W.E.B. Du Bois

John Perry
Coming up on Philosophy Talk: we’ll look at the works of W.E.B. Dubois.

Ken Taylor
Author of “The Souls of Black Folk.”

W.E.B. DuBois
The Negro is a sort of Seventh Son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.

Lucius Outlaw
To me, one of the interesting things about DuBois is that he constantly attended to complexities and nuance.

John Perry
Our guest is Lucius Outlaw.

Lucius Outlaw
I’m a graduate of Fisk University. So my encounter with the horrors was pretty profound. And the lead off epigraph of my dissertation is really from “The Souls of Black Folk,” it is that segment that speaks about, you know, double consciousness. So he had quite an impact on me.

Ken Taylor
The legacy of W.E.B DuBois—coming up on Philosophy Talk…

John Perry
…after the news.

Josh Landy
Hi, I’m Josh laddie. WEB DuBois was born on February 23 1868, and celebrated his 58th Birthday shortly after what became our current Black History Month. So let’s listen to this vintage episode with John and Ken, about Dubois his life and thoughts.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…everything except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you as always from the studios of 91.7 KALW—local, innovative public radio for San Francisco.

John Perry
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus.

Ken Taylor
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John Perry
So Ken, today we’re talking about W.E.B DuBois, a great man. He was born just after the civil war in 1868, and died just before Martin Luther King’s great speech in 1963. When I think about Dubois, I’ve read several of his books and studied him over the years. But when I was growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, a town named after the Great Emancipator, a town a good 80 miles north of the Mason Dixon Line, a town that was legally integrated, unlike the towns down in Kansas at that time. We never heard of DuBois. We heard about George Washington Carver and the peanut. We heard about Booker T. Washington and Up From Slavery, but I don’t think I heard the name Dubois mentioned till I was in college.

Ken Taylor
Oh, that’s that’s kind of interesting. Maybe that was because of Lincoln. I mean, DuBois was a intense analysts and social critic of the situation of black people in America. Maybe they just couldn’t stomach his message. In Lincoln, maybe they just didn’t want to maybe they prefer that accommodationist message of a Booker T. Washington. But I do have to say that, you know, Dubois really was a highly consequential intellectual. And he did it mostly through his writings. But you know, and he kind of was a founding generations of black thinkers. And writers were in deeply influenced by the boys and they keep returning to him. But I do have to say that philosophy or discipline, for a long time didn’t pay much attention to DuBois. That’s partly because the thing is, he was really deeply gripped about race, culture, identity philosophers in the 20th century, except for like the pragmatist, and some people now weren’t paying much attention to that stuff. And then when we started paying attention to that, we said, wow, look at this, these writings of Dubois.

John Perry
Then I think philosophically Dubois is an important figure even apart from his effect on black consciousness, and the Harlem Renaissance and all those great things. He was kind of a figure that fits between Emerson and the transcendentalist, where I think he got the seeds of his concept of double consciousness. And American pragmatists like me who develop this chi of the eye versus the me or even an existentialist like ceart, who who has to tell me more about double consciousness? Well, double consciousness is we all have this consciousness of who we are, that just comes from being human, where you’re the person who sees the things we see and does the things we do. And we have memories of what we’ve done. And we have some sense of who we are that way. But in addition, living in a world like we do, we have other people that talk about us and develop concepts of who we are based on information, misinformation and those feedback into us. We have to deal with both of those concepts if we can’t make them fit. And I think Dubois is saying that any African American is going to have a lot of trouble making them fit. But then we’ve got this double consciousness.

Ken Taylor
Tt’s going to be particularly striking for African American consciousness, right? Because on the one hand, especially the times DuBois was writing the African Americans that are despised to other right by this power, powerful group of white and then he’s got to conceive of himself Am I American? Am I Negro Am I have this or not have this to help us think about that more. Polly Stryker, our roving philosophical reporter, went out and talked to some folks about their concept of double consciousness. She filed this report.

Polly Stryker
W.E.B. Dubois is a name I associate with the Harlem Renaissance and the rise of the black intellectual at the turn of the 20th century. He was the first African American to get a PhD from Harvard, and was a founding member of the NAACP. But in light of civil rights leaders like Dr. King and Malcolm X, how relevant is he? I decided to dive into Dubois famous work The Souls of Black Folk. In it, he wondered how blacks living as second class citizens could ever really know themselves.

