The institutional roadblocks to progress for Black people are what make up the first use of Black exceptionalism, in which Black people are “exceptions” to the American progress narrative. Post

Reconstruction, the reign of terror over Black people in the United States did not cease—through the years, lynchings, segregation, housing discrimination, and the prison industrial complex saw to that. And despite many Black Americans rising in status and educational oppurtunity

69 Du Bois, Souls, p. 62 ​ ​ 70 Desmond, “American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation.” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html. 37 following the Civil Rights movement, Black Americans “still suffer from far harsher and more pervasive discrimination and segregation than nonwhite immigrants of equivalent class position."

71 There exists a specific and lingering discrimination against Black people as a class, and if the nation does not also recognize the humanity that Black people would recognize in themselves, institutional change is impossible.

The reality of Black exceptionalism chafes with Du Bois’ hope for the rise of a “Talented

Tenth” of Black Americans, who would ideally secure their humanity through a great education and lead the race forward. It also doesn’t fit with Washington’s vision of progress via a Black labor class, at least in that such a pursuit would place Black laborers as the lowest possible caste, below their white and even nonwhite peers. Anti-blackness, or the “desire to inculcate disdain for everything black,” persists as Black exceptionalism, a brake on upward economic mobility for

72 Black Americans. The continued existence of this break in the century after Reconstruction can be assigned to any number of factors, such as white antipathy towards Blackness, and even the

73 continuing perception of Black Americans as former slaves. Perception is key here: having features that are prescribed to Blackness (dark skin, a wide nose, full lips) would make economic growth more difficult, while having ambiguous or white-passing features would have the opposite effect, even if one is Black. The possibility of subverting Black exceptionalism could be in one's ability to "pass" as white. But outside of being able to present as white, black exceptionalism is a harsh truth that would seem to dismiss Du Bois' hope in a generation of educated Black leaders.

71 Gans, Herbert J. “Race as Class.” Contexts 4, no. 4 (November 2005): 17–21. doi:10.1525/ctx.2005.4.4.17. 72 Du Bois, Souls, p. 41 ​ ​ 73 Gans, 2005 38

But what if there are exceptions to Black exceptionalism? And not just through passing as white: what if one could present themselves as unambiguously Black, and still secure economic prosperity and true equity with White citizens? And, perhaps more meaningfully than mere economic prosperity, what if one could present as Black and own property, the privilege that had once been used to dehumanize and profit off of your ancestors? In the 21st century, 100 years after Reconstruction and half a century after the Civil Rights movement, it’s worth exploring if the striving for wealth via capitalism presents a new kind of Black exceptionalism, and a new way to pursue equity for Black citizens. This alternate path to equity suggests that Black exceptionalism as understood by both sociologists and Du Bois is imagined differently today.

The Guiding Hundredth

First, it's important to point out that Du Bois’ vision of the Talented Tenth was not static.

In 1948, 45 years after the publication of Souls, Du Bois gave an address to the graduating class ​ ​ of the Sigma Pi Phi fraternity that restated his thoughts on the Talented Tenth. In the “Talented

Tenth Memorial Address," Du Bois reorients the concept, with more of a focus on character and not just status. This reflection is guided by Du Bois addressing his assumption that educated

Black men would look out for the race, and not just themselves, earlier in his life:

“It was from that experience that I assumed easily that educated people, in most cases were going

out into life to see how far they could better the world. Of course, as I looked about me, I might

have understood, that all students of Fisk University were not persons of this sort. There was no

lack of small and selfish souls; there were among the student body, careless and lazy fellows; and

there were especially sharp young persons, who received the education given very cheaply at Fisk 39

University, with the distinct and single-minded idea, of seeing how much they could make out of it

for themselves, and nobody else."74

This concern about selfish leadership, and his turn towards socialism at this point in his life, sharpened Du Bois vision for the educated Black elite. “My Talented Tenth must be more than talented, and work not simply as individuals,” he says, and they must display “willingness to

75 sacrifice and plan for such economic revolution in industry and just distribution of wealth."

The economic revolution he proposes is quite different from capitalism—“It is called by many names: Socialism, Communism”— and rejects the desire to “become more American than

76 the Americans." Instead, it prioritizes cross-class solidarity with Black and oppressed people around the world, which requires a new Talented Tenth. This new vision, which he calls the

Guiding Hundredth, has more focus on group leadership and the necessity of self sacrifice. The

Hundredth would take the form of “a directing council composed of educated and specially trained experts in the main branches of science and the main categories of human work, and a

77 paid executive committee of five or six persons to carry out the program."

Du Bois’ reiteration of the Talented Tenth contributes to this analysis of a new Black exceptionalism in two key ways. For one, it shows that concerns about self-aggrandizement amongst the Black elite are not new, even from those who originally endorse the Talented Tenth.

Second, the fact that the economic revolution Du Bois supports in the memorial address has not manifested in the last 72 years suggests that group leadership by trained Black experts has not

74 Du Bois, 1948 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid.

40 come to fruition like he thought. This is worth keeping in mind throughout this chapter, as we assess capitalism as a path towards cohesive consciousness.

Property and Protections

The accumulation of property and capital is the fundamental process through which

American citizens exercise their rights. In the wake of Reconstruction, Black people could now own what they once were, property. With property, Black families could accumulate capital, and with that secure a full life for themselves and their descendants, or at least that was the assumption. As now official citizens of the United States, Black people would be entitled to that privilege, and to the land they once worked as slaves. The appeal of this new reality has only grown in the 21st century, as it has become evident that those Black Americans who have succeeded within capitalism have become icons within the Black imagination, placed at the same level as heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.

The decree of Special Field Order No. 15 — the infamous promise of “forty acres” of land abandoned during the Civil War to Black families — failed to imbue the whole population of Black people with that which they were owed, and white plantation owners ended up taking

78 much of the land for themselves. But those few Black people who had the means to purchase the land were able to defy their economic destiny. Where their legal status as citizens, and their education via college, failed to give them justice, capital succeeded, and provided access to a kind of intangible protections that were once known only to white citizens. These are the first

Black capitalists, who found the path to Black liberation in the dollar, and not necessarily

78 Special Field Orders, No. 15, 1865 41 through schooling or a trade. What seems to be the goal of these enterprising Blacks is the pursuit of both the American Dream (the accumulation of wealth) and the minimization or removal of negative discrimination they would otherwise face as Black Americans.

On Master Capitalists

To undertake this evaluation, other work from Du Bois’ canon must be pulled in, especially those works that dig into his thoughts on capitalism and its relationship with race. In the fourth chapter of Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, W. E. B. Du Bois describes ​ ​ capitalism as more than mere race antagonism—it is still roughly organized by race, but class is now fully tied to it. Du Bois finds that the world consists of an “imperial commercial group of master capitalists” who are “international and predominantly white”; the “national middle classes," which are “white, yellow, and brown”; and the “international laboring class of all

79 colors," “oppressed groups” that are mostly “yellow, brown, and black." In this structure, owning Whiteness cannot promise meaningful class uplift—the three classes under racialized capitalism do not promise the status of master capitalist to all white people, even if that group is mostly white—but it does suggest a kind of entitlement to subjecthood for those white laborers, who resemble the international class of master capitalists.

The second issue, which neatly intersects with this entitlement, is that Whiteness promises status to those who have no other property. Not only does the existence of the white elite shore up the belief of subjectivity for white laborers, it also suggests that their reaching master capitalist status (their “rising dreams”) is an eventuality. With this intact, authoritarian

79 W.E.B Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York, NY: Harcourt, 1920), p. 67-8 ​ ​ 42 actors leverage the “strong blood bonds, common languages, and common history” of the white

80 middle class against the striving laboring class beneath them, which is mostly Black and brown.

This is the third consequence of Whiteness as property: aesthetic proximity to the (racial) identity of the master capitalist grants subjectivity and economic advantage.

But what happens when Black people become master capitalists, or make strivings towards joining that tier of capital dominance? The possibility of this becomes more realized every day. As the late stages of American capitalism and neoliberalism continue to atomize identity—having a good job vs. a bad job, being able to afford higher education or not, being employed or unemployed—two opposing phenomena have developed in the Black American underclass. As the prison industrial complex, which commits millions of Black Americans to bondage and fully denies their subjecthood, grows, so too does the population of Black elites, slowly but surely. These “exceptional Blacks” are exceptional precisely because they demonstrate the possibility of reaching a master capitalist status. How can it be that Black

Americans are still in “the shadow of hunger, in a world which never needs to be hungry," yet,

81 for the first time, they can look like those who get to eat?

After all, a Marxist analysis of society finds that the state protects private property over all else, and if race is a kind of property, investment into it yields a collective yield. If that’s the case, can wealthy Black people convert (social and material) wealth into a kind of “racial” property? Or does the wealth of those “exceptional Blacks” exist despite a lack of racial capital? ​ ​ This is the question at the root of my examination of Black capitalism, and this chapter examines and evaluates the possibilities the question considers.

80 Du Bois, Darkwater, p. 67-68 ​ ​ 81 Du Bois, Darkwater, p. 68 ​ ​ 43

Under Du Bois’ outline of racialized capitalism, there are three classes: a master capitalist class that is international (and mostly white); the national middle classes that are more racially diverse, and share “strong blood bonds, common languages, and common history”; and the

82 laboring class at the bottom, which is mostly Black and brown. There is a correlation between one’s race and their economic fate, and so long as it exists, the solidarity between Black and white laborers cannot meaningfully manifest. White laborers, who “own” the object of

Whiteness, felt entitled to becoming master capitalists, and their “rising dreams” were threatened by the arrival of Black laborers in urban centers during the Great Migration. Under capitalism, race in the US finds its value in the probability of being born into being a master capitalist, or at least proximity to such a status. Du Bois’ framing of capitalism as a hierarchy is a fruitful theoretical framing towards exploring this possibility, and while his perspective is rooted in

America post-Reconstruction, this paper focuses on the contemporary shift towards capitalism as an engine for radical racial progress.

That history is still essential, especially when it comes to framing the pursuit of racial

83 capital as a pursuit of the protections afforded to whiteness. This pursuit is not merely the accumulation of enough capital such that racial identity is severed from one’s material destiny, because that protection has been built into whiteness from the beginning of the nation. Whiteness is a racket in this sense, in that it is a collective that pursues its own self-aggrandizement at all costs, even adjusting whom it excludes as needed (see the integration of the formerly marginalized Irish into American whiteness in order to dismantle solidarity between Irish immigrants and Black laborers). If the question is if Black capitalists can have the protections of

82 Ibid., p. 67-68 83 Cheryl I. Harris, 1993. "Whiteness As Property." Harvard Law Review 106 (8) 44

Whiteness as property for themselves, then it must be answered with a clear “no." The aesthetic dimension of Whiteness (in which one must “look” white, or possess ambiguous features that can be read as white) prevents Black people having anything but mere access to some of its privileges, even if they are master capitalists. The very accusation of having Black ancestry can disqualify one’s ability to access Whiteness and its property protections, since its construction

84 centers exclusivity (who isn’t white is more pressing than who is white). With material wealth, ​ ​ ​ ​ Black capitalists can approximate the privileges of Whiteness, but never fully “own” them because said privileges are conditional. So long as they are read as the Other, those protections can evaporate quickly in specific contexts, such as getting pulled over in one’s sports car by the police. Capitalism is racialized, and even at the highest levels, material wealth does not negate this truth. The problem is ultimately that Whiteness includes a set of protections that apply to all who own it, and as such, it promotes a kind of one-sided solidarity around it that connects poor white laborers to white master capitalists, despite their class difference. This has larger consequences for Black subjects, since even wealthy Black people don’t have access to the protections of Whiteness despite their material wealth. If the conversion of material wealth into race based protections is possible at all, said protections would not be the same as those afforded to Whiteness. This concern exists beyond Du Bois’ thinking in Darkwater, since there were so ​ ​ few middle-class Blacks at the time, and this work expands beyond the baseline of his framing.

In Darkwater, Du Bois centers on existing racism fueling class tension. If that class ​ ​ tension is dulled once there are Black master capitalists, such as Oprah, Jay-Z, or Beyonce, does the possibility of revolution diminish? The existence of these figures of Black wealth would

84 Harris, 1993 p. 1737 45 seem to point towards a utopian possibility within capitalism. This chapter investigates this utopian potential of the pursuit of Black racial capital. Without the protections of Whiteness on the table, just how foreseeable is that future now that minoritized people are master capitalists?

The Exceptional Blacks

To begin, it would be useful to identify what makes a Black person “exceptional." For sociologists like Herbert J. Gans, Black exceptionalism is a continuing consequence of the Veil, where Black Americans are perpetually excluded from the American progress narrative that white and many nonwhite citizens enjoy. The Color Line of the 20th century used to demarcate a division between White and dispossessed Black and brown people, at least as a sociological construction. While the nation has always held a number of different racial demographics, race as understood up until the mid 20th century centered this binary in its racial caste system. This polar caste system was a key component of the most infamous legal precedent regarding race,

Plessy v. Ferguson, as it was established that a legal distinction between Black and white people,

85 and Whiteness as a protected property, was constitutionally supported.

As the racial makeup of the US began to shift with immigration from Latin American,

Caribbean, and Asian countries, the non-white/non-black population of the US grew dramatically. The nation is set to be majority non-white in as soon as the next decade, and it seems that the binary of the Color Line would disappear with this feat. But African Americans still face discrimination and systemic disadvantage that began with slavery and the Color Line. It may be that the binary of the Color Line isn’t dissolving, but shifting. Instead of a divide

85Supreme Court Of The United States. U.S. Reports: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537. 1895. Periodical. https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep163537/. 46

86 between white and black, the split is between black and nonblack. The latter dichotomy is

Black exceptionalism: the social phenomenon that puts a glass ceiling on the economic progress

87 of Black people and compares their progress to other marginalized American populations.

But, if there are exceptions to Black exceptionalism, as demonstrated by those Black ​ ​ Americans who achieve national merit, global acclaim, or class ascendancy, then there is another kind of Black exceptionalism to consider. This alternate definition is more closely tied to Du

Bois Talented Tenth, although it is open to talents beyond the strictly academic. These exceptional Blacks are distinguished from the general assumptions of Black people, because their merit in their respective fields is undeniable to all, black and nonblack. Instead of the universal education that would uplift the Talented Tenth, the universality of the Exceptional

Blacks is found in the magnitude of their particular skills. Going forward, this thesis uses “Black exceptionalism” for the sociological phenomenon of Black Americans being held back from economic uplift, and uses “the Exceptional Blacks” to denote those especially remarkable Black

Americans who subvert that expectation. Exceptional Blacks exist across fields and the political spectrum and are unified by their status as cultural icons and/or their outsized wealth and influence resulting from that status. In that sense, they represent the best of the Black race, a

Talented Tenth that isn’t strictly tied to the route of an academic background.

