Day 19

August 2, 2009

I needed a break, so I took a taxi to Coconut Grove, a resort in Elmina, close to Cape Coast, a neighboring town. It was such a nice day. Not hot, but not too cool with a slight over cast. If I wasn’t by myself I would have went to sleep, but I brought one of my books from my summer reading list, Souls of Black Folks (1903) from W.E.B. DuBois. I have read parts of the text and criticism of it but I have not read it from back to front in its entirety. As I was reading it I couldn’t help but think about DuBois, Obama, Ghana, and identity formation. It may seem like an odd mixture but not so much. As I have written earlier, Obama made Ghana his first country to visit in Africa as president. DuBois’ connection to Ghana is through him becoming an expatriate of the US by revoking his US citizenship and permanently moving to Accra, Ghana. But it wasn’t until I was reading the introduction by Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin in a newly released version (2003) one-hundred years after its original publication, that my ideas started. DuBois is considered by many (if not most) scholars as the foremost authority on African American life. Although he released his first book (his dissertation The Suppression of the African Slave Trade) in 1895, then the first sociological study of African Americans in The Philadelphia Negro in 1897, his work is still pertinent today. Concepts such as “The Veil” and especially the much quoted “double-consciousness” theory in The Souls of Black Folks are consistently used in scholarship:

…the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with 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 other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – 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 asunder (9).

But what is interesting is that DuBois has been deemed the “go-to” person for black American sociology but he did not have the same personal experiences of racism that he discussed. He was disconnected. DuBois was raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and had the opportunity to achieve academically in ways not available to most African American in the last half of the 1800s after the end of slavery. His excellent academic performance may be the result of the different racial climate in the Northeastern US at the time. He was in New England where racism was evident but not nearly as pervasive and dangerous as southern states. He lived in mixed-race community with other black families, arguably middle class, and attended a mixed-race school. He speaks of an incident in his youth when his classmates and he decided to exchange greeting cards but his white classmate didn’t accept his. It was then that he says he realized he was different. With the assistance of his high school principal, he won a scholarship to the prestigious Fisk University (HBCU). I doubt that there was a black principal of a mixed raced school, so I am assuming his principal was white since he attended high school from 1880-1884 before the 1896 US Supreme Court Plessey v. Ferguson ruling making it legal to have separate but “equal” race-based facilities. He traveled to Berlin for two years and he later became the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard University. It wasn’t until he traveled to the southern part of the US that he saw blatant acts of terror and discrimination against blacks by whites. But it wasn’t until he attended a black southern church that he felt the most disconnected from other black Americans. He expressed his experience as something negative. People dancing, screaming, and talking in a form of intelligible eloquence. He comes into the space as somewhat of an ethnographer. An outsider documenting his experiences and interpreting them from his own distant understanding. He becomes encompassed in southern black culture and Southern discrimination. Elements of black life that was foreign to him for some time. He discusses how the black church is a sacred place for black Americans. Where the bible and church becomes centric to black understanding. He tells a fictional story of a man named John whose life appears to parallel DuBois’ disconnection from the southern blacks:

[John] spoke slowly and methodically…A painful hush seized that crowded mass. Little had they understood of what he said, for he spoke an unknown tongue…Thne at last a low suppressed snarl came from the Amen corner, and an old bent man arose, walked over the seats, and climbed straight up into the pulpit…He seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands; twice he raised it inarticulate, and then fairly burst into words, with rude and awful eloquence. He quivered, swayed, and bent; then rose aloft in perfect majesty, till the people moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild shrieking arose from the corners where all the pent-up feeling of the hour gathered itself and rushed the air; John never knew clearly what the old man said; he only felt himself held up to scorn and scathing denunciation for trampling on the true Religion, and he realized with amazement that all unknowingly he had put rough, rude hands on something this little world held sacred (xxv).