Michele Elam
It’s a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, when ever feels his twoness: an American and 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.

Polly Stryker
That’s Michel Elam, Associate Professor of English at Stanford. I asked what DuBois was trying to tell America in 1903, when he wrote The Souls of Black Folk, African

Michele Elam
Americans as he was representing them, were interested in integration, but not assimilation. That passage we read a little bit at Insulza black folk talks about that he doesn’t want to bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism. But he also feels that white America has much to teach African Americans in Africa in general, and he’s very interested in advancing the sense that the learning goes both ways. One of the things that’s fascinating about the Souls of Black Folk is it’s really got to audiences. It’s certainly writing for his peers. But it also is explicitly geared towards whites, trying to reveal the world behind the veil trying to give white people an appreciation of what it’s like to experience blackness in the country.

Polly Stryker
Dubois saw higher education as the way up, says Stanford philosophy professor Lanier Anderson.

Arnold Rampersad
Dubois thought the social problems faced by whites and blacks in the American South are incredibly complex. And that without genuinely broad minded people on both sides, the grave injustice of the social situation that those people found themselves in, was destined to lead to disaster.

Polly Stryker
Anderson says DuBois was philosophical about the color line.

Arnold Rampersad
When Dubois says at the beginning of Souls of Black Folk that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. He means that not only as a sociologist, he also means to point out that the problem of the color line as it existed, interior to the psychological and moral lives of African American people themselves, they faced in much starker terms, a fundamental human problem that we all face, about the way that we should reconcile our own individual self conception with a conception of ourselves that’s driven by the society around us.

The NAACP said of him in 1934, in an official resolution, he created what never existed before: a Negro intelligentsia,

Polly Stryker
Stanford professor of English, Arnold Rampersad.

Arnold Rampersad
To enter into the intellectual world of black America and racist to enter into a world that is really dominated by DuBois. There is something in Dubois for almost every aspect of the American condition where the American condition impinges on the question of race. And America is race. I mean, it’s a racial conundrum. That was in 1900. And still is today.

Polly Stryker
For Philosophy Talk. I’m Polly Stryker.

John Perry
Thanks Polly for that report. And thanks to Michelle Elam, Arnold Rampersad, and Lanier Anderson. So Ken, what do we got today?

Ken Taylor
Well, we’re joined today by Lucius Outlaw, a professor of philosophy, Director of the African American Studies program at Vanderbilt University, author of lots of things, but most recently, “In Search of Critical Social Theory in the Interest of Black Folk.” Lucius, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Lucius Outlaw
Ken, thank you very much. And John, thank you both, before the show this focus on Dubois and for inviting me to be a part of it.

John Perry
Oh well, you’re very welcome. Lucius, we’re really glad to have you. Let me start with this. Now. DuBois was a great social activist and a great social theorist. He was also a philosopher. But let’s put that aside for a moment and tell us what what drove him to leave the academy and become this activist? And how did it have to do with this basic social theory, his approach to that?

Lucius Outlaw
It probably wasn’t particularly experienced in Atlanta at one point where there had been a lynching of an African American and where some, you know, white folk participating in the lynching had cut off parts of his body and put them on display in the pitcher window of a store on a main street in Atlanta. And that I think, was so troubling to the boys was a man thing at some point. I came to conclusion that rational persuasion using science was not going to really get it done, that it was going to take more engaging public discourse of the kind that, you know, he talked about as propaganda that is not just scientific studies, but persuasive articulation, with a broad public was going to have to get at this problematic if we want to make a change.

Ken Taylor
But scientific studies was was the where his his social activism not tied to scientific study? I mean, I think of him as a great astute observer and theorists of race, identity and culture, and politics. Were that were the two sides of him divorced. I mean, did they cooperate?

