W.E.B. DU BOIS AND WHITE NOISE
White noise seems an appropriate metaphor for my own orientation to the problem of white supremacy in our times and to the history of slavery. White noise refers to sound of random signals of different frequencies but of equal intensity. It is often suggested as a sleep aid but neuroscience research points out that it may lead to maladaptive changes in the brain that degrade neurological health and compromise cognition. It is my thought that my experience of Black history and Black life has been obscured by white noise. My own life experiences are set against the background of being white by accident of my birth, by growing up in a white family in a white town in a predominantly white state. I don't recall having any fellow students, people of color, in any of my classes in school all the way through high school. It wasn't until I went to college that I was in classes with Blacks. There was one teacher in high school who was a Black person and I had him for German. Other than that, my life was an environment of enveloping white noise.
The only exception to the above story was an exceptional experience I had two years in high school when I was a counselor at a rural camp in Illinois. It was designed as a working farm and the camp brought children together from different parts of Chicago's inner city for periods of ten days. We had breaks between camp sessions when the male counselors shared a dormitory space. It was then that I met three Black college students from schools in the South. I don't recall ever being discriminated against by them (I was the only white boy in the group) and I don't ever remember feeling prejudiced against them. In fact, I looked up to them as older and more sophisticated because they were ahead of me in school. During one of the camp breaks, I spent ten days at a storefront church in the inner city and lived with several of the neighborhood residents, my guides. They were Black, also. They were very kind to a white kid straight out of a protected environment and I became very fond of them. They showed me around the neighborhood and told me how to act. During that time, I went to a church service at The First Church of Deliverance where there was a congregation of Blacks and a choir of one hundred voices. The ushers were dressed in black suits and black ties and had white gloves as they passed the collection plates. We visitors were not allowed to enter without a tie and coat and, not knowing this and attending in our casual clothes, we had to select one of each from a rack in the hallway in order to be included in the service. I remember to this day the mighty sound of the choir and almost nothing else. Yet, I did not feel out of place because of the color of my skin—only because of my under dressing. These experiences were the only ones I had in a community of people of color but perhaps they were formative for me.
Perhaps I was just too naive to understand the dynamics of race and racial tensions, even though my first year at the camp was punctuated by civil rights demonstrations in Grant Park in Chicago and the Black counselors spent their spare weekends in the city demonstrating. It was the summer of 1962 and very hot. It was even rumored that Jesse Jackson would be coming to the camp for a retreat from his civil rights work but he never came. There was a significant connection between the Black students at camp and the civil rights leaders in Chicago. I was aware of all of this but I think my white noise background crowded out the calls for Black recognition and equal rights. Perhaps I was afraid of getting too close to something I didn't fully understand at that point in my life.
The issue of slavery was an academic subject for me, one that I knew about from my American history classes. It wasn't something vitally alive in my own experience, despite my experiences with Black people. I think my only excuse (and it is an excuse, I see now) was that the only sounds I could hear were those of white noise. Now, at this stage in my life, I am beginning to understand more fully the extent to which slavery and the idea of race has been present in cultures and societies for a very long time. The rise of Trump and the January 6, 2021 invasion of the Capitol by white supremacists has galvanized my own soul and I am embarking on a study of race by reading all that I can. There is a new awakening to this history now, I think, for the same reasons I have been shocked by events. Learning about race is now a pot luck dinner of offerings in books, online series of contributors giving voice to the Black experience. There are personal memoirs and new histories of Black life and surveys of issues of race and racial injustices (carceral histories and assessments, for instance). I have known of the Quaker abolitionists but not much about those Quakers who were slave owners. I knew growing up of my Grandmother's support of Blacks and Black rights and of my dad's love of jazz and the careers of Black entertainers like Louie Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. But it was mostly in an ocean of white noise for me.
I wonder how much of this recollection is a cover for some version of my own prejudice. Maybe I am rationalizing my way out of white noise and white blindness. Perhaps this year of reading is a time for me to answer some of those questions and to notice how my life, too, has been infused with white prejudice against people of color. I allow this as a possibility and an opportunity to be chastened and to learn more.
I didn't know where to start in my year-long study and so chose the most famous work of a Black author I knew and that was W.E.B Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903). I was looking for a road map to follow and turned to him for help. Of course, his work is not comprehensive of the Black experience by any means. But his is an articulate and poetic voice and yet most certainly strongly uncompromising (taking on Booker T. Washington who was considered to be something of an apologist for Black inferiority). He seemed a good choice and a place to start on a journey that takes me to James Baldwin and more contemporary works on Black history and Black life.