86 Rhiannon A. Kroeger and Kristi Williams, "CONSEQUENCES OF BLACK EXCEPTIONALISM? Interracial Unions with Blacks, Depressive Symptoms, and Relationship Satisfaction," The Sociological Quarterly 52, no. 3 ​ ​ (2011): 400. 87 See the “model minority” myth, in which White Americans identify East Asian Americans as the ideal minority. In her article “Are Asian Americans Becoming White?," Min Zhou writes that during the peak of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, articles emerged that “congratulated Japanese and Chinese Americans on their persistence in overcoming extreme hardships and discrimination to achieve success, unmatched even by U.S.-born whites, with ‘their own almost totally unaided effort’ and ‘no help from anyone else.’ [...] The press attributed their winning wealth and respect in American society to hard work, family solidarity, discipline, delayed gratification, non-confrontation and eschewing welfare," which supported the narrative that Blacks lacked these virtues. (Min Zhou, 2004, "Are Asian Americans Becoming “White?."" Contexts 3 (1): p. 34) ​ ​

47

These figures are often compatible with the myth of the American Dream. Their success seems to be in proportion to their talent, reinforcing the vision of American society as a meritocracy. Like the protagonist of a Dickens novel, these exceptional Blacks rose through a number of hardships to earn their place amongst the wealthy. There have been exceptional

Blacks in every field, from sports, television, medicine, music, and as of January 2009, there have been at least four in the White House. Unlike the myth of the American Dream, the existence of Exceptional Blacks often (but not always) reveals the systemic conditions that inform their origins, such as segregation, poverty, and the school to prison pipeline. But by their

“exceptional” nature, their origins are often presented as an individual striving, which is often used to justify the class position of most Black Americans. After all, if the oppression of Black

Americans is not universal, perhaps the onus of overcoming that oppression is on the shiftless and dysfunctional mass who refuse to do better.

Therefore, exceptional Black people are seen as models of the race for both Black people and racialized capitalism, not quite unlike Du Bois’ model of the Talented Tenth. Their existence as affluent Blacks presents a seeming contradiction to the idea that Black people can’t get ahead, and that contradiction represents the growing hope of Black collective uplift as an inevitability.

On the other hand, their place as exceptions also justifies the merit of American capitalism, the system that maintains Du Bois’ three classes in the first place, and the breadth of exceptional

Blacks has uncoupled their status from education as the primary path forward. Du Bois believed that much of the issues Black people faced post-Reconstruction- could only be solved by “study

88 and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of the past." This initiative was the Talented

88 Du Bois, Souls, p. 105 48

Tenth, who were imagined to be a growing group of Black Americans who succeeded academically in order to lead the Black race. In the 21st century, this focus on study and thought is considered less essential. If a handful of Black Ameircans can succeed within capitalism, with or without a thorough education, then the project of redeeming the nation after slavery is truly complete, as far as the state (and disenfranchised whites) is concerned. Taken with Du Bois’ imagining of capitalism, I find that the existence of exceptional Blacks reinforces a stable loop: figures like Oprah, the Obamas, and Jay-Z become cultural icons beloved and admired by Black, brown, and white people, and their success implicitly suggests that the American dream- and the creation of Black wealth through it- is a viable project, even as the wealth gap between master

89 capitalists and international laboring classes grows.

A Business, Man

Jay-Z, born Shawn Corey Carter in 1969, holds a status beyond which Du Bois,

Washington, and their peers could have imagined. He is “hip-hop’s first billionaire” according to

Forbes, joining the company of the other richest Black people on the planet (there are just 13, ​ 90 five of which are Black Americans). In what could be read as his own words on his label’s website, Jay is described as “a dominant force in popular culture," as well as the personification

91 of the American Dream. This description seems fitting for a man whose life story almost seems

89 Wealth continues to be concentrated into the hands of the few: according to a 2019 press release from Oxfam international. “Billionaire fortunes increased by 12 percent last year – or $2.5 billion a day - while the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity saw their wealth decline by 11 percent [in 2018]." (Anna Ratcliff, "Billionaire Fortunes Grew By $2.5 Billion A Day Last Year As Poorest Saw Their Wealth Fall," 2019, Oxfam International. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-fortunes-grew-25-billion-day-last-year-poorest-saw-their-wealt h-fall.) 90 Mfonobong Nsehe, “The Black Billionaires 2019 - Forbes.com.” Forbes, March 5, 2019, ​ ​ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mfonobongnsehe/2019/03/05/the-black-billionaires-2019/. 91 “Jay-Z.” ROC NATION. Roc Nation. https://www.rocnation.com/music/jay-z/. 49

Dickensian in structure. Growing up in the Marcy Projects of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn,

Jay-Z grew from a drug dealer and wanna-be rapper into an industry titan. He is near-universally considered one of the greatest rappers of all time, but in recent years his legacy has become more and more centered on calculated investments and growing his portfolio. It’s notable that his profile on his label’s site hardly mentions his music, instead dedicating the bulk of its three paragraphs to Jay's acquisitions, his friendship with Warren Buffet, and his philanthropic work.

Jay-Z is a pioneer for both hip-hop as America’s primary cultural export this century and its potential as a springboard for the development of Black wealth.

Jay-Z’s career is certainly not the safety of a trade as imagined by Washington. nor does he represent the Black leaders of Du Bois’ Talented Tenth. But Jay-Z does represent the value of non-academic talents, contributing to a cultural shift in what a Talented Tenth of the Black population is even composed of. Such a status is no longer a strictly academic pursuit, and

Jay-Z’s initial and continued success is uncoupled from his schooling, since he never finished high school. But his talent is undeniable, and he often assigns his past hustling as a drug dealer as his preparation for his hustle as a musician and billionaire. His “hustle," or work ethic, is centered as the primary factor in his uplift, to the point where his hustle transforms him into an emblem. One of his most famous lines, from Kanye West’s “Diamonds From Sierra Leone

(Remix)” is explicit in this:

“I do this in my sleep I sold kilos of coke, I'm guessin' I can sell CD's I'm not a businessman; I'm a business, man”!92

The consequences of this shift embody the tension between consciousnesses: for one, the sphere of skills that could secure uplift are now broader. Black Americans now have a bevy of options

92 Jay-Z and Kanye West. 2005. “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix)”. Single. Roc-A-Fella Records, MP3. 50 they can pursue in their search for uplift and self satisfaction, from music, athletics, and the arts.

This is undeniably a victory for access, but that victory is tempered by their status as exceptions.

Black exceptionalism is still in effect, and Black Americans on the whole are still the underclass.

Exceptional Blacks can evade this in part, but cannot sidestep discrimination entirely, nor eliminate it for the rest of Black people. And that’s only if the goal of any Exceptional Black person is universal uplift, which is hardly guaranteed. Jay-Z’s brand is often centered on his own meteoric rise and status, as well as his rise of those he’s mentored. If Jay-Z is a part of a new formation of the Talented Tenth, his desire for enlightenment is all about economics, and his legacy up to now is about satisfying that desire to create a cohesive consciousness for himself.

Black Capitalism

“I’m not Black, I’m O.J.” is not just one of the more notable quotes attributed to the athlete, but it’s also a key component of the hook to “The Story of O.J," Jay-Z’s single from the

2017 album 4:44. The song was released just two years before Forbes Magazine crowned Jay-Z ​ ​ ​ ​ as “hip-hop’s first billionaire” in June of 2019, and the lyrics are preoccupied with both the

93 societal reading of Black people and the liberating potential of Black capitalism.

Black capitalism is a specific manifestation of the desire for Black self sufficiency

94 following Reconstruction. If class uplift for White Americans was done through free enterprise, it stood to reason that the creation and support of Black businesses and banks would secure the place of newly enfranchised Black Americans as equal citizens. Through a separate Black

93 O'Malley Greenburg, Zack. “Artist, Icon, Billionaire: How Jay-Z Created His $1 Billion Fortune.” Forbes, June 3, 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2019/06/03/jay-z-billionaire-worth/#4260206a3a5f. 94 Black capitalism, or rather Black participation in capitalism, began with Reconstruction. Du Bois’ Black ​ Reconstruction explores this more fully, and the particular struggles of that era are explored in Chapter 2. ​ 51 economy, Black people could create “black wealth through black-owned banking and

95 entrepreneurship, and patronage of black businesses." Black capitalism is a refutation of Black exceptionalism, which separates Black Americans from the economic growth experienced by white and nonblack populations, and instead exists in conjunction with the presence of

Exceptional Blacks, who are distinguished by their seeming success via the myth of American meritocracy. Black capitalism portends to be immediately accessible, and seems to be in line with the politics of a young Frederick Douglass: “ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, ​ ​ 96 and on no other terms." Black capitalism is primarily concerned with building up wealth such that the status of Blackness gains the protections enjoyed by whites, securing a material destiny for Black people that is equal to those of white citizens.

Black capitalism is championed by Jay-Z, who’s recently acquired billionaire status seemed to be inevitable in his mind (“Hip-hop from the beginning has always been aspirational,''

97 he mused in a Forbes interview from 2009). In “The Story of O.J," he both dismisses O.J’s claim of being beyond race as ludicrous and cites investment in the market as the only way forward. The song samples Nina Simone’s “Four Women," which was about the stories of four women of different complexions in the Antebellum South, and the chorus of “O.J” echoes her framing:

“Light nigga, dark nigga, faux nigga, real nigga Rich nigga, poor nigga, house nigga, field nigga Still nigga, still nigga."98

95 Gillian B. White, “The Unfulfilled Promise of Black Capitalism,” The Atlantic, September 21, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/black-capitalism-baradaran/540522/. 96 Du Bois, Souls, p. 67 ​ ​ 97 Bruce Upbin, “Jay-Z, Buffett and Forbes on Success and Giving Back,” Forbes, April 16, 2014, ​ ​ https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/1011/rich-list-10-omaha-warren-buffett-jay-z-steve-forbes-summit-interview.h tml#418ec4926480. 98 Jay-Z. 2017. "The Story of O.J." Track 2 on 4:44. Roc Nation, compact disc. ​ ​ 52

Here, Jay-Z points out how critical identity is to the construction of Whiteness. Complexion, dedication (or lack thereof) to Black uplift, material wealth, and relative status do not erase the otherness that is inscribed upon Black people: they are “still nigga." In a later verse, he makes clear that “financial freedom our only hope," and laments not buying property in Brooklyn when it was worth $2 million, and not $25 million. The case for Black capitalism in the song is well established: it won’t remove one from the harsh reality and history of Black American life, or even counter gentrification, but deploying your well invested capital to purchase art and buy the neighborhood that your mother rents in is the only way to escape the cycle.

The promise of Black capitalism is that it is the only way towards Black people holding a meaningful amount of property to rival that of White people. For Black capitalists, if the market of racialized capitalism is unfavorable to Black subjects, they no longer had to participate in it.

They believed they could have an alternative framework (or perhaps racket) to turn to, such that they would not need (white) capitalism at all. The alternative wouldn’t only cater to wealthy exceptional Blacks, but all those willing to engage in the free market. Therefore, the model of

Black capitalism, spearheaded by exceptional Blacks like Jay-Z and those in his tax bracket, should easily create this reality. But this alternative framework has yet to materialize, and perhaps it never can.

Whiteness as Property

“Racial property” is a concept in which racial identity is tied to a material destiny, typically a set of protections that are tied to being of that race. This concept is adapted from

Cheryl Harris’ scholarship on the property interests of Whiteness in Whiteness as Property, ​ ​ 53 which itself owes its existence to Albion W. Tourgée, Homer Plessy’s attorney in Plessy v. ​ Ferguson. As Tourgée notes and Harris builds upon, “Whiteness” is the dominant manifestation ​ of racial property in the United States, and framing it as a property illuminates the ways in which

99 racial property is an extension of the tensions within late stage capitalism.

Harris finds that property is “a legal construct by which selected private interests are

100 protected and upheld." As constructs, they are artificial, and are enforced in order to protect the “settled expectations” of the property holder. The settled expectations for Whiteness as property is a bundle of privileges that support white supremacy and the idea of Whiteness as the baseline for humanity. Whiteness promises those who have it are born into a level of status and security, including those in the white underclass who have been deprived of it by the inequity baked into capitalism. As a property, “Whiteness” has four specific property functions. First are rights of disposition, in which Whiteness is (paradoxically) inalienable. Second is the right to use and enjoyment, since Whiteness is both a passive marker for identity and can be actively be deployed whenever the privileges afforded to being white are used. Third is reputation and status property, which recognizes the “reputational interest” or honor in having the object of whiteness, and reputation has market value; as Harris notes, this is why calling someone “Black” is read as

101 defamatory, as was the case for Homer Plessy. And finally, Whiteness as property includes the

Absolute Right to Exclude, or the exclusive use of the preceding rights. Harris writes:

"... mainly whiteness has been characterized, not by an inherent unifying characteristic, but by the exclusion of others deemed to be ‘not white.’ The possessors of whiteness were granted the legal right to exclude others from the privileges inhering in whiteness; whiteness became an exclusive club whose membership was closely and grudgingly guarded."102

99 Harris, 1993 p. 1707 100 Ibid., p. 1730 101 Harris, 1993 p. 1735 102 Ibid., p. 1736 54

This bundle of rights included with Whiteness as property protects the expectations of what Whiteness means and what the experience of having Whiteness secures. Because

Whiteness is reified as a property, it is rendered stable and consistent, and its static nature stands in sharp contrast to the turbulent status of Blackness. This is precisely why the model of racial property as maintained by Whiteness is desired as a template for the creation of Black racial property by Exceptional Blacks like Jay-Z, for themselves and all Black Americans.

Why it Doesn’t Work

I find that the creation of “Blackness as Property” is unviable, because there is a significant difference between Black people with property and Blackness as a property interest.

This is due to racial capitalism, “the process of deriving social and economic value from the

103 racial identity of another person," which flattens and commodifies Black identity. This is the same mechanism that supports Whiteness as Property, which claims that white people have social and economic capital because of their whiteness. Modern Black capitalism would suggest ​ ​ that this same level of value can be achieved for Black people through wealth, but wealth alone does not dismantle how racial capitalism supports being white over being nonwhite. Until racial capitalism is dismantled, Black people who own property cannot transform Blackness into a property interest on the same scale as Whiteness.

The pursuit of Black capitalism today aligns with the encroachment of the market into every aspect of contemporary life under neoliberalism. It supports the notion that the free market ultimately decides whose rights are acknowledged and protected under the law, and whose

103 Nancy Leong, "Racial Capitalism,"2013 Harvardlawreview.Org. https://harvardlawreview.org/2013/06/racial-capitalism/. 55 aren’t. But this notion is invested almost entirely in one’s finances as the sole factor in one’s status or reputation. Non-monetary resources and skills, like an appreciation for specific kinds of art, as well as the societal status granted to poor whites due to their whiteness, make it clear that money alone does not secure status. And given the origins of the free market, which is built upon the economic boom facilitated by the slave trade, and thus the protection of Whiteness and its exclusivity, Black capitalism appears to be an increasingly limited path towards Blackness as a protected property.

Taken with the free flow of corporate money in politics being driven by the interests of mostly white master capitalists, the promise of racial property for Black people through the market (and with it, Black liberation) is unlikely. Herbert J. Gans’ Race as Class makes this ​ ​ clear: race and class are intermingled on a fundamental level, as race is often used as a shorthand for class and social status. Class uplift is not merely about having money, because wealth is not the lone indicator of social class. Gans notes that skin color is one of many indicators of both economic and societal standing, including “language (itself a rough indicator of education),

104 dress, and various kinds of taste, from given names to cultural preferences, among others."

Black cultural formations, such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), fashion, and cultural preferences can and will be assigned with classlessness when displayed by Black people, despite the growing commercial appeal and ubiquity of these formations.