The “little world” he was referring to was this southern black world he felt he encroached upon. He, John, a stand-in for DuBois. You then see DuBois inserting himself in the narrative. Making himself apart of the people that he looked at with confusion and pity. Not only does he often use the first person to align himself with his “subjects”, but he appears to show his readers (he targeted scholars and lay people) he understands the “little world” he never grew up in. His odd and somewhat oxymoronic placement as both a member of the black community and visitor is evident in his description of the “The Veil” and his use of the bible in his writings. Griffin writes that,

DuBois promises readers that he has ‘stepped within the veil’ and raised it to expose ‘deeper recesses.’ While he elsewhere claims to have lived behind the Veil throughout his life, here he positions himself as someone who dwells both within and just outside its cover –and, most important, as the investigator, the communicator, the native informant who can render the mysteries behind the Veil known (xvii).

It is a place he appears to have placed himself. Also, he sporadically alludes to the bible possibly as a way to show his connection to the artifact “the folk” hold dear. In the last sentence of DuBois’ forethought he asks the reader “And finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil” (4)? His reference to Genesis 2:23 is a statement made by Adam to Eve after she was created from his rib. By using this verse, DuBois seems to be doing a few things. Although he poses a question to the reader, he seems to informing the reader of his placement in the black community. He addresses any doubt the reader may have about his racial identity… or he may be addressing the doubt he already has. “…need I add that I…of them that live in the Veil?” As if to say, no, he doesn’t need to ask, it should be obvious. And if it isn’t continue to read and become a believer. The verse not only is a method to connect him to the black community but makes him an inauthentic being. According to the bible, Eve was not created through independent means. Meaning she was not created from the earth as Adam was, she was created for and through Adam. Created as a companion to Adam by way of his rib. Wo-man, from the womb of man. Arguably without Adam, Eve would never have been created. DuBois positions himself as a product of the authentic southern black community. An Adam of black Americans. A community he was not privy to prior to his adult years. He could be saying, if it weren’t for his experiences among Southern blacks that his research wouldn’t have been possible, his placement as “the investigator, the communicator, the native informant” wouldn’t have been possible. Or it is simply him arresting any doubts the reader may have about his black identity. Regardless, the verse still removes him from being authentic as Adam. Its contradictory in ways. Instead DuBois is like Eve, created from other means. His outlook and scholar is by way of the rib, the bible, the black church his interactions, with southern black Americans, that he became who he was. His roots are not strictly from the earth (the black folk) like Adam. DuBois ideas came from special circumstances much like Adam. God saw that Adam needed a companion, so he created one for him. Possibly it is this unique position that makes DuBois an interesting liaison between the white world he says he left, and the black one he says he has joined (3). (Also implying that it is a world different from the world he is from.)

This brings me to Obama. Obama, hailed as the first African American president was not raised in a detrimental racial climate just as DuBois wasn’t. Obama has roots in Kansas where his mother originates but spent a considerable part of his life in Hawaii living with his white grandparents. Although Hawaii is not exempt from racism (especially of the ingenious people and US discriminatory on its sugar plantations) it is much like DuBois hometown in New England. Meaning, discrimination is not absent but cannot compare to the atrocities in the South. Obama, had little contact with his Kenyan father because they lacked interaction because of his father’s circumstances and because of his father’s early death. Although DuBois’ father left his family making his home one of a single mother, Obama’s father’s absence speaks to another way an which Obama did not grow up in a black community. But even if his father was present, his father was Kenyan. A highly educated Kenyan at that. Both of Obama’s parents had PhDs. But his father is not an African American and wasn’t a part of the black American community either. As an African, his is arguably as foreign to the plight of the black American community as his white mother. Interestingly, Obama’s mother received her PhD in anthropology studying social and economic disparities. Similar to DuBois. During his youth Obama rejected his African name Barak and insisted that people call him Barry. It wasn’t until he became interested in the Black Panther Party history and other black students in college in California that he was convinced to embraced his African heritage that he was distanced from. Much like DuBois who created a connection to the black community by scholastically placing himself inside of it. After attending Columbia, a prestigious school much like Fisk was a prestigious school in DuBois’ time, he attends Princeton and became the first African American to become president of the Princeton law association. He then followed his mother’s footsteps in addressing disparities in the US and worked to tackle social and economic issues as a community organizer. It is much like DuBois who assisted in the formation of the Niagara Movement from which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed. Obama, his wife Michelle and two daughters attend a black church with the now infamous Rev. Wright whose sermons are reminiscent Civil Rights and Black Power movement rhetoric. Obama connects himself to the black church as DuBois did but differently. Obama is a member and appears to physically situate himself as an unquestionable member of the community as opposed to DuBois who seemed to switch back and forth as an ethnocentric ethnographer and a legitimate member during his young adulthood.