A start with Du Bois begins with the distinctions I make among the terms “emancipation,” “liberation,” and “freedom.” The dictionary defines all of them in terms of the others but, for me, there is a distinction that helps me understand each better and to see how each one figures differently in the work of Du Bois. Emancipation refers to the legal act of freeing a group of people from bondage or oppression, as in the Emancipation Proclamation. Liberation is the state of being emancipated, to be set free from confinement or control. Freedom is the experiential condition of being free of constraints with the capacity to exercise choice and free will and having the ease or facility of movement. It also includes the power to engage in certain actions without control or interference. So, it seems possible to be emancipated, liberated, and still not free. That is how I tend to view how racism has found a lasting presence in our society. That is the background picture painted by Du Bois.
His book is a series of essays beginning with the desires or “strivings” of Blacks. (He can be forgiven for his lack of gender sensitivity in his references to “man” and “manhood.”) This chapter lays out the educational and economic realities of Black people in a world dominated by white people. He emphasizes education, voting rights, and freedom in the sense in which it is defined above. Here he refers to the “Negro problem” for America where those “strivings” are denied.
Chapter Two contains the reference to the “color line.” This line demarcates the lives of Black and white folks. It defines the cleft between all advantages given to one group and denied to the other. He documents to short lived efforts after the Civil War to give Blacks opportunities in education.
“...the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.”
The disappointed efforts to extend suffrage to Blacks “ended a Civil War by beginning a race feud.”
Chapter Three on the work of Booker T. Washington “and others” is a studied criticism of what is now called the “assimilationist” approach to Black integration.
“Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission ….”
“...the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.”
“His (Washington's) 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 righting these great wrongs.”
This passage contains the same passionate calls James Baldwin makes almost half a century later in his speeches and writings.
Chapter Four is a personal memoir of Du Bois's experiences as a teacher in rural Tennessee and his return visit ten years later, noting that no real progress had been made in the lives of those he knew.
Chapter Five is a reflection on the diminished role of teachers and preachers in the lives of Black folk.
“In the Black world, the preacher and teacher embodied once the ideals of this people,--the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing....”
“The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a center of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.”
It wasn't until the Civil Rights movement that preachers like Martin Luther King, Jr. would emerge as spiritual and political uplifters of Black people and, even then, he was criticized for not adopting a more activist stance in support of Black people.
Chapter Six paints a broader picture of what is necessary for the education of Black people in attaining the “social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and co-operation.”
Chapter Seven is another personal memoir of his experiences through southern Georgia, documenting oppression and few successes of Black people on the land to which they had been chained by the brutality of slavery and its vestiges.
Throughout his work Du Bois continued to emphasize the high ideals of self-improvement and societal acceptance while documenting the reality of the desperate conditions under which Blacks struggled all their lives. He referred to Darwin's thesis of “survival of the fittest” (a long-standing cudgel used by proslavery adherents) but in a most generous and open-hearted way:
“... in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty.”
He was well aware of the economics and demographics of slavery that kept Blacks enslaved, of how voting rights were always denied, of how police systems were designed to control unruly slaves, all inhumanities that are still a part of contemporary political life.
“Within and without the sombre veil of color vast social forces have been at work—efforts for human betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest.”
Further chapters discuss the role of the Black preacher and Black churches and their roots in Black history from nature worship to voodoo and Christianity. In another chapter of memoir he relates the heartbreaking story of the death of his infant son but turns the tragedy into a story of the baby having been freed, escaping the bonds of slavery:
“Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.”
And then there are several stories about abolitionist intentions and an unrequited love leading to a clutch of losses. The final chapter takes on the topic of Black folk songs, “the sorrow songs.” Here he celebrates the “voice of exile” that emerged from nature, songs that incorporated hope and faith in the “justice of things.” All of the chapters are a quilt of Black experiences, both individually personal and societally significant. Du Bois intended to make the Black enslavement a real experience that could only come alive in a vital way with both the individual and the communal included in the quilt. In a very poignant way, he was able to show that if emancipation and liberation had not become a reality for most Black people, then there were degrees of freedom that brought them hope—through their songs and stories. That, of course, is not enough freedom and should not be the cover for continued racism. Du Bois did not intend to feed into the racist myth that Blacks were happy with their circumstances but only to show that the spirit of human freedom was a real hope and one to which Blacks were entitled as much as whites.
This was an important book for me to read at the beginning for several reasons. I got to sample Du Bois's poetic writing style and his articulations of aspects of slavery and its manifestations from someone who could document his personal experiences as well as the socioeconomic repercussions of Black bondage. I could hear the later voices of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. and how they made references to Du Bois in their writings and speeches. Sadly, racism persists in some of its most primitive forms and in more sophisticated ones, too. Knowing about the history of Black experiences makes it easier to see how slavery and racism still permeate our culture. This is the beginning of understanding and, perhaps, change.