Perhaps Jay-Z can perform his liberation by going to a meeting with Warren Buffet while wearing Air Jordans, but other Black Americans must still conform to the politics of respectability for even a low-level job interview. And while Jay-Z can understand that investing

104 Gans, 1993 56 in a painting can lead to a high return on investment for his children, there is no guarantee that his appreciation for the work goes beyond its price tag, at least in the eyes of non black billionaires. Whiteness as a property includes reputation and status property, which recognizes the market value of being white. Blackness may have some reputational value due to its position as the nation’s cultural engine, but no matter how many paintings Jay-Z buys, he cannot tap into that status property that comes with being born white. This is in spite of the success and wealth that separates him from most Black Americans, which he might attribute to his ambition and

“hustle." In Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, Lester Spence ​ ​ writes:

“Black elected officials and civil rights leaders reproduce [the ideas of neoliberalism], participating in a remobilization project of sorts, one that consistently posits that the reason black people aren’t as successful as their white counterparts is because of a lack of hustle, is because they don’t quite have the work ethic necessary to succeed in the modern moment. [...] This remobilization project posits that there are two types of black people — black people who have the potential to be successful if they take advantage of their human capital, and black people who have no such potential." 105

These two understandings of the human capital (or market value) of being Black is what Jay-Z distinguishes himself by—“I’m a business, man!”—but it's important to note that Spence sees these understandings coming from other Black people. Because “the language of race extends to the long-term unemployed to the point where some could argue that the unemployed are now

‘black’," Jay-Z’s hustle politics don’t acknowledge that white people can see him for his market

106 value, but not his humanity.

Status property is inalienable, and the acculturated tastes, convictions, and expectations of (white) master capitalists isn’t necessarily shared with Black capitalists, even if they are in the same tax bracket. Double consciousness persists within Black capitalism, as the hustle of the

105 Spence, 2015, p. 25 106 Ibid., p. 24 (see footnote 24) 57

American Dream clashes with the murkiness of the Veil and the inability of capitalism to foster a collective and cohesive Black consciousness. Black capitalists find that financial freedom is the only hope, but Black capitalism is still capitalism, and takes on the mechanisms of the container it was produced within, that being white supremacy and the Color Line.

This critical weakness within Black capitalism is a feature, not a bug. During the Nixon administration, the desire for Black self-sufficiency included “reparations, control over financial

107 infrastructure, and a mandate to support and grow black businesses." These tenets were appropriated by the Nixon administration’s Southern Strategy, and molded into Black capitalism, which was an alternative to meaningful contributions from the government. Instead of providing housing, welfare, jobs, or property, Nixon “pointed blacks to the free market and wished them

108 luck." As Mehrsa Baradaran writes in the article “The Real Roots of Black Capitalism,"

“Black capitalism morphed into Ronald Reagan’s ‘enterprise zone’ policy, Bill Clinton’s ‘new market tax credits,’ and Barack Obama’s ‘promise zones’," and now, Donald Trump’s

109 “opportunity zones," all of which manifest as tax bonuses to large developers. The leveraging of entrepreneurial pursuits instead of meaningful reform have not produced a meaningful increase in Black wealth. If anything, it stymied it. 53 percent of Black American wealth was wiped out by subprime mortgages during the 2008 financial crisis, and by 2009, “35 percent of

110 black families had zero or negative wealth."' Black capitalism seems fruitful in theory, but without existing alongside massive government assistance, both Baradaran and I find it unfeasible for both collective Black uplift and Black economic ascendancy.

107 White, 2017 108 Baradaran, 2019 109 Ibid. 110 Baradaran, 2019 58

The activist roots of Black capitalism, and the very premise of Black exceptionalism, center this conception. Black people are not meant to succeed within capitalism, so they must elect to participate in their own economy; Black people are not meant to succeed at all, and those who defy this expectation will always be scarce. Later in his life, after his turn towards communism, Du Bois would have argued that Black capitalism, or at least the assimilation into the interests of capital, was anti-activist. Upon his turn towards more radical politics, Du Bois recanted his views on the Talented Tenth, and lamented the assimilation of the educated Black middle class into the elite: “Negroes of intelligence and prosperity had become American in their acceptance of exploitation as defensible, and in their imitation of American ‘conspicuous

111 expenditure’. They proposed to make money and spend it as it pleased them." Once exploitation of the many is consented to, the exceptionalism of the few becomes the status quo.

As a consequence, the development of a cross class coalition within the Black collective is troubled by the desire for individual security.

Race does not perfectly indicate class, and class is not merely economic status. But the correlation between race and class is still so strong because there is no way for Blackness to have the same property interest as Whiteness in American society, and the potential paths to said protections are too limited or rare to be meaningful. Near the end of Race as Class, Gans suggests that continued discrimination against

Black Americans via Black exceptionalism is a matter of market competition. He writes that “Keeping

African Americans from decent jobs and incomes as well as quality schools and housing makes more of these available to all the rest of the population [...] discrimination and segregation may decline significantly only if the rules of the competition change or if scarce resources, such as decent jobs, become plentiful enough to relax the competition, so that the African-American population can become as

111 Du Bois, W.E.B. 1968. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last ​ Decade of its First Century. New York: International. p. 370-1 ​ 59

112 predominantly middle class as the white population." But so long as the societal conception of

Blackness is anti-Black, movements to grant some form of racial property owed to Black

Americans are doomed to failure. In envisioning Black exceptionalism as a problem both created and resolved via the free market, Gans misses an opportunity to examine how the pursuit of

Black liberation (and thus, cohesive consciousness) has been narrowed to economic pursuits alone.

A solution that might address this narrow scope is the deployment of state provision, where equitable housing, health, and employment would be secured for all by the government. A series of social democratic programs would ensure equity for all, and would be an approach that does not hinge Black liberation on economics alone, at least in theory. Additionally, non-market state provisions would be collective by nature, unlike the singular hustle epitomized by Jay-Z.

My concern is that these government provisions have, historically, not been equitable or unbiased towards Black people. Take the stereotype of the “welfare queen” as a clear example of state provisions being used for oppressive ends. The term describes Black women who don’t

“have the potential to be successful if they take advantage of their human capital” as leeches who

113 have dozens of children on the taxpayers dime. And while poor whites are also dependent on a

114 strong welfare state, they will reject it as welfare becomes associated with poor Black mothers.

In truth, I find that the inadequacy of existing state provisions like welfare fail due to “a racist unwillingness to include Blacks as full citizens and to patriarchal norms about women's place in

112 Gans, “Race as Class.” 113 Spence, 2015, p. 25 114 Gilens, Martin. 1999. Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy. ​ Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 60

115 society." Any future social democratic project must reckon with the intersection of these biases, which produced a welfare state that cannot achieve a baseline of dignity for all citizens, much less be emancipatory for Black Americans. In Chapter 2, I engage further with state provisions in the form of reparations for slavery, a particular formation of state provisions that I find to be more promising, if only because of its race-concious premise.

Returning to my analysis of Black capitalism, I struggle to see how this form of uplift is anything but individual and rooted in good fortune. Unlike Du Bois’ visions of the Talented

Tenth or the Guiding Hundredth, Exceptional Blacks and Black capitalists strive for cohesive consciousness through a pursuit of American ideals and means, and as such, unintentionally

116 reinforce the binary between Black and American consciousnesses. This is ultimately why this contemporary striving fails to produce a cohesive Black psychic identity, because its vision of self-assertion is assimilation at best and pale imitation at worse. Perhaps, if the conversion of material wealth into Black racial property through the free market is impossible, the nation could do its parts to fulfill its Reconstruction era promises to Black people. This possibility is explored in the next chapter. Regardless, the continuing existence of the Color Line and its consequences, as well as the growing influence of neoliberal capitalism, have left the conditions of many Black

Americans stagnant. Jay-Z may be a business, but his rise cannot elucidate what it means to be a problem.

115 Roberts, Dorothy E. "Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship." (1995): 1563. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7683&context=ylj 116 “We Negroes [...] have tried to become more American than the Americans.” (Du Bois, 1948) 61

Chapter 2: Cohesive Consciousness as the End of Reparations

“What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”

- Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”

Parallel Splits in Consciousness

If The Souls of Black Folk is the definitive examination of Black life in the 20th century, ​ ​ then Ta Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” is the definitive examination of Black existence the 21st. This association isn’t merely due to the popularity of Coates’ article, although the piece is critically lauded and celebrated, and both works are, or at least began as, articles

117 published in The Atlantic. “The Case for Reparations” and Souls both reckon with what to do ​ ​ ​ ​ with the Color Problem, and the consequences therein. As proposed in Souls, the primary ​ ​ consequence of the Color Problem is the divisiveness of double consciousness, the inability to resolve Black American identity with the ongoing sins of the nation against Black lives. Du

Bois’ strivings to resolve this tension seek an intellectual and spiritual overhaul of Black life, in

117 Many of the essays that make up The Souls of Black Folk were previously published in The Atlantic, including ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ the first chapter, which introduced both the Veil and double consciousness. That essay’s original title is “Strivings of the Negro People," and it can be found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/ ) ​ 62

118 pursuit of political power, education, and general freedom. These strivings are further intermingled today, sharing strands of DNA as they change and evolve. For example, the pursuit of wealth via Black capitalism, a contemporary striving examined in the last chapter, centers both the accumulation of power and the deployment of talents by gifted Black people, all in pursuit of imagined collective freedom.

The 21st century strivings for cohesive consciousness must be more sophisticated out of necessity, as the static nature of those past strivings have been demonstrably unsatisfying. “The ​ ​ Case For Reparations” is the most popular work of the 21st century that directly addresses this lack of satisfaction in Black life at every level, all while taking a sophisticated past into the context of an even more fraught present. And Coates’s scholarship is centered in this chapter’s analysis because it represents both a contemporary striving for cohesive consciousness, and an explicit reframing of double consciousness. Up to now, Du Bois, and this thesis, have posited double consciousness as an internal strife, envisioning the conflict as an individual struggle, or at least one that only has consequences for the Black American collective. Coates reckons with double consciousness as not just an injury to Black psychic life, but an injury to the nation itself:

“Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our

119 self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history."

Coates’ reparations go beyond adjusting the promise of Special Field Order No. 15 adjusted for inflation, and challenge the United States to give itself a critical analysis and act

120 accordingly. In this chapter, Du Bois’ vision of double consciousness for Black people is put

118 These strivings are established in the Introduction, under ‘Du Bois’ Strivings’, p. 12. 119 Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case For Reparations," The Atlantic, June 23, 2014, ​ ​ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/. 120 Special Field Orders, No. 15, 1865 63 in conversation with Coates’ vision of double consciousness for the nation, in order to determine the scale of both the project of cohesive consciousness and how the striving for reparations operates as a solution.

Why Pursue Reparations?

How wrongs are righted is the question at the heart of any mechanism that seeks justice.

Ideally, this mechanism protects victims of injustice and offers appropriate comeuppance for those who committed said injustice. But how does such a system address scale, where the crime occurs across centuries, the victims suffer generations of harm, and those that operate the mechanism are the indicted party? Such is the problem of reparations. It is difficult to navigate just how nations that were active participants in genocide, mass interment, war crimes, and other large scale abuses of human beings right their wrongs, because it frankly seems impossible. Such crimes are devastating, and for those harmed, their vision of reparation can vary wildly. To clearly illuminate why reparations are seen as both desirable and a matter of justice, this section envisions strivings for reparations as varying combinations of the desire for remembrance and the desire for restitution. Restitution can accompany remembrance, and vice versa, although they are not strictly coupled to one another.

Remembrance as a kind of reparations is typically manifested in memorials and initiatives that explicitly locates the crime in a nation’s history. Unlike the remembering of fallen veterans or national icons, reparations that center remembering are typically somber indictments of a dark past. German Holocaust museums, like the one in Auschwitz, do not downplay the systemic extermination of millions of Jewish and other peoples. German school curriculums 64 emphasize these truths as a part of the socialization of German youth. The German government has required the inclusion of Holocaust education in all secondary schools since 1992, an act of increasing importance as generational distance from the rise of the National Socialist party grows

121 and far right rhetoric experiences a global resurgence. Remembrances can be controversial: the debate over the removal of Confederate statues in the South is one such example, which exploded into the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that culminated in the death of activist Heather Hayer.

Restitution, meanwhile, is a matter of the redistribution of resources to those harmed and/or their descendants. The goal of restitution is less centered on the creation of a memorial of wrongdoing that is tied to a national consensus, and more on directly addressing the material consequences of the crime on the harmed. Returning to Germany, Coates dissects the economic restitution paid by the German state to Israel near the end of “The Case For Reparations." For both Germans and Jewish survivors in 1952 Germany, there was disagreement on the desirability of monetary reparations. “Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything," and

122 only five percent of those polled felt any kind of responsibility for what the Jews had suffered.

The popular national consensus imagined Hitler and his party as an anomaly that had been sufficiently punished and that the bulk of the nation could wash their hands of. For Jewish survivors, taking restitution would be accepting blood money, “laundering the reputation of

123 Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead." Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, protested in the streets while Israel discussed reparations with

121 Monica Vitale and Rebecca Clothey, 2019, "Holocaust Education In Germany: Ensuring Relevance And Meaning In An Increasingly Diverse Community," FIRE: Forum For International Research In Education 5 (1): 44-62. ​ ​ 122 Coates, 2014 123 Ibid. 65

124 West Germany, declaring that “‘there will be no ‘reparations’ from Germany’." For some ​ survivors, no lump sum, or payment over decades, could ever restore what was plundered.

In the end, Germany paid 3.45 billion deutsche marks, roughly $7 billion in 2019 dollars, to Israel. Individual claims by survivors and the families of victims followed. The sum total of the entirety of Germany’s reparations payout is around $89 billion, a fraction of the total damages (an Israeli government report estimates that the total sum of damages is between 240

125 126 and 320 billion). Those initial reparations radically altered the material destiny of the young state of Israel. Coates writes:

“‘By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli

merchant fleet," writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million.

"From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment

in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total

investment in the railways.’ [...] Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The ​ Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made

with reparations money."127

The effect of financial restitution is dramatic, and while it does not erase the sins of the past, it attempts to address the gap in material conditions between the oppressed and the oppressor.

I cite Germany and the Holocaust here because of the scale of the crime (the systemic extermination of millions of marginalized people) and the alignment of the two strands of reparations, restitution and remembrance. Moral pressure pushed the German state to offer not

124 Coates, 2014 125 Dylan Matthews, "Six Times Victims Have Received Reparations," Vox, May 23, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/5/23/5741352/six-times-victims-have-received-reparations-including-four-in-the-us. 126 "Israel Sets Holocaust Damages At $240 Billion." 2005. Nytimes.Com. ​ ​ ​ https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/21/world/africa/israel-sets-holocaust-damages-at-240-billion.html. 127 Coates 2014 ​ 66 just a social redressing of history, but a direct distribution of wealth to those harmed. The desire for reparations is a direct engagement with the cognitive dissonance of a nation violating the humanity of its own denizens or innocent parties. Because reparations are typically pursued through legal activism (as the formal mechanism of “righting wrongs”), there is a direct continuity from the legal striving for cohesive consciousness and the pursuit of reparations from the United States for its engagement in slavery.

The desire for, and even the deployment of, reparations for slavery is nearly as old as the

United States. Despite the concept’s recent prominence following Coates’ publication, the idea of repaying the victims of chattel slavery stretches back to as early as 1783. That year, the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned for the state of Massachusetts to reward her with the profit of her enslaved labor after her master fled the country during the Revolution. According to

Coates’ historical research into the case, she was “granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12

128 shillings” for her 50 years as human property, or roughly $2,800 USD adjusted for inflation.

This was paid out to her by the estate of her former master.

Coates cites Royall’s case as evidence that the notion that the United States’ crimes owed something to former slaves was not always seen as an absurd request, even if it was rarely executed. See the later case of Henrietta Wood, who was legally made free in 1848 but was kidnapped and forced back into bondage from 1853 to 1869. The next year, Wood sued her kidnapper in federal court for $20,000, and after eight years of litigation, she was awarded

129 $2,500, or roughly $65,000 in today’s dollars, in 1878. Wood v. Ward is the largest sum granted as restitution for slavery to this day, but it reveals that there is a meaningful, if meager,

128 Coates, 2014 ​ 129 W. Caleb McDaniel, "In 1870, Henrietta Wood Sued For Reparations—And Won." Smithsonian Magazine, September 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/henrietta-wood-sued-reparations-won-180972845/. 67 precedent for reparations for descendants of slaves. The rarity of this outcome is indicative of

Reconstruction’s failure to deliver on reparations on a larger, meaningful scale, such as the rollback on the distribution of confiscated property to free Black people after the Civil War.