Lucius Outlaw
I think they would. I don’t think they were divorced. And I think is how do you understand doing certain kinds of work? And how do you articulate it for what audiences it’s one thing to give a talk is it doesn’t 1897 to the American Academy of, of political and social science, a learned body of people of academics and specialists. It’s another to edit crisis magazine, magazine and goes on and sustain larger buy subscriptions of ordinary people, mostly African American people throughout the country, who are paying to read what is going on. Those are two different audiences. And it is a question about how do you reach these various audiences like that? It was reaching this wider audience, as a person said in the clip before, when he if you read the source of Black Folk, he’s talking to several audiences. They’re not just one and he was trying to reach a wider literate audience, not just people who would consume what we regard as, you know, evidence based scientific articulations in learned journals, endorsements.

John Perry
I mentioned earlier, when I was growing up, we heard a lot about George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington. We didn’t hear beans about DuBois. But he took on their conceptions of the role of African Americans in American life. How big a part did that debate play in his development as, as a public intellectual?

Lucius Outlaw
He played a huge part. I mean, I think there’s a point at which particularly when he comes to take on Booker T. Washington, it’s a watershed moment for him and send ourselves a blank focus the essay of Mr. Booker T, Washington, and others. And he knew that when he was taking that step of a public criticism of Washington, that he was taking on one of the major figures, black figures in the country at the time, who was the power broker of influence between black folks and white folk in the country. And he knew that this was going to be a watershed moment. For him. It was a watershed moment, while the consequences was because your Washington ultimately closed off all financial resources go into Atlanta University, which is one reason he said I need to get out of here before Atlanta ends up starving. And so it goes in New York, when he’s invited to come up and do crisis magazine, etc.

Ken Taylor
So what was what was the big debate between Washington and Dubois about what what was the issue help our listeners understand what was at stake? And why? Why Why was there such passion between them?

Lucius Outlaw
I think there were a couple of things. One was in one of the central notions of the late 19th century for white folk and white folk who are thinking about how do you shape historical unfolding on the central notions was two notions in particular one was character, and the other was manliness or manhood, generalize across the whole population of men and women. One or two boys, as criticisms of Washington was that he articulated things in a way that they were white people who use it to the advantage to think that he was accommodating racial segregation and invidious discrimination. And DuBois was clear that Washington wasn’t sanctioning that. But he thought that Washington needs to be a bit more careful in his articulation so as not to mislead people into thinking that he was endorsing that he said the cost of that accommodation was too high, except the manhood of African American people. Furthermore, there was a real disagreement about education, not whether there should be a Tuskegee or a fiscal Talladega, one providing vocational education, one providing education for what we call the talent at 10. It was at Booker T had become so influential. And it becomes so partisan that he became the control point for resources flowing into the educational pifo throughout the nation. And Booker T began to contain really control and limit the amount of resources that would go to places like this contest.

Ken Taylor
So he was he was kind of a kingmaker as it were, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Our subject today is WEB DuBois. Our guest is Lucius Outlaw from Vanderbilt University.

John Perry
In our next segment, we’re gonna dig deeper into some of the boys main ideas about identity, race and culture. Now, out there in our listening audience, we know you’ve got a lot of ideas about this. You’re just sitting there thinking about it, don’t do that. Pick up that phone and give us a call when the time is right. Our number is 415-841-4134 That’s 415

Amy Standen
This is an encore presentation of Philosophy Talk. The phone lines are closed.

Ken Taylor
Double consciousness The Souls of Black Folk white folk do and your calls and emails when Philosophy Talk continues.

Paul Robeson
A long ways from home.

John Perry
Paul Robeson who like WEB DuBois, our subject for today, died in self imposed exile from his native America. His sometimes I feel like a motherless child. This is Philosophy Talk. And I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Today we’re discussing the philosophy of WEB DuBois. Have you ever experienced double consciousness? Have you ever lived behind a veil ever known what it’s like to be experienced by another another West power over you as a problem?

John Perry
Join us the number is 415-841-4134 That’s 415…

Amy Standen
You’re listening to an encore presentation of Philosophy Talk. The phone lines are closed.

John Perry
Email comments at Philosophy Talk dot o RG. Our guest is Lucius outlaw from Vanderbilt University. Now look, Ken and Lucious. American philosophy is gifted right now with with a lot of very prominent, wonderful African American philosophers. And I’m sitting here in a conversation with two of you, w e Dubois must have had a big influence on your conception on your ability to take this as a as an aspiration. Let’s hear a little passionate about that. How about it?