Now, as I look back at the beginning of this piece, I am more aware of how white noise permeates my own outlook. And I wonder if I am still subject to how the noise obliterates my curiosity and knowledge about this most important subject that affects the lives of all Black people, people of color, and whites, too, as they are no less potential prisoners in someone else's jail or gulag or other system of enslavement. In denying freedom to Blacks, we deny our own freedom from oppressions of the body, mind, and spirit as fellow human beings. We do not notice how we are equally bound because we hear only white noise.
I wondered at the beginning of this piece if I suffer from the effects of white noise in relation to racism and I haven't resolved that question. Relating my own experiences and reading Du Bois have made it easy for me to congratulate myself on my own liberated state. It isn't that I think it necessary to suffer some self-flagellation in order to come to terms with what is a pervasive stream in American life. But I am not sure how to understand what elements of racism might lurk in my unconscious and how to know them for what they are. This piece has been the beginning of an exploration of racism but I think white noise also obliterates sensitivity to other social ills and even some inborn tendency for xenophobia, suspecting anyone who doesn't look or think like me. So, hopefully this year of reading will heighten my awareness of all aspects of assigning others to a lesser status than mine and to understand the degree to which I am subject to the trends in society that contribute to white noise. How does one cultivate a true intention to accept others (of a race, political party, gender, sexual preference, economic status) for who and what they are? And how does one separate out a determination to pursue Truth, Beauty, and Goodness from those who disparage or counter such pursuits? Do I have to be “right” in some things and does that erode universal acceptance?
It is useful to continue digging into what I call “white noise.” I have read most of Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. It is comprehensive and tackles a very complicated historical/socioeconomic/political/ethical/moral issue. He traces the mindset of racism through all of American history and doesn't let anyone anywhere along the line off the hook. He fractionates racism a number of ways (“uplift suasion,” “assimilationist,” etc.) and categorizes personalities and historical events into these fractions. I can see how this might be a useful teaching tool, but I still wonder if the categories aren't his own way of expressing a personal racial mindset. There is a great deal of historical context but he often dismisses it in many instances and assigns racist behavior and political maneuvering to intentional desires. But, I wonder if the history of racism hasn't always been (and still is) a matter of acting within the fog of white noise. I question whether those assigned to the category of assimilationist, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, were consciously attempting to pander to white supremacists in order to advance Black fortunes. Or, perhaps, he, too, was wandering in the fog and was advocating on the basis of what he was able to perceive about social evolution in his own times.
I find myself pushing back at Kendi's assertions of rampant and intentional racism and I suppose that puts me in the category of being a racist. But I think back over my own experiences and I don't feel like a racist. I support any efforts that free any individual from the various prisons society imposes on them or racial groups or groups marked by category. I read Du Bois's work with the idea that he was advocating for Black folks in the only way he was able at the time. Later social contexts turned to more militant actions and even violence, but that was not the context of Black advocacy in 1903. I think the same case can be made for women's suffrage or the civil rights of other minority groups.
I am troubled by the idea that, even now, I am wandering in yet another version of white noise and not noticing my own biases correctly or clearly. What should someone do to tease out these biases in order to support human rights? Kendi's next book, How To Be An Antiracist, might help me answer this question but it presumes that the reader is a racist and wants to change things. If James Baldwin was correct and the answer to racism is self-examination of one's biases and an opening to the love of another, then knowing about the role of racism in our collective history is very helpful. I am not sure how individuals who have an intention to work with personal white noise can impact how racism is expressed in society, in a grander and vaster landscape that includes all the factors that affect the lives of all citizens (police racial profiling; economic gaps; partisan political expressions of racism; such as gerrymandering and elimination of voting rights; public health discrimination; discrimination in housing opportunities, etc.).
For now, I will stick by my impressions of Du Bois's work and attempt a closer and deeper look at my own biases when it comes to racial prejudice. My admiration for Du Bois and what he attempted to do for Black folks is still admirable in my eyes. His personal history is complex and his actions often contradictory but that just reinforces my impression that all of us are wandering through the white noise fog. I think the same thing can be said for all those who have addressed the issue of racial prejudice and its manifestations. Racial prejudice in its intentional and oppressive forms must always be condemned but those usually make themselves obvious and are subject to change. It is the subtle lapses in racial references that add to the overall difficulty, impregnated in rigid ways in our social discourse.
My ongoing study of race is still a useful pursuit and I am not put off by my own possible stubborn biases, but use them to carry me on in the study. Both the works of Du Bois and Kendi are very thought provoking sources. I will continue to seek an answer to the question: How do I go about seeing more clearly through the fog of white noise? And what actions are suggested by those insights?