Du Bois’ Reparations

In most of his writings on Reconstruction, Du Bois is quick to say that its goals–granting emancipation, suffrage, education, and land to Black men–were abandoned or betrayed by the nation. In his essay Black Reconstruction, Du Bois writes of a second civil war, in which the ​ ​ white Southerners joined into a cross class coalition that dismantled the original aims of

Reconstruction. “It must be remembered and never forgotten that the civil war in the South which overthrew Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this

130 foundation." The Freedmen's Bureau and post-war amendments to the Constitution were promises to protect Black people from the “unlimited exploitation” of their bodies and labor, but the letter of the law was not enough to insure this. In both Souls and Black Reconstruction, Du ​ ​ ​ ​ Bois writes how Black people, in the South especially, were consolidated into a class of laborers that had their livelihoods tied to their former masters. At the end of Chapter 2 of Souls, when discussing the failure of the Freedmen's Bureau, Du Bois starkly diagnoses the betrayal at the heart of Reconstruction:

“… in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights

130 Du Bois, W. E. B. 1935. Black reconstruction: an essay toward a history of the part which black folk played in ​ the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. p. 671 ​ http://www.aspresolver.com/aspresolver.asp?BLTC;S7874. 68

and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life."131

Frequently in Black Reconstruction, Du Bois cites the desire for protection from the government ​ ​ during this period. During a convention in Mobile, Alabama, Black citizens petitioned Congress for a securing of their liberty, noting the arson of their churches and the fear of white terrorism they lived under. “[...] in many parts of the state their people cannot safely leave the vicinity of their homes; they are knocked down and beaten by their white fellow-citizens without having offered any injury or insult as a cause; they are arrested and imprisoned upon false accusations; their money is extorted for their release, or they are condemned to imprisonment at hard labor; that many of their people are now in a condition of practical slavery, being compelled to serve

132 their former owners without pay and to call them 'master.'”

The Freedmen’s Bureau was meant to be this “government guardianship” over Black

Americans after the Civil War, an institution that would embody the nation’s promise to make

133 things right with its “helpless wards.” But the promised support and nurturing of a newly emancipated race never came, and without it, Black Americans continued to live in unfreedom.

The promise of Reconstruction was broken, and the Freedmen's Bureau was just one of many broken promises. These broken promises are now reflected in our contemporary formation of capitalism.

American capitalism can be described as “low road capitalism," where “wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions; inequality reigns and

131 Du Bois, Souls, p. 61 ​ ​ 132 Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st Session, Part I, p. 127. ​ ​ 133 Du Bois, Souls, p. 60 ​ ​ 69

134 poverty spreads." This echoes Du Bois’ thoughts in Black Reconstruction in the chapter “Back ​ ​ Toward Slavery”: “The wage of the Negro worker, despite the war amendments, was to be reduced to the level of bare subsistence by taxation, peonage, caste, and every method of

135 discrimination." Through Du Bois’ provided lens, Black laborers emerge as the first “low skill” workers, whose exploitation is reified into the nation’s economic structure.

This inequality is a necessary element of the United States’ economy, and this form of capitalism has secured the United States’ position as the most prosperous nation on Earth. The foundation of this prosperity, and the original model for the inequity within, was built upon the exploitation of human beings under slavery. Following Reconstruction, those slaves became

136 citizens in the eyes of the law, and their humanity could no longer be so easily disregarded.

This fact certainly did not stop the reign of terror over Black people in the United

States—through the years, lynchings, segregation, housing discrimination, and the prison industrial complex saw to that.

But a particular facet of the Color Problem applies to the accumulation of property and capital, the fundamental process through which American citizens exercise their rights. As citizens, Black people could now own what they once were, property. With property, Black families could accumulate capital, and with that secure a full life for themselves and their descendants, or at least that was the assumption. The decree of Special Field Order No. 15 infamously promised up to forty acres of land abandoned during the Civil War to Black families, a direct path to wealth creation that the Freedmen’s Bureau, and frankly, Du Bois’ focus on

134 Desmond, 2019 ​ 135 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, p. 671 ​ ​ 136 Ibid. ​ 70

137 education in Souls, could not guarantee. Special Field Order No. 15 would be an initial step ​ ​ towards a government guardianship over Black Americans that would tackle and, in time, dismantle the Color Line.

But the order was never carried out, another failing to meaningfully imbue Black people with that which they were owed. In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson ordered that land confiscated by the federal government be returned to its original owners, killing the nascent

138 hope for forty acres before it could ever be realized. Du Bois clearly understood the pain of this loss, as he writes about both the failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction on the whole. In the chapter on the Black Belt, he illustrates how slavery swiftly evolved into sharecropping, where emancipated Black Americans had little choice but to continue working the land that they were once enslaved upon, again trapped in a position where they would never have claim to the wealth they produced. Their former masters became “part banker, part landlord, and part despot," to whom Black sharecroppers are dependent for rations, shelter, and

139 money. Du Bois lays out the state of the Black Belt, and thus the state of most Black

Americans post-Reconstruction, unambiguously: “The direct result of this system is an all-cotton

140 scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant."

Where Du Bois falls short in his recognition of this betrayal is where he puts the duty of repair and resolution, or rather, where he doesn’t. Du Bois engages the second sight granted to him by the Veil to imagine how the average (or white) American imagines the Color Problem, particularly in the South. To this American, the problem is that the land ripe for development

137 Special Field Orders, 1865 138 "Reconstruction | Definition, Summary, & Facts." 2020. Encyclopedia Britannica. ​ https://www.britannica.com/event/Reconstruction-United-States-history#ref1096633. 139 Du Bois, Souls, p. 131 ​ ​ 140 Ibid., p. 132 71 needs men to work it, and by their estimation, there are newly freed Black laborers who would be perfect for the job. Clearly, such a resolution is short sighted, and speaks to a general lack of interest in the societal implications of Black Americans as newly enfranchised citizens and human beings. Instead, this vision of the Color Problem proposes that the solution is the further exploitation of Black people for the sake of economic growth. Du Bois is less critical of this burden on Black American laborers as much as he is critical of their lack of training: they are

141 “willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful." He insists that this deficiency of character must be remedied by training and leadership, but refuses to specify who should take on this role:

“After Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume this group leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to inquire whose duty it was—whether that of the white ex-master who had profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose edict freed the bondmen; [...] but I insist it was the duty of some one to see that these workingmen were not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without skill, without economic organization, without even the bald protection of law, order, and decency, [...] destined to be thrown almost immediately into relentless and sharp competition with the best of modern workingmen under an economic system where every participant is fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor."142

As seen above, Du Bois offers a handful of possibilities for who should lead this kind of reparations, from former masters or wealthy whites or the national government. Perhaps he finds that for his purposes, these actors are interchangeable, and this can be tied to how Du Bois imagines the form in which reparations are to be delivered. In Souls, Du ​ ​ Bois prioritizes education as the ultimate tool of emancipation, and his vision of reparation is tied to it. Capital and labor are acknowledged as critical factors in the lives of black folk, but are deemphasized in favor of the idea of “training” the race for the

141 Du Bois, Souls, p. 145 ​ ​ 142 Ibid. 72 world. Du Bois recognizes American capitalism as a system that dehumanizes laborers,

Black and white: “Into the hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black, have fallen; [...] For the laborers as such, there is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and

143 dividends." It seems that Du Bois doesn’t expect this status quo to change, and only hopes that free Black people are made ready for its coldness.

Ideally, education–especially higher education for the Talented Tenth–would produce political and economic power, which would in turn grant Black people the protection and oversight enjoyed by their white peers. Without these protections, newly freed Black people faced “cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which can be made by conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary

144 until escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime." Du Bois continues:

“I have seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and pay for a farm in installments three separate times, and then in the face of law and decency the enterprising American who sold it to him pocketed the money and deed and left the black man landless, to labor on his own land at thirty cents a day. [...] such proceedings can happen, and will happen, in any community where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom and race-prejudice beyond the pale of sympathy and race-brotherhood. So long as the best elements of a community do not feel in duty bound to protect and train and care for the weaker members of their group, they leave them to be preyed upon by 145 these swindlers and rascals." The intraracial solidarity he gestures towards in the last sentence places the burden of social education on well off and educated Blacks, since no one else (the ex-masters, white philanthropists, or the national government) is willing to lead “shiftless” Black people towards a societal standing that is less ripe for exploitation. In a way, Du Bois’ vision of

143 Du Bois, Souls, p. 146 ​ ​ 144 Ibid. 145 Du Bois, Souls, p. 146. ​ ​ 73 reparations was as much an internal project as it was an external one: Black people needed to fix themselves before they could have others fix them.

Du Bois makes no illusions about education being a perfect kind of reparations, or even as an ideal form of repair. The failure of both Freedmen’s Bureau and Special Field

Order No. 15 to secure property for Black people, and the ever present threat of white terrorism, meant that the distribution of said property to those who toiled over it for generations was improbable. And education could only do so much to resolve racism, secure the ballot, and protect generations of Black laborers from exploitation by the

White merchant class. By emphasizing education as the primary means of uplifting the race, Du Bois’ analysis doesn’t say enough about how the concept of “government guardianship” could be applied to a more thorough and well executed kind of reparations for Black people. Given the then-recent failures of government guardianship, his stance is credible. But Du Bois’ lack of a case for reparations, as well as his locating the burden of raising the race on emancipated Blacks and not their former owners, is highlighted when put against Coates’ proposal, which emphasizes the role of property and capital in Black

American life since Reconstruction, and squarely identifies reparations as the burden of the nation.

Coates’ Reparations

In “The Case for Reparations," Coates charts out just how deep the wound against Black

Americans is, and diagnoses the nation with its own kind of double consciousness. Coates’ analysis refutes Du Bois’ investment in education specifically, and does so by taking into 74 account how that particular project failed to manifest in uplift through the 20th and 21st century, a temporal position Du Bois lacked. In doing so, his analysis shifts the burden of raising the race from Black Americans onto every actor in the United States, charging them with a crime that

146 “indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration." In implicating everyone in the nation, Coates’ pushes for a national reckoning that is just as significant, if not more so, than the distribution of financial reparations.

Coates defines reparations twice in “Case”, first in the context of the Contract Buyers

League in North Lawndale, Chicago. The first section of the article, titled “And That’s Just One of My Losses," follows the life of Clyde Ross, as he faces the plunder of Mississippi as a child and the plunder of contract sellers as an adult. At the end of this section, Coates lays out exactly what Ross and his fellow victims of contract sellers are demanding in their suit against those who cheated them out of a home:

“They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the ​ crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer seeking 147 the protection of the law. They were seeking reparations."

This first definition can be reiterated as such: reparations charge society with a crime against one’s community, a crime that is publicly ruled as such, in which the executors of said crime are considered “offensive to society” and are made to give equitable restitution for the crime to the community they harmed. This definition couples restitution and remembrance, especially the latter. By this definition, restitution must meet all of the preceding standards to be considered reparations, especially the standard about public recognition of a crime against a community. As

146 Coates, 2014 147Coates, 2014 75

Coates states later in the article, reparations are not a “handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe”; they are, by design, a public admission of wrongdoing, one that begins conversations and does not end them.

The second definition focuses on this potential conversation, and how reparations may be imagined as a matter of both broken contracts and bifurcated consciousness, which is of particular interest for this study of double consciousness. In the ninth section of “Case”, Coates’s second definition of reparations follows his suggestion that if white supremacy may be “a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it," then a new nation must be imagined:

“Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans."148

Again, Coates emphasizes the confrontation with wrongdoing at the heart of reparations. He’s explicit about the possibility that it might not heal the injury of generations of wrongdoing and plunder against Black Americans, but he finds reparations to be necessary for the nation in a way that Du Bois did not, a consequence of their positions at the opposite ends of Black history.

While Du Bois was writing about the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction’s failure,

Coates constructs his case as a timeline from that period, through to the civil rights movement, and ending in Chicago today. Coates observes the consequences of institutional oppression over nearly a hundred years, a period of time that Du Bois could only imagine. With that said, Du

Bois’s emphasis on education seems far less cold given stories like Clyde Ross’, the central

148 Coates 2014 76 interviewee of “Case”, who grew up sharecropping in Mississippi and was cheated out of his home in Chicago by contract sellers. When Clyde was a child, “Mississippi authorities claimed

149 his father owed $3,000 in back taxes," a claim that his father could not read. As they knew well enough to not expect fairness from the police, they had no way to contest the claim or protect themselves. Du Bois recognized how a lack of education presented a fatal weakness for

Black people’s ability to secure their safety and their livelihood- perhaps if Clyde’s father could read, and the “ignorant, honest Negro” from the Black Belt in Georgia could understand how he

150 was being scammed, they would not have been cheated out of what was owed to them.

Likewise, Du Bois’ line of thinking could be extrapolated to victims of redlining and contract sellers. In their honest striving to purchase a home, Black migrants to Northern cities were exploited for their ignorance of real estate and tricked into buying on contract, “a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of

151 renting—while offering the benefits of neither.” Perhaps if Clyde Ross had been prepared, his knowledge could have offered him some protection.

Perhaps due to the continuity of Black struggle into the 21st century, both Coates and I find that being educated would not have been enough. When Clyde’s father was approached with back taxes he likely did not owe, his ability to contest the claim wasn’t just limited by his inability to read. “He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse”–

152 and, more pressingly, he knew what would happen to his family if he fought. They lived in

Mississippi between 1882 and 1968, when the state had more lynchings than any other state in

149 Coates 2014 150 Du Bois, Souls, p. 146 ​ ​ 151 Coates 2014 152 Ibid. 77

153 the union. The South, and the nation by extension, was a kleptocracy, a society built on the plunder and free exploitation of Black people. Coates finds that the terrorizing of Black people has been foundational to the nation’s institutions at every level, and consciously describes it as

154 theft. In a reflection on “The Case For Reparations” four years after its original publication, ​ ​ Coates says he calls oppression theft to make its consequences, as opposed to its intent, abundantly clear: “[...] this is not just mean. This is not just maltreatment. This is the theft of

155 resources out of that community."

How can education be deployed in the face of housing discrimination and terrorism that would dismantle resistance at every turn? Clyde Ross admits that he was “ashamed” for being swindled in his attempt to own a home, despite spending his entire life equipping himself to avoid such a thing:

“I’d come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how dumb I was. When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open."156

This shame at one’s continued suffering is debilitating, and ultimately, dehumanizing. And it affected every Black person in Ross’ neighborhood: their desire to maintain the facade of owning a home prevented them from organizing as a collective for years. Coates’ focus on outlining the unjust means and brutal consequences of one system– Chicago’s housing policy– tells a story about generations of harm done to a community, all while squarely locating blame on the systems that deprived Black people of their hard fought civil liberties. Due to this generational focus that extends to today, It’s no wonder that Coates’ vision of reparations is centered less on

153 Ibid. 154 A claim that is echoed in the thesis of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project in The New York Times in 2019, where ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ the year of the nation’s conception is shifted from 1776 to 1619, the year that slaves first arrived in the colonies. 155 Coates, 2014 ​ 156 Coates, 2014 ​ 78 the training of a lost, “backwards” people with “wildly weak and untrained minds," and more on

157 a national reckoning with a history of planned damage to their collective dignity.