Lucius Outlaw
Oh, indeed he did. You know, John, I’m a graduate of Fisk University. So my encounter with DuBois was pretty profound as a student at Fisk University. And when I went off to graduate school, and began writing my dissertation, the lead off epigraph of my dissertation is really from The Souls of Black Folk. And it is it is that segment that speaks about double consciousness. So he had quite an impact on me. So

Ken Taylor
tell us, okay, so Dubois has had quite an impact on you. And I’ve read somewhere I read, I was reading one of your work papers recently. And you said something about returning over and over again to Dubois his work on race. Tell me tell me about DuBois. How did he conceive of the very idea of race? And then tell them we’ll segue into talking about the particularity of black consciousness? But how did he conceive of the very idea of race? Well,

Lucius Outlaw
initially, around 1897, one of the ways he thought about it, it released way begins articulated in writing is of what he calls a vast family shaped fundamentally by what exists sociology and history in history, not by biology, you know, that has some part to play, but very little, it’s not. racial groups are not defined by biological characteristics, but by shared language, shared experiences, shared history, shared religion, etc. As he said, he could not know as a vast family, and he wrestled with this notion throughout his very long life of 95 years. So

John Perry
he was, like, most thinkers about race today, not a biological essentialist. He didn’t think the biology of it that was was very important. But he thought in culture was very important and mostly positive. He wasn’t for just out of assimilating people, people still disagree about that, as I understand what

Ken Taylor
let me ask you a question, though. Okay, what makes what makes me I’m an African American, and Ghanaian who’s of African descent, what makes us members of the same race by this way of thinking? I mean, I mean, I might the culture in which I have been reared, and which is deeply imbued my veins is some version of an American culture, it’s not sure. I mean, what makes us what makes me in the DNA and a member of the same race by his light?

Lucius Outlaw
Well, I think for him, it’s going to be part genealogical that is going to play a part, it’s not going to be the determining part is an initial conditioning. The rest was going to be with you again, what he says sociology, history, etc. Have you had very similar experiences? Now that clearly is a genealogical story to be told about people from the continent of Africa being brought to the United States,

Ken Taylor
right? But that sounds biological

Lucius Outlaw
story? No, no, thank you, John is historical. It is also of course, because there are cultural content images that will be sustained across multiple generations throughout the period of enslavement even into the 20th and 21st centuries. So the history sociology part is worth looking at and appreciating deeply, not just the biological bonds there. And the extent to which the gay and the African American are of the same race. Again, it depends on how you understand the concept and how tightly you want to have the connections be drawn. This way they can be drawn fairly loosely, the way in which we say people have who are white in the US are of European descent. We don’t really have a problem saying,

Ken Taylor
Well, let me Let me pressure just a little bit further than just to see how the DuBois in conception goes. Because, okay, I take the situation of people of African descent in America, they are faced with a problem and a challenge. And they have to forge an identity and a culture out of that situation that is different from any problem that an African is faced with, right? I mean, the Ghanaian has to deal with all sorts of things, but they’re not the things with which I have to deal with, if you know, and if my racial identity emerges out of that, Oh, what, in what sense? Again, I’m wondering, are we is it deep to say that the Ghanaian and I are of the same rate? I mean, there might be some similarities. But in what sense? Is there some deep sense, in which?

Lucius Outlaw
Well, let’s back up for a moment, if you say, began, well, who colonized Ghana? who settled in the US? Thank you, by the time we’re done with answering that question, we’re going to find that so many very same people were settler colonies of both Ghana, and the United States of America, and thus had involvement with people of African descent. So to say that the experiences of the African American and those of Ghana are not the same, I think is too much to quite a judgement to draw, there will be differences, there are going to be some similarities, and the similarities, I would argue are not going to be trivial. The differences will not be trivial, either. And that makes for some of the interesting flexes to me. One of the interesting things about Dubois, is that he constantly attended to complexities and nuances and never sought simple conceptual solutions for challenging issues. You know,

John Perry
I think some of his insights are probably truer today than even they were then because the, the technology with which we can build this public conception of a person are so great now and so available. I think of Muhammad Ali’s visit to Africa, where there was no doubt this deep sense of unity between him and the African two went to the year to to see the fight. And that was all televised all around the world. I mean, I mean, these identity creation machines are, you know, 24/7. And to have the integrity to kind of define yourself independently of them is pretty difficult. What do you think about?