Neither Obama, on his campaign trail or DuBois seem to discuss their privileged background much. In Ghana, there are advertisements that say Obama is the son of a goat herded who rose to be the president of the most powerful country in the world. Mostly likely, Obama’s father never herded goats because he was highly educated. And since, often times, primary and secondary school is not free, his family must have had the means of paying for his schooling. Also, since Obama was not born in rural Kenya, he wouldn’t know the first thing about goat herding. But referring to him as the son of a goat herder is a way to connect Obama to the a common African. Also, many times Obama mentioned some humble situations during his life when his mother and her children had to use food stamps to survive before his mother married an Asian man. Although I don’t feel as if Obama abused this fact or incessantly used it to make his background appear more humble than it was, it did help in making people believe he understood them. That he can meet the common American on their ground. That he was not an outsider. Much like DuBois wanted inclusion. Another interesting parallel is that both DuBois and Obama allude to Christianity: DuBois in his writings and Obama in his speeches. Although Obama may have had to use this tactic more so because of the assumption that he was Muslim, he also referenced Martin Luther King’s speeches. It is somewhat of a backdoor method of connecting him to the black church (where many activists met during many civil rights organizing activities) and it’s a way to connect to the black American experience. An experience that he arguably had little experience with living in Kansas, Hawaii, and other neighborhoods with his mixed-raced family. Also, during Obama’s presidential campaign and during his presidency, people have labeled him a socialist. A principle that is not far from the Communist Marxist ideology DuBois adopted in 1934.

I wonder if coming from multi-raced background, with enough discrimination to realize they were different from the mainstream culture, allowed them to have a different insight. Some people can’t see the forest for the trees or so deep in the ditch that they cannot see or have access to the tools they need to remove themselves from the situation. Can being entrenched in a racial identity became a barrier and evolution? For change? They have a different perspective. DuBois was not the first person write about Black people. And Barak Obama is not the first black person to run for US presidency: Shirley Chisholm, Jessie Jackson (twice), Alan Keyes, Al Sharpton to name a few. But there is something about these men’s backgrounds that gave them a different insight.While in Hawaii, Obama had friends from Portugual, China, and India. He lived with white grandparents, had a white mother, and an Indonesia father after his mother and Kenyan father divorced. It wasn’t until he was on the main land of the US that he experienced the name-calling discrimination. Much like DuBois who didn’t experience heightened levels of discrimination until he traveled to the South. Both traveled outside of their comfort zones. DuBois requests and does work to prove himself to be a part of the black community. DuBois goes to the South, teaches in Atlanta and gets his hands dirty in the US racial disparities. Obama doesn’t request but inserts himself in the community via the church and through executing community organizing in urban Chicago areas. DuBois through scholarship and Obama through politics.

In 1945 DuBois meets with African leaders to discuss pan-Africanism. DuBois is concerned with issues of colonization and works to monitor political events in African and supports African liberation movements. In 1961 DuBois is invited by Ghana’s new President Kwame Nkrumah. Obama comes to Ghana in 2009 and Ghana’s current president campaigns for a union between him and Obama.

Hmm, I feel like there is more to this. Possibly, more to come.

Interesting facts: Obama’s Birthday August 4, 1961. DuBois Dies on August 27 1963 the day before Martin Luther King leads the March on Washington.