Coates indicated that the passage of the congressional bill H.R. 40, or the “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act," would be a simple first step towards that reckoning. Authored by the late congressman John Conyers Jr., the bill outlines the creation of a commission that would simply “study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living

African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for

158 other purposes." Even though Conyers’ bill would merely be a study into reparations, and not a payout, it has never made it to the House floor, even though Conyers originally presented the bill in 1989 and in every congressional term that followed. The bill was most recently presented to

Congress by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee on January 3, 2019, and it has still not been passed. Coates posits that the reluctance to consider the commission is a national defense

159 mechanism, a “hand-waving at the past” in order to ignore slavery’s present consequences.

A nation that was born decrying the theft that is taxation without representation sustains itself on that very act, and by equating this contradiction to the crime of theft, the nation’s double consciousness becomes a crime. But Coates doesn’t consider this crime a matter of guilty or not guilty, although the nation is surely indicted for its attachment to the plunder of Black people.

The closing of the wealth gap promised by reparations quantifies “something we feel but cannot

157 Du Bois, Souls, p. 94 ​ ​ 158 U.S. Congress, House, Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, HR 40, 116th Cong., 1st sess., introduced in House January 3, 2019, https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hr40/BILLS-116hr40ih.pdf 159 Coates, 2014 79 say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the

160 American psyche and the banishment of white guilt." The promise of this healing of the

American psyche is a national striving towards cohesive consciousness that would resolve the contradictions of the nation, if that is at all possible on this scale. But how would reparations inform the project of Black cohesive consciousness specifically?

Would Reparations Create Cohesive Consciousness?

Coates suggests that reparations would at least begin the national project of cohesive consciousness. In his interview in the New Yorker, Coates lays out the steps of this national striving: First, the crime must be recognized and acknowledged as a crime; then, the creation of a commission to navigate what payment looks like; and third, and perhaps most crucially, reparations must be tied actual policy and a shift in how history is taught. “You had to actually teach people about what happened," especially those who committed or allowed the

161 transgression in the first place.

This would be a massive reconciliation of America’s stated values with the values that it maintains, and an open national conversation about the discrepancies between the two is ambitious, to say the least. At best, it would represent a new beginning for the United States; at worse, it would permanently establish that America is a nation formed for white men, not Black.

Some, like Clyde Ross, firmly believe that reparations will never happen, a conviction that is

160 Coates, 2014 161 Ibid. 80 most definitely owed to what they’ve witnessed over the decades. Others, like Coates, are open to the creation of a commission to discuss reparations, like the H.R. 40 bill.

As it stands, it seems too early to tell if reparations could kickstart a striving for national cohesive consciousness, but strangely, the reckoning of reparations seems disconnected from that same striving for Black Americans. Yes, reparations represent the striving of generations of

Black people to receive restitution from their oppressors, but by centering the healing of the nation, the healing of Black consciousness is assumed to be a secondary consequence. This is not an airtight guarantee, for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, the actual distribution of reparations, should it happen, may be complicated in such a way that it is not distributed to all who would call themselves Black

Americans, such as those who do not have ancestry that stretches far enough back, to those who are incarcerated or considered felons. Unlike reparations paid to Israel by Germany, the crime and its consequences stretch across centuries, and the development of the African diaspora complicates distribution. Like the vision of a new black exceptionalism in Chapter 1, reparations may not be a universal project, even if it intends to be. Second, restitution for the crime of white supremacy does not promise that the crime won’t happen again, or that the harm done to its victims is erased. “Negro poverty is not white poverty” and the meaningful differences between the socio economic worlds of Black and white America wouldn’t just disappear with the closing

162 of the wealth gap. In the same way that nouveau-rich Black elites aren’t guaranteed protection from racism, monetary reparations can’t entirely nullify long held bigotry and systemic discrimination, even with revamped educational institutions. In fact, the acceptance of

162 Coates 2014 81 reparations could be read as an acceptance of the centuries of suffering that Black Americans survived. If a monetary value can be put onto the United States’ history of racism, Black opponents to reparations, like Jewish opponents to German reparations, could argue that taking reparations would be a laundering of America’s reputation and “mortgaging the memory of their

163 dead." Any implementation of reparations on a national scale would need to effectively address these factors if it wants to remove the Veil and foster the development of cohesive Black consciousness. The effectiveness with which reparations are distributed, how they could act as a definitive end on an era of anti-Black racism, and how they can exist without devolving into the erasure of history are all nuanced, complicated considerations for how reparations may manifest.

With this in mind, reparations seems to be a noble pursuit of an ideal society, where a post-Emancipation United States can again recognize what is owed to the Black and indigenous people upon which the nation was built. For my part, I find that Coates’ focus on America’s psychic profile is an unfortunate limitation of his article. To be fair, Coates is very successful in his goal of making a case for H.R. 40 and a wider national conversation about reparations, and focusing on America’s contradictions is a striking way to do so. But the ultimate success of reparations as a concrete set of acts will be measured by how it informs the economic and psychic realities of Black Americans, and Coates only touches on the former in “Case”. Given this, I think an ideal form of reparations would focus on those two dimensions of Black

American life. Doing so requires payouts from the nation, universities, corporations, and any other parties that directly profited from slavery (as well as private prisons, sharecropping, and predatory loans). Alongside this would be a thorough national examination of white supremacy

163 Coates 2014 82 as the foundation of the nation on every level of society, especially in schools and government.

Curriculum would be entirely overhauled: and teaching about white supremacy and the critical contributions of Black and marginalized people throughout the nation’s history would be a national requirement, like Germany’s mandates on teaching about the Holocaust.

Furthermore, I would borrow the fundamental ideas of Du Bois’ Guiding Hundredth from “The Talented Tenth Memorial Address” and deploy them alongside reparations. In that speech, Du Bois suggested the creation of a new organization composed of Black Americans that would lead an economic revolution, one that would protect wealth redistribution to the historically marginalized by dismantling capitalism. Effectively, my vision of reparations would have to go beyond representing “America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders”; they would be the end of America as we know

164 it. Completely overhauling the idea of America changes what it means to be American, and perhaps, would change what it means to be a problem.

My ideal vision does not reflect how I actually believe reparations will manifest. If any vision of it becomes actualized, I find that it would likely hew closer to Coates’ case: H.R. 40 passes and the committee gives a recommendation, but it emphasizes an education based approach to restitution. A national review of public education curriculum, free job and skill training for Black Americans, and mandatory workshops for real estate agents, banks, CEOs, and whoever else would both name white supremacy as an “offense against society” without presenting a meaningful challenge to the nation’s history. It would be reparations as manifested through white guilt, instead of reparations as an interrogation of Whiteness. This belief is

164 Coates 2014 83 primarily informed by my belief in the power of embedded anti-Blackness. Doing the work of restitution beyond mere acknowledgement is unlike both America’s precedent (see the continued existence of Columbus Day and the open display of the Confederate flag) and the modus operandi of neoliberalism, which is primarily focused on market forces and not justice.

Neoliberalism would particularly limit this project: if there is a general societal belief that there are “two types of black people — black people who have the potential to be successful if they take advantage of their human capital, and black people who have no such potential” as

Lester Spence suggests, then restitution would likely focus on granting that potential to the latter

165 group. Reparations that focus on raising human capital, instead of dismantling economic prosperity built on slavery, would be disappointing, but it would be the only manifestation of them that addresses its growing popularity and doesn’t threaten to unravel the entire nation, so its much more plausible. If reparations can happen at all, only time can tell if it could produce cohesive consciousness for Black people, or the nation.

165 Spence, 2015, p. 25

84

Chapter 3: Gendering Double Consciousness, Black Maternals, and the Striving for Freedom

“The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When, now, two of these movements—women and color—combine in one, the combination has deep meaning."

- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Damnation of Women ​

Gendering Cohesive Consciousness

In its original conception, double consciousness represents the clash between race and nationality specifically; the twoness of being both American and Negro are the “warring ideals” that define strivings for cohesive consciousness. Du Bois’ theory, like all notable theoretical frameworks, is a reflection of his era and perspective, and as I addressed in Chapter 2, contemporary leaders in Critical Race Theory (such as Ta-Nehisi Coates) have the benefit of hindsight and new ways of thinking. As such, it is essential that readings of Du Bois are both aware of his biases and critical of them. For double consciousness, Toni Morrison’s critique of

166 Black male writers being preoccupied by the white gaze comes to mind. Morrison’s comparison between that preoccupation and her own focus unveils another of Du Bois’ biases: for all his contributions to the Black American canon, his imagination of how Black people strive for cohesive consciousness is colored by a general lack of acknowledgement of Black women as leaders, theorists, and agents in their own right. Strivings for cohesive consciousness are

166 Morrison, 2012 85 informed by all aspects of identity, and the contradictions at the heart of Black American life are

167 not solely defined by race and national identity. Chapters 1 and 2 evaluated class uplift and legislative reparations respectively as means to achieve Black cohesive consciousness, and this chapter, which addresses Black social movements as gendered struggles, must begin with critiques of Du Bois’ shortcomings in addressing gender. Chief among these failings is Du Bois’ ambivalence towards the political and collective independence of Black women.

Du Bois’ profeminist perspective is progressive for both his time and our present, in that

168 it promotes gender equality and a woman’s right to her bodily autonomy. Du Bois’ advocacy against patriarchy and stifling domesticity is evident throughout his work, but is most famously seen in his essay “The Damnation of Women” in his book Darkwater. “Only at the sacrifice of ​ ​ ​ ​ intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of modern women bear

169 children," he writes. “This is the damnation of women." Domesticity is a paradox: how can a society pride itself on the transformative power of labor and self-ownership when half of the population finds their labor restricted to their capacity to reproduce and manage a home? The ​ ​ essay, like Souls, critiques a set of societal contradictions that obfuscate the possibility of ​ ​ freedom and permit targeted violence, with a focus on sexual, alongside racial, politics. And like double consciousness, every permitted existence for women straddles praise and punishment:

“All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils

167 Double consciousness' direct consequences often manifest in the dimension of class, so Du Bois’ conception of it does include at least three dimensions. For our purposes, we can read class as part of the “American” dimension. 168 “Profeminist” (as opposed to feminist) denotes male advocates of women’s equality. 169 Du Bois, Williams Edwrads Burghardt, “The Damnation of Women.” In Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, ​ ​ 111. Pennsylvania State University, 2007. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/22996786/darkwater-penn-state-university. 86

170 virgins." Du Bois has an eye for the paradoxes that fuel both white supremacy and patriarchy, and he critiques them in unison, if not as one system.

Defining Black Americans by their relation to white people permits their dehumanization and perpetuates their status as plundered victims, and it would seem that Du Bois would say the same is true when women are defined by their relations to men. The effect is compounded for

Black women, who exist at the overlap between these spheres, and thus exist in an intense and specific space of alienation. The new internal contradictions that result from this overlap between womanhood, Blackness, and national identity should inform how double consciousness is imagined, since hostility to one’s sex and gender has some consequence on how one strives for cohesive consciousness. The depth and utility of double consciousness transforms under a gendered lens. Black Liberation activist Anna Julia Cooper puts it best: “Only the black woman can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with

171 me’."

But in The Damnation of Women, Du Bois’ foremost profeminist text, Black women are ​ ​ ultimately defined by their relations to the (implicitly male) Black American collective: when he quotes Anna Julia Cooper, she is named as “one of our women” instead of being actually

172 identified. Her contribution is honored without distinguishing her as its originator. The use of

“our” suggests a possessive relationship, a diminishing of agency that chafes with Du Bois’

170 Du Bois, “The Damnation of Women”, 111. 171 Anna Giulia Cooper and Mary Helen Washington, A Voice from the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ​ ​ 1988). 172 "Pageantry, Maternity, and World History." In Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, ​ ​ edited by Gillman Susan and Weinbaum Alys Eve, 380. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv6dj.15. 87 profeminist proclamations. While Du Bois properly attributes Black women afterwards, they are either historically exceptional or iconic, like Harriet Tubman, or privileged by their interrelations within institutions like the church (church mothers). Du Bois identifies strongly with the movement for women’s equality, but his profeminism is colored by a masculinist understanding of race, where men are centered as the norm. Du Bois is a staunch critic of the oppression of white men, and finds an alliance between the burgeoning American women’s rights movement and Black men to be critical, but his writing suggests that what made him most upset were acts of sexual violence against Black women committed by white men. “The most guarded right of white men in this land and others” he writes in a 1912 issue of The Crisis, is “the right to seduce ​ ​ 173 174 black women without legal, social or moral penalty." But he places Black men as the victims of that violence: he continues by suggesting that Black men should “kill lecherous white

175 invaders of their homes and then take their lynching gladly like men. It’s worth it”! In a 1922 issue of The Crisis, he identified the foundation of the color problem as a “matter of the ​ ​ ownership of women; white men want the right to own and use all women, colored and white,

176 and they resent any intrusion of colored men into this domain." In that same issue, Du Bois links the “problem of the 20th century," which he identifies as the Color Line in Souls, to the ​ ​ oppression of women, while simultaneously denying them any kind of agency in his paradigm.

This obscuring of the agency of Black women, and Du Bois’ choice to center men when discussing the consequences of the oppression of Black women, is a failure, and it represents a deeper issue within both the study of critical race theory and Du Bois’ theory of double

173 The Crisis was the official magazine of the NAACP, and was founded by Du Bois in 1910. ​ ​ 174 Du Bois, “Divine Right,” The Crisis 3 (March 1912), 197. 175 Ibid. 176 Du Bois, “Black France,” The Crisis 23 (March 1922), 199. 88 consciousness. This examination of the problems within Du Bois’ profeminism is in no way meant to dismiss his fight for women’s equality, but it is meant to establish the shortcomings of

“double” consciousness as a key category of analysis. Would his original conception, which centered the clash between Blackness and being American, have included gender as another Veil if Du Bois had worked with Black women, or was one? How would a gendered double consciousness interpret strivings for cohesive consciousness, or would it desire the pursuit of cohesive consciousness as praxis at all? This chapter investigates how theorist Joy James addresses Du Bois shortcomings regarding Black women, and argues that her Womb Theory is mutually enriched when deployed alongside double consciousness. Following this theoretical grounding, this chapter follows the life and activism of the late Erica Garner, and focuses on her praxis as a striving for cohesive consciousness that could only be understood by gendering the theory of double consciousness.

Du Bois’ Profeminism and its Failings

The institution of slavery, and the social formations that emerged to support it , are fueled by a cycle of self-justification: those that benefit from owning other human beings often argue that it’s not just their own desire, but nature itself, that makes the practice right. This line of thinking is as old as modern political thought, and the belief in a dynamic of natural superiority vs. marked inferiority persists across centuries. Aristotle argues that “from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule ]...] Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends 89

177 to all mankind." Aristotle splits humans into three categories, which Joy James names “the free male as human theorist, the slave as antihuman nontheorist, and the non-slave female as

178 semihuman, defective, antitheorist."

This hierarchy of (human) men over non-human slaves and semihuman women includes the caveat that women are “antitheorist," fundamentally opposed to and fully incapable of divining the human condition in the ways that non slave men can. This order “presents ideology-as-philosophy in which the capacity for theory and freedom are proprietary possessions

179 held against future citizens." For all of his profeminist leanings, Du Bois is complicit in this patriarchal conception of freedom, even while he is fiercely critical of the supposed natural superiority of white men. Advocacy for women is an extension of his critique of white hegemony, and his advocacy is colored by a perception of Black men as the norm within the

Black collective. Du Bois’ refusal to properly quote Anna Julia Cooper as herself, but rather as

“one of ours," claims her theory as an extension of a general Black American collective, a collective that centers his own theory. Du Bois asserts that Aristotle’s evaluation of innate, natural superiority of slaves over masters and men over women is a lie, but he does not meaningfully contest the assumption that women are antitheorists, or that Black women are at once antihuman and antitheorists.