Lucius Outlaw
Oh, yeah, I think that’s fine. And they remember how good this has always been a troublesome prospect for our significant numbers of fine folks who were in power and participated in white supremacy and the domination of folks that roughly said, it was always a real concern on their part, that there not be, you know, transatlantic shared consciousness of folks of African descent. And they worked hard to promote a sense that there was nothing in common with those various people. They did not want the United States of Africa, they did not want a serious Pan African movement to take root and to grow. It was to threaten. Now they can form Pan European alliances. They can form NATO allies, they can form alliances with Europeans in America and see themselves as sharing in one civilization that begins in Greece, I have no problem with that. And we in philosophy don’t tend to to really tackle that can we tend to go right ahead, promoting the notion that Plato and Aristotle, our ancestors of Europeans and American you’re

Ken Taylor
listening to Philosophy Talk we’re discussing WEB DuBois with Lucius outlaw are number 415841.

Amy Standen
You’re hearing an encore presentation of Philosophy Talk, the phone lines are closed,

Ken Taylor
and Ulysses is on the line from Emeryville. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Ulysses. Yes, Welcome,

Speaker 2
and congratulations on a fine show and a beautiful choice of subject matter at this critical time. I’d like to pose a question for your distinguished guests, Professor Lucius outlaw. Hopefully, President E. Gordon Gi is still president of Vanderbilt with masters of laws together at Columbia before you scholars were born when talking about

John Perry
some of them.

Speaker 2
Wb Dubois with respect to to Booker T. Washington. Let’s fast forward to the modern era. Now as a graduate of Boalt Hall Law School here in Berkeley, and a former Hoover Institute scholar. I am constantly interested in the differences between the amount of low income and students of diversity that are admitted to Stanford as opposed to Berkeley now in the face of 209. Berkeley agenda constraints but at Stanford which is a private school, not subject to the legal constraints, there is a higher proportion and I think outright numbers of students of color, irrespective of income and Stanford then it is in Berkeley. Now, at Vanderbilt, I understand is a private institution And I’d like Professor outlaw to tell us what we could do as public interested in education to increase the number of students of diversity in the public institutions in the face of attitudes like 209. And I’ll take my answer off the air.

Ken Taylor
Thanks you Lizzie’s 209? You know, you know, 209? Is that?

Lucius Outlaw
Right? Yeah, Proposition two on that. Sure. And thank you. This is where they for that question and go and get, you’re still Chancellor Vanderbilt. And I’ll try and pass on your good thoughts regarding him. It is a difficult challenge for public institutions. But I think it’s not an impossible one, the Supreme Court and the Michigan cases, rule against the strategy being deployed by the undergraduate segment of university admission, but support that one by that was being deployed by the law school. And basically what they said was, you can’t use firm, numerical quotas, so to speak, you can’t use those to figure out how you’re going to get people of color into this institution. Race can however, continue to be affected, among others, as you began to measure how you’re going to admit people into an institution. So public schools can do this, it just has to be a bit more nuanced, and not very crude and fast. Like we’ll take timbers and African Americans will reserve those seats, but they can build diverse classes. And, you know, for example, in many bill, we don’t have scholarship programs that are reserved for only for African Americans. We have scholarship programs that have criteria, races, some factory now, but other things are weighed equally as heavily, if not more in terms of how we bring people in with those scholarships. And we’re getting record numbers into the university. Lucius

Ken Taylor
let me let me focus you back to the two boys a little bit segwaying off the point you just made. One of the things some people think is that the key to adjust society is transcending conceptions of race or color, a colorblind society in which race is just regarded as a source of invidious distinctions. Right. And so it doesn’t track anything deeper morally significance. I don’t think the boys would have agreed with that. And from your writings, I don’t think you would agree with that either. Tell me about that. You’re

Lucius Outlaw
right on both counts. I don’t agree with it. And most people on the planet, I think, don’t agree with if you’d look at how they live and divorce certainly didn’t. I was looking today at one of his essays in 1963 years before he dies, and which he is urging African Americans Matejka that we must continue to have racially fine institutions, literature, art, etc, highest, but they must be open to all. And they must be founded on the principle of universal brotherhood. To mean DuBois was what I call a pluralist integration is he wanted a world with diverse peoples who contributed to the world, and that all people in the world would partake of what other peoples in the world had contributed was that rich diversity that would enrich us all, if we would attend to it respectfully. So it doesn’t want us to not know that people are from different cultural groupings, ethnic racial, how we design, but in fact, to know that as one of the grounds by which we appreciate and respect

Ken Taylor
them, Marian invoke Berger is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Marianne.