In Profeminism and Gender Elites: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. ​ Wells-Barnett, Joy James argues that through his incomplete attributions to Black feminists, Du ​ Bois rearticulates women like Cooper’s experiences without their particularities: “His

177 Aristotle, Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 95. ​ 178 Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal,” Carceral ​ Notebooks 12 (2016): pp. 260, http://www.thecarceral.org/cn12/14_Womb_of_Western_Theory.pdf) ​ 179 James, 2016 90 representations obscured women’s political agency with symbolic imagery that undermined the

180 pragmatic politics of his profeminism." Citing Patricia Morton, James argues that “Du Bois’s challenges to denigrating stereotypes of African American females failed to ‘reconstruct black

181 women as full human beings in history’." Black women in Du Bois’ writings are mystified beings, and their capacity as caretakers and mothers is given primacy over their political agency.

James’ critique of Du Bois’ profeminism addresses precisely why double consciousness and the strivings therein, require a gendered dimension. Double consciousness is an examination of Black psychic life and Du Bois’ profeminism is insufficient to an evaluation of how being a

Black woman factors into its central paradox. In the introduction of Souls, the ability to ​ ​ recognize the Veil’s existence, and the struggle that follows, is tied to men, through both the use of he/him pronouns, consistently gendered language, and the premise of the strivings he identifies. Going to college to foster one’s intellectual gifts, owning property, and the pursuit of political participation were a struggle, but newly enfranchised Black men had access to these strivings post Reconstruction, at least under the letter of the law. For Black women, these were all impossibilities.

The primacy of Black males within Black intellectualism continues to have consequences, both amongst Du Bois contemporaries and today. Du Bois practiced a selective curation of history that diminished the contributions of Black women, and James argues that his selective memory, in “both its advocacy for gender equality and its erasure of radical black women’s agency, might be a cornerstone in the construction of the contemporary black

180 Joy James, "Profeminism and Gender Elites: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett," In Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, edited by Gillman Susan and Weinbaum Alys Eve, ​ (2007): 74. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv6dj.5. 181 Ibid. 91

182 intellectual as male elite." Scholarship that purportedly focuses on the full scope of Black politics and history become vague and nonspecific when it comes to Black women, who

“disappear or have only token inclusion; we also find writings that extol black women’s political

183 and intellectual power while excising the details of their radicalisms." Black male leadership is naturalized, and Black profeminism is deradicalized, as patriarchy is reified within critical race scholarship. Joy James finds that the paradox of Du Bois’ profeminism produces two opposing modern approaches to his work: “Gender conservatives resist while gender progressives embrace

184 and expand upon his profeminist politics." Neither can fully reconcile Du Bois’ advocacy for women with his erasure of Black women’s political agency, as either scholarship builds atop a compromised base. Joy James notes that both feminists and profeminist writings on Du Bois reify his selective memory and male elitism:

“For example, both profeminists and feminists may elide women’s agency in order to reify black women’s status as victims of black male dominance. Minimizing the presence and impact of black women’s radicalism on [the] black liberation struggle promotes generalizations about black patriarchy. Some writers condemn patriarchal political history that ignores women, only to highlight women’s contributions in ways that further ignorance of African American women’s radical agency. In this sense, their progressive works are wedded to male elitism and sexist censorship."185

This is echoed in Morrison’s interview, where she identifies Black male writer’s focus on the white male gaze. Their attachment to that gaze reinforces their attachment to a vision of freedom defined by patriarchy.

Joy James also considers how Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, the eminent work on ​ ​ ​ ​ double consciousness in modernity, is linked to the erasure of Black women in the historical record: “The Black Atlantic fails to discuss the prominent African American women ​ ​

182 James, 2007, p. 90 183 Ibid. ​ 184 James, 2007, p. 90 185 Ibid. 92 activist-intellectuals who also crossed the Atlantic: Jessie Fauset, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B.

Wells, and Mary Church Terrell. These female contemporaries and colleagues of Du Bois either studied or organized in Europe. Their histories, and with them much of black history, disappear

186 in Gilroy’s depiction of cultural hybridity and migratory intellectualism." The Black Atlantic is ​ ​ all about the multifaceted nature of Black cultures as a consequence of the Color Line and double consciousness, deepening Du Bois’ initial, brief assessment in Souls. In it, Gilroy identifies a ​ ​ unique “Black Atlantic” culture, created from aspects of African, American, British, and

Caribbean cultures and histories. James contends that the book’s erasure of Du Bois’ female ​ contemporaries, especially since they otherwise fit within Gilroy’s research interest, furthers the invisibilizing of Black women in the canon. That isn’t to say that Black women don’t play a significant role in The Black Atlantic— the account of Margaret Garner is especially critical to ​ ​ Gilroy’s analysis of slavery’s consequences— but I find that James does identify that Gilroy not mentioning Du Bois’s female peers reinforces Du Bois’ particular profeminism.

The legacy of this invisbilizing persists in both Black political thought and action; social organizing for radical and revolutionary ends is, in this scholarship, the closest analogue to what

Du Bois identified as the striving for “freedom” post-slavery. In Manning Marable’s

“Groundings With My Sisters'', the third chapter of his 1983 book “How Capitalism

Underdeveloped Black America'', Marable writes one of the earliest modern critiques of Black male elitism authored by a Black man. “The superexploitation of Black women became a permanent feature in American social and economic life, because sisters were assaulted simultaneously as workers, as Blacks, and as women'', a tripled exploitation that Black men did

186 Ibid., p. 91 93

187 not have to reckon with. Marable also argues that male-led Black resistance has often centered the emasculation of Black men, often via the assault of their wives, sisters, and daughters by white men. The assault of women was an assault on Black men, and this again reifies Black men as the ultimate victims and denies Black women their agency. Liberation became tied to the reclamation of manhood, or what Black feminist Michele Wallace calls “Black Macho," the

“notion that all political and social power was somehow sexual, and that the possession of a

188 penis was the symbol of revolution."

Marable writes that Wallace’s writing was imperfect, in that it attributed machismo to all

Black male leaders, but that the metaphor of Black Macho accurately assessed how social strivings like the Black Power movement often reinforced regressive patriarchy under the guise of Black liberation. Being born a man did come with assumed respectability; Joy James writes that “The Montgomery Women’s Political Caucus organized the 1955 bus boycott with E. D.

Nixon and chose the politically inexperienced Martin Luther King, Jr. as its titular leader for

189 appearances of respectability and authority tied to middle-class male clergy." But she, like

Marable, finds that Wallace paints with too broad a brush. James notes that while activist Assata

Shakur left the Black Panther Party due to its sexism and elitism, she spoke favorably of her co-activist Zayd Shakur, who “refused to become part of the macho cult that was official in the

190 BPP. He never voted on issues or took a position just to be one of the boys." The position of

Black women and theorists in liberation movements is nuanced, and James is critical of the consequences of Du Bois’ profeminism that erases them. She is also disparaging of

187 Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston, MA: South End Pr., 1983), p.70 ​ ​ 188 Ibid., p. 100 189 James, 2007, 92 190 Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (London: Zed Press, 1987), p. 223. ​ 94 overcorrections that are ahistorical, and that reinscribe gender dynamics in a way that is also harmful. These critiques of Du Bois outline not just his shortcomings, but the fact that cohesive consciousness— the end of the Negro Problem— is desired by all Black people, not just men, as praxis. To properly gender double consciousness, our reading of contemporary double consciousness must account for the problems of Black patriarchy. This requires the backing of another theoretical framing, one rooted in all the Veil’s dimensions, especially gender, race, and nation.

Captive Maternals, Womb Theory, and the Leverage of the Black Matrix

Joy James’ Womb Theory, and her writings on Captive Maternals, does not seem to be intuitively compatible with double consciousness, at least at first glance. Both are informed by a specific theoretical approach, centering the positionality of marginalized (in this case, Black) women and their role in the national consciousness and that of the (Black) collective.

Black women who wake up and do the work of movements and resistance, work that is

191 motivated by love and for which they suffer anonymously are Captive Maternals. Captive

Maternals are identified by four qualities: “nontransferable agency; combative peer relations, usually with privileged males; a radical vision for life without trauma; and the desire and capacity to ‘love’ through familial and communal ties that cross boundaries and sustain

192 freedom." They can be cisgender or trans women, or those who are feminized into caretaking and consumption, and their heightened vulnerability— to “violence, war, poverty, police, and

191 Jeff Shantz, Joy James, and Robyn Maynard, "The Captive Maternal And Abolitionism: A Tribute To Erica ​ Garner," The Social Justice Centre (2018). ​ ​ https://www.thesocialjusticecentre.org/blog/2018/3/11/the-captive-maternal-and-abolitionism-a-tribute-to-erica-garn er. 192 Joy James, “Captive Maternal Love: Octavia Butler and Sci-Fi Family Values,” Literature and the Development ​ of Feminist Theory (2015): 185. Cambridge: doi:10.1017/CBO9781316422007.014. ​ 95 captivity”— highlights the fact that their very existence enables the possessive empire that

193 claims and dispossesses them. Put another way, Captive Maternals make up the backbone of both empires. Captive Maternals produce “the reproductive and productive labor to stabilize

194 culture and wealth”; without this labor, America falls apart. They can “work in and for governance, corporations, prisons, police, and the military. Their diversity—from CEOs and university presidents to Attorney Generals and janitors and the incarcerated—indicates

195 ideological difference, economic need, and political desire within a democracy." For Black

Captive Maternals, their place at the bottom of society, even given the seeming equality enjoyed by American citizens today, is both indicative of their persisting denigration and consumption as well as their place as the foundation of the national project.

Womb Theory is the framework that Captive Maternals exist within. In The Womb of ​ Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal, Joy James writes, “In ​ transitioning a colony through a republic into a representative democracy with imperial might,

196 the emergent United States grew a womb." ​ This “womb” is a metaphor for how America reproduces its own power by maintaining the oppression of Captive Maternals, through which

197 America “sustains itself on black frames." Captive Black Maternals are the foundation of the nation, and their continued oppression legitimizes and maintains the nation-state. “For centuries, patriarchal, enslaving Womb Theory normalized—as natural, universal, and befitting the diminished capacities of the captive—trauma and theft of labor and time, which legitimized the

193 James, 2016, p. 255-56 ​ 194 This can not be overstated in light of the ongoing crisis with COVID-19, which has made the necessity of this labor hypervisible. 195 Ibid., p. 258. 196 James, 2016, p. 256. 197 Ibid., p. 259 96

198 existence of Captive Maternals as inevitable, inconsequential, and invisible." Black Captive

Maternals “face verbal slander and intimidation, physical violence, domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, and contempt, policing in schools, jobs, society, and prisons, from every sector” as the norm, but their suffering is not what marks them: it’s their captive labor as the nation’s

199 caretakers. In this sense, Black Captive Maternals hold what Joy James calls leverage: the imposition of Womb Theory creates a seesaw of power, and James calls the fulcrum of this metaphorical seesaw “the Black Matrix”:

“The Black Matrix as fulcrum functions when the captive leverages her power against captor and captivity. [...] The political actors are seated in various distances on that spectrum plank. The weight of those seated, and perhaps their “erratic” proclivity to jumping off the plank, determines who is elevated to the highest position and who scrunches their knees up with their bottom on the ground. [...] I argue that leverage, rather than “feminism” or “intersectionality” or “progressivism” might be a useful term for recognizing power and predation."200

The Black Matrix metaphor is the key to understanding Womb Theory and double consciousness as compatible articulations of the Black existence. In this framework, “leverage”— no matter how it is manifested — allows for Captive Maternals to rupture captivity, not just for themselves, but all captives. Revolution, large and small, can topple the lofty and raise the oppressed, but the threat of retaliation is inevitable. That threat challenges the desire for rupture: “most public activism stays on script, within conventional politics or on-continuum politics, where activism sanctioned or approved by governance or funders dominates," while “off-continuum politics” —

201 rebellion, protest, boycotts, and riots — become “an act of the uncivil."

The tension between how Black Captive Maternals choose to utilize their leverage, if they choose to use it at all, is a matter of double consciousness. This tension is deeper than

198 Ibid. 199 James, 2016, p. 256 200 Ibid., p. 257 201 Ibid., 258. 97 respectability politics, although concerns about civility are embedded into every Black social movement. If the Black Matrix is a seesaw, then the democracy of the United States is a plank: the relative weight of Black Captive Maternals is fundamental to the structure's operation as intended. This can be seen in Aissata Shakur’s journey from collective caretaker to enemy of the state: “In order for Shakur’s narrative to emerge in its own right, not as a perversion or pathological mutation of victimization or violence, one cannot ignore Shakur’s structural relationship to propping up Western democracy, first as caretaker (Panther breakfast program

202 supplementing for social services denied to the urban poor) and later as demonized criminal."

If Black Captive Maternals can’t have their labor be used to support oppressive systems, their exile, death, or erasure also functions as a means of propping up the state.

With this lens, the political agency of Black women is both made visible and considered as an essential element of American imperialism. Captive Maternals cannot have their agency transferred, and every dimension of their particular oppressions must be considered as a fact of

Black socio-political and psychic life. With this, the Black Matrix introduces a necessary complication to liberation struggles. Deploying both Womb Theory and double consciousness as complementary frameworks alters how the striving of emancipation is imagined by emphasizing the often overlooked dimensions of contemporary social movements headed or founded by Black women. Black Lives Matter, the most famous of these contemporary movements, rose to prominence by tapping into the grief of Black Maternals who had lost their children, siblings, and parents to police brutality, leveraging a demand for general humanity where the

(masculinist) Black Power movement demanded manhood. James’ scholarship on Captive

202 James, 2016, 258-9 ​ 98

Maternals often returns to the life of Erica Garner, who was radicalized by the death of her father, Eric Garner, who was choked to death by New York police officer Daniel Panteleo in late

2014.

The Life and Death of Erica Garner

Erica Garner-Snipes died on December 30, 2017. After an asthma attack developed into her heart stopping, Garner fell into a coma on the 23rd, and on the 30th, she passed away. She is survived by her two children; her then eight-year-old daughter, and her then 4-month-old son, whom she named after her late father, Eric Garner. She was 27 years old.

In a conversation with Robyn Maynard at the Carceral Culture Conference in 2018, Joy

James dedicates their talk to Erica, who had passed just a few months earlier, and considers her passing to be a direct consequence of her activism. In the three years following her father’s murder, Erica “was constantly doing research on her dad’s case, and organizing demonstrations

203 against the force that killed him, but not taking care of herself." Every Tuesday and Thursday after her father’s death, Erica hosted die-ins on the sidewalk where he uttered “I can’t breathe," his final words, eleven times. She would lay face up on the ground, rest her hands on her stomach, and close her eyes, a model of the premature death that had come to Black Americans in encounters with police for decades. The die-in was just one element of her regular demonstrations; it began as just her, her family, and a few locals protesting on the corner where her father was killed. Even in her actualizing the tragedy of her father’s passing, the thought of an audience was secondary. “I do it without cameras there. I do it with cameras there, and I'm

203 Shantz, J., James, J. and Maynard, R., 2018. ​ 99

204 going to keep doing it," she said. Her grief is a reckoning with a paradox: her care for Black ​ life is disturbed when that life is extinguished by the state, a body mean to protect and serve that life.

In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Garner said, “Of course it’s harder being black ​ ​ than white in America, because white people have this privilege. They were born with this

205 privilege. They were born higher than us." Erica, the oldest of the late Eric Garner’s children, reflects on privilege as a kind of inherited dignity. To return to the Black Matrix metaphor, white people are born “higher," the weight of Black people at the other end of the plank lifting them into prosperity. This statement could be taken as an Afropessimist insight into the seemingly unstoppable reign of white supremacy, but her words on how she uses her anger and frustration in her approach to activism is muted, tactical. “I am angry but that’s not going to solve anything.

I’d rather be angry on a march and channel it with all those people and project it in my voice.

Because now people are looking to me so I have to keep pressing on for my father and end the

206 cycle of violence. You can’t fight violence with violence. You’ll either get killed or go to jail."

In focusing her anger into organizing, Garner taps into the Black radical tradition, but her reluctance to directly challenge the state through violence speaks to the diplomacy of those who recognize the Veil and the retaliation that follows rupture. In this sense, her emphasis on the non-violent, grassroots nature of her politics, she both publicly roots her labor in

204 Friedman, Dan, Rocco Parascandola, and Bill Hutchinson. 2014. "Eric Garner's Daughter Holds 'Die-In' At ​ Staten Island Location Where Her Father Was Put In Fatal Police Chokehold." NYDailynews.Com. ​ ​ https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/garner-daughter-holds-die-in-article-1.2042603. 205 Elizabeth Day, "Erica Garner-Snipes: ‘I Believe In Justice. It Will Take A Long Time But It’s Gonna Come’," The Guardian, January 24, 2015, ​ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/25/eric-garner-erica-garner-snipes-justice-will-take-a-long-time-pol ice-violence. 206 Day, 2015 100

(nonthreatening) love and builds coalitions with celebrity activists like Jesse Jackson and politicians like Bernie Sanders. The increasingly public and hypervisible nature of activism in the 21st century magnifies the utility of the “second sight” granted to Black Americans by double consciousness. Seeing oneself through the eyes of others is deeply ingrained in Black psychic life, and this sight informs the politics of respectability that inform Black led social movements. Garner’s second sight in particular is shaped by her existence as a Captive Maternal.

The context of her dismissal of violence is critical: just before it, she states that she doesn’t want police coming after her younger brothers, who both look older than they actually are. Her stated desire for reform, and not revolution, can be read as a protective measure as much as a matter of her own politics. In the interview, she deliberately speaks of police brutality as a class issue, saying “it’s not just black people being killed, being brutalised. It might be people from a trailer park or poor white people that they [the police] will mess with, rather than messing with a man

207 in a suit." Garner had “a radical vision for life without trauma” in James’ words, marking her as a Captive Maternal.

Later in 2015, Garner returned to The Guardian with an opinion article that pleaded for a ​ ​ unified coalition. In the months since her earlier interview, Garner’s politics have become more particular. “I live within a system that regularly kills black people," she writes, an explicit rebuke

208 of anti-Black policing. Garner reflects on her continued activism following a grand jury’s failure to indict Officer Pantaelo, and the challenge of being the face of a growing movement.

Here she specifies her resistance to the erasure of her agency. “People I trusted started voicing

207 Day, 2015 208 Garner, Erica, and Kemi Alabi. 2015. "Conflict Can Destroy Movements. We Need To Fight The System, Not ​ Each Other | Erica Garner And Kemi Alabi." The Guardian. ​ ​ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/09/erica-garner-conflict-can-destroy-movements-fight-the-sy stem. 101 their disagreements and pressuring me into decisions I never wanted to make. I was even told not to work with National Action Network and to say my father’s death wasn’t about race. From lies about what permits I needed to bad advice about dealing with police, the people I once thought

209 supported me began to drown out my voice." Erica Garner’s agency is untransferable, and through means like the Guardian piece and online coalition building, she rejects a compromised, ​ ​ contradictory consciousness.

The op-ed culminates in the deterioration of the #ChokeholdOnTheCity march, a joint event between Garner, Justice League NYC, and other organizers. Early on, there were undercurrents of dissent between Justice League and other organizers, likely due to the former’s alliance with the controversial Louis Farrakhan. Upon the activists’ arrival at the spot where Eric

Garner had died, the tension exploded into “name-calling and finger pointing” over who should be credited for the rally. By the time Garner settled things, police had arrived and blocked their path, cutting the event off at the knees. “The police are killing our people – that’s reason enough not to fight amongst ourselves,” she writes. “No movement is immune to conflict, but it’s up to every last person on the side of justice to make the decision to move forward together. We build relationships with other activists and supporters, take the streets and risk arrest because we’re

210 fighting for a world that truly values our lives."

Garner’s desire for a united front was a matter of necessity; without it, the opposition to her fight for justice would have been overwhelming. Her Freedom of Information Law Act requests about her father’s case and the officers involved were frequently denied, she lobbied at the state capitol, and she watched as Daniel Donovan, the district attorney who gave immunity to

209 Ibid. ​ 210 Garner and Alabi, 2015 102 most of those officers and handled the grand jury case, won a seat in Congress. After everything,

Erica muses that “the only person ever charged with a crime connected to my father’s death is

Ramsey Orta, the man who recorded it all." Her labor to generate a world without trauma (and thus without split consciousness) was powered by trauma, the strain of which is unofficially understood as the cause of her early death. In this sense, her uncompromised pursuit of accountability chafes with other contemporary movements.

“Even social justice movements and activists can be too ready to make accommodations ​ to power and authority, believing criminal justice systems can be reformed (even when based on brutality, erasure, and genocide) and careful not to threaten their own positionality (through “reform-minded” politics). [...] So the unruly are left to deal with it—to push for real change, to confront the institutions and agents of exploitation of 211 oppression. And face the consequences."

For an unruly activist like Garner, who like other Black women leading social movements suffered from health risks, the consequence is her annihilation. The fact that her death was a direct consequence of the same mechanisms that killed her father is a devastating tragedy, but it is critical to not flatten her into a symbol of the suffering of Black womanhood, as

Du Bois may have done had he known her story. Her tragedy is not a sad story in a vacuum, but the culmination of ratcheting tension between two worlds: the American state that is dependent on the silence of Captive Maternals doing the work of caregiving, versus her existence as a

Black woman who refused to grieve in silence when the state targeted her people . “Erica Garner was a victim of both state violence and state neglect," and a reckoning with the particular crimes of the United States against Black women (state sanctioned violence, the erasure of their political agency, redressing for their labor as caretakers) should be a critical component of Black

212 liberation movements and scholarship on Black psychic life.

211 Shantz, J., James, J. and Maynard, R., 2018. ​ 212 The listed crimes from James’ conversation with Robyn Maynard. 103

The Striving For Freedom

In Souls, the striving for liberation is the first striving for cohesive consciousness, likely because Du Bois recognized it as both the earliest instinct for Black people and the underlying current at the heart of the strivings that followed. In this thesis, the modern iteration of that striving is presented last, after a critique of Black capitalism (the evolution of the pursuit of education) and an analysis of the fight for reparations (the evolution of the desire for political agency). This choice was deliberate. Chapters 1 and 2 are about the descendants of Du Bois’ original strivings. Du Bois’ envisioning of the Talented Tenth centered college education, not the exceptionalism of Black celebrity, but the ideals share a remarkable amount of DNA. Likewise, the desire for reparations began long before reconstruction, and contemporary scholarship on the matter is informed by growing support to holding the nation accountable for its genocidal foundations.

The striving for liberation differs because its central thesis remains relatively unchanged:

213 “the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land." In that sense, this striving engages most directly with the question at the heart of this thesis, which asks what it means to be a problem--a contradiction-- in America. If those who are free have not yet found freedom, as evidenced by the movement that Erica Garner and countless others take part in, then freedom is still denied to a significant number of Black Americans. But the denial of freedom as Du Bois presents it implicitly centers Black men as the primary victims of white supremacy, and the persistent disembodiment of Black psychic life is articulated and studied with Black men as the

213 Du Bois, Souls, p. 39 ​ ​ 104 norm. Critics of the manifestations of patriarchy in Black social justice movements unintentionally reify these norms, and as a consequence, dreams of freedom are implicitly shaped by restrictive gender formations.

This is precisely why I believe that double consciousness must be paired with an additional framework in order to understand what the desire for cohesive consciousness looks like today. The question cannot proceed with its current assumption of who is seeking freedom, that being Black, educated men. Perhaps if Du Bois had worked with his female contemporaries, such as Ida B. Wells, this narrow focus would have been fruitfully expanded. I find that Womb

Theory, and the idea of Captive Maternals therein, complements double consciousness because it directly engages with the problems Du Bois does not ponder in Souls, primarily the problem of ​ ​ being a Black woman and all that entails (disproportionately facing “verbal slander and intimidation, physical violence, domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, and contempt,

214 policing in schools, jobs, society, and prisons, from every sector”). I also brought these two frameworks in conversation with one another in order to make the necessity of Black social movements for the creation of cohesive consciousness. All the United States’ sweeping changes, from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Act, were the result of political struggle, where people

215 organized in order to secure and define their rights. These struggles can manifest into new realities, and an optimistic read on modern mobilization of Black people, which is more visibly tied to issues facing Black women, suggests that public organizing could grant reparations or other requested legislation.

214 James, 2016, p. 256 215 Spence 2015, p. 5 105

I have my doubts on that particular front: I’m more inclined to agree with Anthony Paul

Farley’s Afropessimist assessment, where “requests for equality and freedom will always fail,"

216 because “the fact of need itself means that the request will fail." Anti-blackness is built into the ​ ​ nation, but I still hold out hope for Black social movements as a space where new visions of freedom can be generated and fought for (I find the “leverage” of Captive Maternals to be particularly promising). By incorporating a critique of Du Bois’ failings with Joy James’ theoretical framing, the possibility of a cohesive consciousness that is free of the Veil can be more richly imagined, while remaining grounded in the particular oppression that Black women face—and the leverage they utilize—as Captive Maternals.

216 Farley 2004, p. 226 106

Conclusion: On Reconciling Contradictions

“In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most clearly picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Negro of to-day and is tingeing and changing his religious life. Feeling that his rights and his dearest ideals are being trampled upon, that the public conscience is ever more deaf to his righteous appeal, and that all the reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength and fresh allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma."

- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk ​

Strivings, Then and Now

What does it mean to be a problem? This thesis identifies three contemporary strivings to resolve the paradox at the heart of double consciousness: how one can be Black and American.

In the introduction, I explained what I find to be the three initial strivings for this goal that Du

Bois explores in The Souls of Black Folk: the striving for Black political power, the striving for ​ ​ education, and the striving for emancipation. In the chapters that I followed, I suggested that those strivings have counterparts in the 21st century: the striving for economic uplift via a new kind of Black exceptionalism, the striving for reparations, and the striving for liberation via the social movements of Black Maternals, respectively. Each chapter examines the appeal, processes, and failings of these strivings in kind, and each look at these striving considers them in a material and psychic context. What makes these “new” strivings so rich is that the shift in

“problems” from the 20th century to the 21st reorients the conflict of double consciousness. The tension at the heart of double consciousness is ever present, but the passage of time suggests that, 107 in the 21st century, double consciousness may be understood as a collective of interrelated ​ ​ tensions, specific to each striving. For example, as discussed in the third chapter, Black women face a connected, but distinct tension as Black Captive Maternals: using their leverage to challenge oppressive mechanisms that kill their loved ones vs. securing their survival and the survival of their loved ones under those norms at all costs. This complicates how double consciousness is understood as the clash of just two spheres, Blackness and Americanness, in ways that Du Bois neglected. And that’s just a dimension that Du Bois was aware of–given his profeminism–but did not include in his theory. Consider the paradoxes of the other contemporary strivings: the clash between individual uplift through capitalism and the desire for Black-led revolution, or pleading for reparations from the same legal mechanism that made that harm possible.

I posit that the 21st century has deepened the fracture in the collective Black consciousness, and that from our position in this present, old and new breaks can be brought to light. Through this scholarship, I have come to understand double consciousness as a dynamic set of interrelated paradoxes that define Black psychic life, as a consequence of the material realities that have informed Black American life since kidnapped Africans arrived in the nation in 1619. This conclusion reflects on what I find to be the most pressing of these paradoxes, which are embodied in each of the three strivings. In these reflections, I assess each strivings’ relative success in resolving its core paradox, as well as how these strivings may interact with one another. 108

Jay-Z, Colin Kaepernick, and Black Philanthropy

In Chapter 1, I considered the position of wealthy Black celebrities as the contemporary

Talented Tenth, where other talents (in performance, the arts, or general notoriety) are emphasized over academic success. Their economic prosperity is often the direct result of skills informed by their lived experiences as Black Americans, as well as good fortune and a keen understanding of capitalism. While the project of Black Capitalism espoused by these celebrities, rapper Jay-Z in particular, is not successful in creating cohesive consciousness as Du Bois or I imagine it, it is worth considering the tactics that Black capitalists deploy towards emancipatory struggles and strivings. Jay’s previously discussed stance that direct engagement in capitalism is the key to Black prosperity is troubled by the inequality built into capitalism, which disqualifies this striving from being a collective project. But is it a cohesive project- does it resolve the tension between Black and American by obtaining liberation? Perhaps Jay-Z’s status as a billionaire icon suggests that it is: not everyone can strike it rich, but perhaps Black icons can operate as rallying figures for Black Americans, and use their wealth to create social change. A rich example of these topics requires a return to Jay-Z, who exists in a tricky position regarding the movement against police brutality and his own business dealings. 109

Much has been made about former NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s public activism in the last few years. While he is most well-known for kneeling during the national anthem at football games in order to honor victims of police brutality, Kaepernick’s activism off the field is a persuasive example of a Black celebrity activist who uses wealth as a tool to promote change.

For Kaepernick, this is mostly in the form of donations to outside organizations: between

October 2016 and December 2017, Kaepernick donated 31 grants and $900,000 to a breadth of organizations, from the Center for Reproductive Rights to the Do No Harm Coalition, a coalition

217 of medical professionals that fight racism in the public health sphere. Outside of his Nike sponsorship and the advertisement it produced–which flattened his stance to “believe in

218 something, even if it means sacrificing everything”–public comment from Kaepernick is rare.

The closest thing to such a statement would come from his friend and fellow player/activist Eric

Reid, and acts of solidarity from artists like Rhianna, who refused offers to perform at the Super

Bowl. Until recently, Jay-Z was among these allies.