Speaker 3
Thank you. Yes, I wanted to make a comment, because I’m also Canadian, American. And I think that this speaks really to the entire question of double consciousness, and what is the link? And how do we understand race, because I grew up in a small town in Connecticut. And so in many ways, one could say that, you know, culturally, I’m white. Yet, in my experiences in that town, as well as now I live in the Bay Area, but primarily in that town, I was always seen as black and my being from Ghana, was secondary, if not tertiary. And me that was really not the most important aspect of my identity. And I wouldn’t say that, you know, I claim that identity as much as it was forced upon me. And so I think that when we start talking about a colorblind society, that that’s really quite unrealistic, because people are positioned according to how they look. And that’s the common I wanted to offer.

Ken Taylor
Let’s just respond to that.

Lucius Outlaw
Sure. And I think that’s right. And, you know, as John said, early on, the double kind of thing was not only about how I understand myself, it’s about how do others see me and as ecologist said, how do they position those that they view in certain kinds of ways. Now, again, what I want to hold up as a prospect is that we can have identifications that are not invidious, that they can be white, they can be African American, they can be Native American, they can be Hispanic, Latino, Jewish, American, whatever, they do not have to be invidious by virtue of being this neat. So that is what I would like to see. We’ve got

John Perry
an email that speaks to this kind of question of extending the concepts of diversity that we’re looking at. This is from Marcia, try being a very intelligent, constitutionally aggressive female in the 50s. In America, try it in the 60s. It’s pretty common today. Speak up for yourself and you’re a bitch. No one is allowed to make jokes using the N word anymore, but Bitch jokes are still okay on TV go on try to tell me about double consciousness dot dot dot how you just read between the lines. She’s a little ticked off.

Lucius Outlaw
Yeah, I take her point to be. This is not just about racial group. This has also had been a problematic for women that, you know we have had to work out in this society, how to appreciate women who are for who they are without on the first denying that they had certain capabilities beyond simply being members of the household and producers in newsrooms of children. But also to come back and say, even as women, he may have certain kinds of attributes that are beneficial to all of us in which we can benefit if we attend to them properly. I agree or not all the way there yet.

Ken Taylor
I agree with you entirely, which is what I think even goes further. I think it’s part of the modern problematic, because I think one of the things that modernity has done is put all these people rushing into contact with one another, seeing what they want to see in each other. I mean, why did the? Why did the Europeans see all these people that they encountered as other because they wanted to exploit them and they needed, they needed a rationalization or reason or whatever, they needed something that would justify to themselves, their exploitation. Of course, the people who were being exploited wanted to resist, but the Europeans had all this power. So it’s this great. This is great whirl and twirl of modality, this seeing and resisting other seeing and trying to make them see you, as you see yourself and them trying, you know, trying to appropriate your own vision of yourself. It’s a great world of modernity. So I think it’s deep within all of us.

John Perry
Well, I think I just think it Marcia has a good point, too. I mean, in the what are we the 10s of 21st century, the 90s. And now, women really have almost a triple consciousness problem, because they’re supposed to be supermoms. At the same time. They’re unfulfilled if they’re not out there, earning a living and having a professional identity, and then they just have to be themselves. These things are pretty difficult.

Ken Taylor
So you were about to say, Lucius?

Lucius Outlaw
Yeah, I think that’s right. I was gonna say one of the things I mean, my great enemy is it was a deeply conflicted and dishonest project. On the one hand, you get these claims about, you know, the political philosophy of liberal individualism and etc. And this is going to open a world of the Freedom etc. But that was one of the limits for white people, because modernity is really a project also of the expansions of people from Europe to other parts of the world, who, as you say, can have been upon acquisition. Yeah, and who are endowed by their own reason, as well as by their gods, to take to acquire at the expense of other peoples, including eliminating them through killing them. It means that you’re

Ken Taylor
listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re discussing W. EB Dubois, with Lucius outlaw at Vanderbilt University. This

Amy Standen
is an encore presentation of Philosophy Talk, the phone lines are closed

John Perry
talking about Dubois conception of race and his analysis of the interlocking racial consciousness of blacks and whites in America. When we continue, we’re going to talk about the continuing significance of the boys ideas race and

Ken Taylor
the 21st century plus more of your calls and emails when Philosophy Talk continues.