217 Greg Bishop and Ben Baskin, "What Colin Kaepernick's Philanthropy Tells Us About His Vision For Social ​ Change In America," Sports Illustrated, December 6, 2017, ​ ​ https://www.si.com/sportsperson/2017/12/06/colin-kaepernick-charity-giving-donations. 218 Jelani Cobb, "Behind Nike’s Decision To Stand By Colin Kaepernick," The New Yorker, September 4, 2018 ​ ​ ​ https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/behind-nikes-decision-to-stand-by-colin-kaepernick. 110

In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Jay-Z mused that, while he had never met ​ ​ Kaepernick, he admired him; he had even dedicated a performance of “The Story of O.J” to the

219 player, and said he would have signed the blackballed player to a team if he was able. This dynamic shifted when Jay-Z, who initially supported Kaepernick’s kneeling, publically allied with the NFL in August of 2019. Jay Z’s Roc Nation label entered a partnership with the NFL to

“enhance the NFL's live game experiences and to amplify the league's social justice efforts”

220 according to a press release. This hand in the NFL’s “Inspire Change” social justice initiative includes a commitment to having the league spend $100 million on social justice initiatives over the next 10 years. For many, Jay-Z’s alliance with the NFL was a betrayal of one of the most visible acts of protests in decades, by a man who had positioned himself as an exemplar for unapologetic Black success. For his part, Jay-Z finds his partnership with the organization that ousted Kaepernick to be the next step forward for his activism. In a 2019 editorial, Jay-Z reemphasizes his vision of wealth creation as social justice:

“He cites Meek Mill, a Roc Nation management client, who was arrested in Philadelphia in 2007, when he was 19 on gun and drug charges. ‘Meek’s got eight guys who could pull him back,’ Jay-Z said. ‘I said, “Meek, you are going to go back with them, or you need to bring them with you.” So he reaches a hand back and pulls them with him. That’s social justice: It’s how we help a person help their community and help themselves."221

Chapter 2 covered my doubts of Black Capitalism’s potential for collective uplift and radical change, since it is fundamentally assimilation into the framework that undergirds the deficient social conditions of Black Americans, and the conflict between Jay-Z and Kaepernick’s activism

219 Dean Baquet, "Jay-Z Discusses Rap, Marriage And Being A Black Man In Trump’s America," The New York ​ ​ Times, November 29, 2017, ​ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/29/t-magazine/jay-z-dean-baquet-interview.html. 220 "Jay-Z's Roc Nation Entering Partnership With NFL," National Football League, August 13, 2019, http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000001041162/article/jayzs-roc-nation-entering-partnership-with-nfl. 221 Rosman, Katherine. 2020. "Jay-Z Takes On The Super Bowl." Nytimes.Com. ​ ​ ​ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/style/jay-z-super-bowl-roc-nation.html?login=email&auth=login-email. 111 emphasizes why it cannot produce cohesive consciousness. Both men leverage their wealth and celebrity to amplify their activism through corporations (Jay-Z with the NFL, Kaepernick with

Nike), and yet they are at odds with one another. Neither is creating a revolution with their philanthropy, though Kaepernick’s consistent and meaningful commitment to human rights organizations is admirable. Given this perspective, the biggest differences between the two, given their talents and sizable cultural platform, can be found in their relative wealth and their expressed thoughts on police brutality.

As mentioned prior, Kaepernick’s investments are done with little fanfare, at least in comparison to Jay-Z’s philanthropy. Likewise, Kaepernick’s activism is made vague by his corporate allies, the acts that made him notorious simplified into a slogan on a poster. Similarly, the NFL’s Inspire Change Initiative, now led by Jay-Z, universalizes police brutality, but does so in a way that commodifies the grief of Black Maternals. The “#EveryonesChild” campaign is a series of public service announcements that follow the mourning families of victims of police brutality and gun violence. The first, a three minute piece on the parents of Danroy “DJ” Henry, a 20-year-old student athlete who was shot by police in 2010, is made up of footage of DJ as an infant and rising football star. Throughout, DJ’s respect for the law, and his parent’s appreciation for the officers who discovered that the report for his death was fabricated, is emphasized. “One of the most important things we can do as a community," his mother says, “is to have better communication, and better love and respect for people. I don’t want to assume all police officers

222 are bad, and I don’t want people to assume all young black people are bad." Her final words in the PSA, which state that DJ was “everyone’s son," grants the campaign its name and thesis: this

222 Player’s Coalition (@playercoalition), “http://DJDreamFund.org We are in this together. #EveryonesChild,” ​ Twitter, November 6, 2019, https://twitter.com/playercoalition/status/1192079185994559489

112 could happen to anyone, so everyone should care. The campaign uses the grief of DJ’s parents, and later, that of other victims of police violence, in order to push for reform without specificity

223 or controversy. By implicating that accountability for police violence is on all communities, the issue is diffused until it hardly has meaning beyond mere symbolism. The infusion of capital into the labor and suffering of Black Maternals dulls rupture into mere reform, displacing the radical potential of grief and the specificity of challenges to police brutality.

Ultimately, Jay-Z’s —and to a lesser but notable extent, Kaepernick’s—use of their capital towards liberation struggles is a shallow, if well intentioned, striving. Perhaps this is due to the politics of the “hustle," where Jay’s goal was the development of his own human capital,

224 not philanthropy per se. The same is true for Kaepernick, who had no stated desire to lose his career and become an activist when he joined the NFL. Jay-Z's particular vision of wealth creation as social justice is troubled by its internal contradictions, where partnerships with institutions that are criticized for being racist (the NFL, police) are logical steps towards Black liberation. Kaepernick’s activism is also troubled by these contradictions, but the understated nature of his philanthropy suggests a productive alternative, where exceptionally talented Black

Americans join in social movements while resisting the need to lead or otherwise profit from them. The existence of a class of wealthy Black artisans might have the appearance of a cohesive

Black consciousness, but their success within capitalism does not resolve the underlying mechanisms of racism that inform Black life.

223 The family of Botham Jean, who was killed by officer Amber Guyger in his own home, were featured in a later campaign video. 224 Spence, 2015, p. 25 113

Reparations and the Inevitability of American Reluctance

The second chapter investigates the components, definitions, and desire for reparations for slavery. Of the contemporary strivings for cohesive consciousness, the pursuit of reparations is the most ambiguous in its possibilities. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ argument for reparations centers the unification of the national consciousness, and presumes that Black cohesive consciousness will follow. Ultimately, only time will tell. In the five years since the publication of The Case for ​ Reparations, the topic of reparations has entered the mass media, but has not manifested as a ​ concrete reality. The H.R. 40 bill, which would establish a commission to investigate what reparations could look like, was last submitted by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in

January of 2019, and has yet to see a vote. The bill represents a kind of tipping point: Coates desires a national conversation that would “[air] family secrets” and “[settle] with old ghosts," and the commission would explicitly “address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and

225 226 inhumanity of slavery in the United States."

What the commission doesn’t set out to do is produce “a healing of the American psyche

227 and the banishment of white guilt," not on its own. Given the decades it has taken for reparations to be seriously discussed in the national discourse, and the continued lack of execution of H.R. 40, it seems clear that the fight for reparations is locked in up in bureaucracy.

225 Coates, 2014 226 U.S. Congress, 2019 227 Coates, 2014

114

Should H.R. 40 pass, and a commission is successfully created, how much longer will the wait be for its recommendation to be executed?

This particular consideration is an underdeveloped element of Coates’ use of Germany's reparations as a point of comparison. By the end of the Second World War, Germany’s faced immense external pressure for the horrors of the Holocaust, and paid war debts to the Allies as well as their reparations to Jewish survivors and Isreal. Their position as antagonists to human decency was recognized on an international scale, and this moral pressure informs their national understanding of their historical crimes. The United States does not face this pressure in the same way, because the victims of chattel slavery were not considered human when the crime occurred, and there is little pressure from the Global North to make reparations a reality. To be frank, the transatlantic slave trade has remained in the past, because addressing its present consequences has no benefit for the nation on an international scale, unlike Germany after the war. In America, the moral pressure mostly emerges from within, from the Black American consciousness that challenges its white counterpart.

That moral pressure often manifests in remembrance, and only rarely does it become restitution. But this remembrance is troubled in two ways: its universal applications to both sides of the American consciousness, and the assimilation of historical struggle. Growing up in the

South, seeing symbols of the Confederacy was a regular part of my existence. In the first grade I attended Robert E. Lee Elementary, and in gas stations they sell belt buckles emblazoned with the Confederate flag. For every National Museum of African American History and Culture, there’s the Mississippi state flag; for every Black president, there is a president who publicly allies with white supremacists. The narrative of historical progress in the United States is rarely 115 critical of the nation’s sins, from slavery, Manifest Destiny, and what the Confederacy sought to protect. Coates believes that reparations should address this particular contradiction:

228 “Reparations would mean the end of yelling ‘patriotism' while waving a Confederate flag." To expand on this thought, reparations must also mean the end of white washing figures like Martin

Luther King Jr., who “closely aligned with grassroots activists and publicly rejected capitalism

229 and the imperialist U.S. war in Vietnam” before he was assassinated. Black liberation struggles would have to have their incisive critiques of the state intact, not retold in chunks that consistently paint the nation in a progressive light.

Given all that reparations must do to unify both the national and Black collective consciousness, the reluctance to execute them is likely to persist, even if H.R. 40 succeeds in creating a reparations commission. Coates’ research into Israel's successful use of German reparations to jumpstart their economy suggests that an economic case for reparations could be made, especially considering the looming global recession. Investing billions of dollars in disenfranchised Black Americans could be a boon for Black people and stimulate the national economy, although that’s just my speculation. Reparations can ultimately take any form, and could be a massive stimulus to Black communities and the economy as a whole, but without the conversation moving forward in the legislature or on a presidential ticket, its possibilities remain ambiguous. The nation is reluctant to even have a formal conversation about what reparations could look like, and the liberal narrative of gradual progress renders the urgency of the demand ​ and need for reparations inert. In order to reckon with the split in both national and Black

228 Coates, 2014 229 James, Joy. 2015. "“Sorrow, Tears, And Blood”: Black Activism, Fractionation, And The Talented Tenth." ​ Viewpoint Magazine, , 2015. ​ https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/01/26/sorrow-tears-and-blood-black-activism-fractionation-and-the-talented-t enth/. 116

American consciousness, the pursuit of reparations must change tactics and subvert neoliberal bureaucracy to even be considered. My recommendation would be to coordinate national organizing around the need for reparations, and as a complement, supporting candidates who support reparations in Congress and the White House.

Queering Double Consciousness

Chapter 3 problematizes Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness by drawing attention to his habit of dismissing the agency of Black women in favor of Black men, a strain of masculinist theory that has persisted in Black liberation struggles. In order to account for double consciousness’ failure to account for women as human theorists, I incorporated Joy James’ theories of the Black Matrix, Womb Theory, and Captive Maternals as frameworks that complement and function alongside Du Bois’. Together, these theories give insight into how

Captive Maternals operate as the heart and soul of the contemporary striving for Black liberation, as exemplified by the life, activism, and death of Erica Garner.

The question at the heart of the chapter’s interrogation of Du Bois’ profeminism is whether he would've imagined his relation to the Veil differently if he had written The Souls of ​ Black Folk with Black women, or had been a Black woman himself. Double consciousness is, ​ after all, a matter of lived experience first and foremost. The revelation that “[Black men] cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve?” also

230 applies to women, doubly so for Black women. Facing the repression of both racism and patriarchy is a notably different experience than Du Bois’, and exploring this ignored

230 Du Bois, Souls, p. 42 ​ ​ 117 positionality requires going beyond the limits of Du Bois’ imagination. Incorporating James’ framework of Black women’s agency brings this analysis closer to the Combahee River

Collective, a coalition of Black feminists. As they espoused in their manifesto, the Combahee

River Collective defines Black womanhood as a wholly unique experience:

“Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and I970s. Many of us were active in those movements (Civil Rights, Black nationalism, the Black Panthers), and all of our lives Were greatly affected and changed by their ideologies, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men."231

A further problematizing of double consciousness would consider another dimension of compounded oppression beyond Du Bois’ imagination, that being queerness. Du Bois’ implicitly masculinist approach is also, and the “Black Macho” that relies on theory that shares that bias, is heteronormative by nature. Since masculinist projects of Black liberation locate freedom in “the right to seduce black women without legal, social or moral penalty," as white men are capable of,

Black people who operate under different means of desire exist outside of liberation. In this space outside of (Black masculinist) liberation, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and non-binary

Black people exist alongside and below Black women as antihuman and antitheorist, intensifying

232 their oppression by another order of magnitude. Despite facing oppression from both White and Black people, queer Black people often drive Black liberation struggles, including Marsha P.

Johnson, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and the members of the River Collective, who explain their alliance with Black liberation movements despite sexism:

“Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of

231 Combahee River Collective. 1986. The Combahee River Collective statement: Black Feminist organizing in the ​ ​ seventies and eighties. https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf ​ ​ 232 See Chapter 3 of the thesis, p. 74 - 75 118

course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism."233

In this respect, the River Collective, as well as other queer Black people–named and unnamed– are Black Captive Maternals, whose positions as caretakers for their communities informs their capacity to rupture systems of oppression. In adding the spectrums of gender and sexuality to double consciousness, those who face compounding oppressions, like the twenty Black trans and

234 gender-nonconforming people whose murders were reported in 2019. With these additional factors, further scholarship should investigate the possibility of a “quadruple consciousness," if not the existence of many more splits in Black psychic life and self-identification.

How Does it Feel to be a Problem?

At the end, I return to Professor Brent Edward’s critique of double consciousness: “Just

235 two, Dr. Du Bois, we are forced to ask today? Keep counting." The theory, and the strivings for unified consciousness that it details, all emerge from a binary representation of the Black

American psychic landscape, which is anything but simple. The adjective “double” obscures a multitude of splits in consciousness, hairline fractures that deepen and split as the tensions of late stage capitalism, systemic inequality, and state sanctioned violence become more pressing. As a consequence, there will always be new contradictions that double consciousness must account for.

Perhaps, in the century since the theory was first published, double consciousness is owed a reorientation. Up to this point, we imagined the Black collective consciousness as broken

233 Combahee River Collective, 1986 ​ 234 "Violence Against The Transgender Community In 2019 N." 2019. Human Rights Campaign. ​ ​ ​ https://www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-transgender-community-in-2019. 235 Edwards, 2007 119 halves of an injured whole, instead of a massive web of interlocking, differing realities. In this web, spheres of Black existence are defined by the contradictions that surround them, “strands” that distinguish them from other spheres. This web of consciousness defines Black psychic lives by the contradictory ideals they challenge and the ones they accept. That’s not to dismiss the harm of fracture: as outlined in this thesis, the strivings for cohesive consciousness continue to exist because the realities of Black oppression still exist. Look no further than our current crisis, where Black Americans are disproportionate victims of COVID-19 compared to the rest of the

United States population, a direct consequence of centuries of insufficient healthcare and

236 discriminatory housing policy. But in imagining split consciousness as a web instead of as fractures, the means for evaluating cohesion shift. In observing the contemporary iterations of

Du Bois’ strivings for cohesive consciousness, it becomes clear that the interrelated factions within the Black American collective may be cohesive in and of themselves. For Black capitalists like Jay-Z, there are no contradictions between their wealth and their capacity for activism, because they exist in a sphere of other Black capitalists who are not troubled by such accusations. Compare this to Erica Garner, and invisibilized Black Captive Maternals like her, who challenge the notion of grieving passively and formal leadership of civil rights struggles. In doing so, they create new spheres of existence on the margins that center their power and particular struggles.

The original vision of double consciousness investigated the conflict between being

Black and living in a white world during Reconstruction. At the time, this was an unprecedented

236 Jason Breslow, "Why Misinformation And Distrust Are Making COVID-19 More Dangerous For Black ​ America," NPR, April 10, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/10/832039813/why-misinformation-and-distrust-is- making-covid-19-more-dangerous-for-black-amer. 120 experience, one that followed 400 years of slavery. It stands to reason that through time, some

Black people have learned to successfully live with their own contradictions, and reconcile their

237 “seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals” on their own terms. Perhaps this is a shift towards a dialectic of consciousness, a meeting of thesis and antithesis that produces synthesis with new meaning. James Baldwin shares a similar thought in a 1989 interview:

“All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."238

As a privileged population of Black people find themselves disassociated from overt oppression, and these strivings continue to evolve, the conflict at the root of Black American existence persists. The seeming permanence of this fixture of Black psychic life raises a question. If today, a Black child had their offering of a greeting card refused by a white little girl, would it dawn on them—with certain suddenness—that they were different from the others? "...

239 or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil”?

237 Du Bois, Souls, p. 38 ​ ​ 238 Fred. L Stanley and Louis H. Pratt, Eds. Conversations with James Baldwin, (Jackson and London: University of ​ ​ Mississippi Press, 1989): 5-6. 239 Du Bois, Souls, p. 36 ​ ​ 121

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