John Perry
Alien Jackson, and how I got over. I’m John Perry. And this is philosophy doc, the program that questions everything except

Ken Taylor
your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. We’re discussing the philosophy of WEB DuBois, who said that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line. Do we still face that problem in the 21st century? Or have we transcended it?

John Perry
Join us by calling 415-841-4134? That’s 415

Amy Standen
you’re listening to an encore presentation of Philosophy Talk. The phone lines are closed 5259917 1-800-525-9917

John Perry
Finally, comments at Philosophy Talk dot o RG gets us email.

Ken Taylor
We’ve got an open line. So give us a call you can get in, you can get in pretty quickly. Lucius, I wanted the last thing you were saying. Look, you know, in the old days, a long time ago, 1000 ad or something you ask somebody? What is your race some woman from Africa? She wouldn’t be puzzled at the question. These concepts of race came into existence, I think. And they became prominent in our social life when the Europeans encountered the other and had to explain them to themselves and justify their exploitation. So that makes me think like the way to a more just cosmopolitan world order might be just to explode these concepts which are just they were they were thought up in the service of Imperial exploitive projects anyway, so they just need to be exploded. Why not? And I think if you look at them as biological they’re, they’re completely empty.

Lucius Outlaw
Well, they’re not completely empty can they may not do all the work that people want them to do, but they’re not completely empty. I mean, it really is a case that you’ve got diverse groups of people, let’s call them population groups and breeding population groups where there are biological things going on. And that’s pretty clear. If we watch what continues to unfold what, what decoded the human genome, I think we’re gonna get even more confirmation of this, it will be a different conception of race, then the old 19 1817 century notion. Furthermore, I would say, the concept of race may not have been plausible if you go back a couple of 1000 years. But if you ask people, were they part of some lineage, some group of people that were defined in pod through descent? The answer to that is going to be virtually every group of human beings ever been on the planet? The answer is going to be? Yes. Stephen

Ken Taylor
in San Francisco is on the line. Welcome to philosophy tuxemon.

Speaker 4
Yeah, hi, I am wondering about whether or not there are any inherent characteristics about race. And I wanted to propose the following thought experiment, if we go back to the time when Europeans made contact, or more significant contact with the African continent, and we just flipped roles where Africans had, you know, reliable international capacity to go on ships and weaponry that was advanced, if we just switched the roles. Would there be anything different?

Ken Taylor
Good hypothetic ghosts? Steven, what do you think, Licious?

Lucius Outlaw
Well, I mean, I don’t know how you would answer that hypothetical. I mean, you know, one thing that you’d say, well, okay, what were African peoples encounters with other people on the continent, where there was a worthy endeavors of conquest? And so that is going to be yes. Did they have some of the same conception? I think so if you said, well, let’s just flip the script. In some sense, you’ve got to look much more closer to folks and ask, where they dreamed to move around the world with a notion of conquest armed by their gods or their gods to take charge of the land and other people’s and dispose of them? If they would? Once they kind of I think he answered, I think that’s going to be no, we don’t seem to have much evidence. That’s like, there are some clear differences that we’d have to get at here. Okay.

Ken Taylor
Let me push it just a little bit more on this point about the conservation, to use a DuBois in of rain in the 21st century. I mean, let’s grant the project of forming identity is a complicated project. And any person’s identity has multiple multiple competing, interlocking, perhaps cooperating strands. How significant as such are the racial strands in the constitution of one’s identity? I mean, is it more important that I’m a black man, that I’m an American, that I’m a philosopher, that I’m, you know, a Westerner that I’m an English speaker? I mean, is it up to me? Is it up to society? How do those things? How are those things adjudicated?

Lucius Outlaw
Well, a number of don’t let June catering the number of different kinds of ways. Sometimes, it’s up to us. But as newborn human beings, none of it is up to us, it is all done socially on our behalf. So we don’t get to choose a great deal of identity for most of our lives. By the time we come to the point where we can make a choice and strike out on our own sense of who we are. We’ve already acquired identifications of a very complicated time slot, you know, bequeathed to us by home school, trade, synagogues, mosques, volunteer organization of all can we can then go rework those? The question of, you know, what is most significant, in some sense, is partially an individual question. It is also partly a social question, the more complex the more complex societies we live in. Yeah,

Ken Taylor
so the boy said that the history of culture, I can’t remember the exact quote is the history of races. But if if race is just one thing, among others, that constitute culture and identity, is that the right way to think about it isn’t raised as a strand that runs through history?

Lucius Outlaw
Well, but again, I think you’d have to go back and ask the following question. To what extent have those kinds of identifications been very crucial for human beings in terms of how they then mobilize their resources and engage in activities of shaping the world in which they live? It turns out, it isn’t just one strand among others. It has to do with the fundamental way in which people understand themselves through connection with other human beings through lineages and their place in the world, such that the quote, As a man as a political animal seeks to leave by hand those who will look like him. I’ve asked him this, right. It is not simply one strand among other strands, and it is a pretty fundamental one for human anthropology. So

Ken Taylor
that means that the problem of the 21st century remains the problem with the color line or not. That’s what that’s what I was trying to set up.

Lucius Outlaw
Yeah, well, I think it will, but not necessarily in the same terms. My hometown in Starkville, Mississippi, is not constructed in the same way as it was when I was a kid growing up. There are still racial notions. They don’t mean quite the same thing. Black and white folk don’t operate each other in the same way, is an evolving set of conceptions race is still in play. But the very meaning of it and the politics that flow from those notions of race have been transformed significantly.

John Perry
Well, I think we can say with some confidence that the color line will not be the only problem in the 21st century that looks like the religion line and and the question of whether America is going to rule the world or, or not, or give up this silly ambition. We got plenty of problems on our plate, but my guess is the race one won’t go away. Lucius,

Ken Taylor
and then that we’re gonna have to take a buddy, thanks so much for joining. It’s been joining us. It’s been it’s been great

Lucius Outlaw
fun. And thank you so much for having me. And thanks again for the show.

Ken Taylor
My guest has been Lucius, outlaw professor of philosophy, and director of the African American studies program at Vanderbilt University, author of in search of critical social theory, in the interest of Black Folk, we

John Perry
want to thank all the callers we didn’t get a chance to talk to, and a couple of emails we didn’t have a chance to work in. We really appreciate these calls and emails, even when we don’t get to them. Thanks a lot.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. So John, what do you think of today? I mean, what is the 21st? The problem of the 21st century? You just said it’s not the problem of the century?

John Perry
Well, you know, I guess we’re sitting here in the 21st century about where DuBois was in the 20th century when he said race was going to be the problem of the 20th century, I just assumed not know what’s going to look back on the 21st century and be the big problem. We’ve got so many potential ones, we might destroy the ecological balance of the Earth, America might turn completely into a tyranny. Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism, and all kinds of fundamentalism may paradoxically emerge at the very time when science and philosophy and all the positive intellectual parts of human life are reaching their Zenith. It’s a big mystery to me. Yeah, it’s

Ken Taylor
a big mystery. I have to say I do. I think I disagree with Lucius a little bit I, I, I often wonder, so I think of myself as an African American. But I asked myself, What does the African and African American mean? If you ask a Ghanaian what his African This is, it’ll be something very concrete in particular, or Nigeria or South Africa, for an American of African descent. It can’t mean anything like any of those particular identities. So I often wonder what what does that really, really mean? Well,

John Perry
I have to tell you, I’m feeling pretty good about philosophy talk. And I think that if our listeners or our non listeners will go out and download or listen on the internet, to our conversations with Anthony Appiah, and our conversation today with Lucius outlaw, and get the ones that are available on podcasts that really have a good introduction to a lot of good thinking about the role of race in America.

Ken Taylor
And they can also you know what else they can do, they can go and read your blog that you put up to date on our blog, that blog dot Philosophy Talk that O RG I’m gonna put one up, I’m writing it called the many Souls of Black Folk. On that blog. Our motto is Kognito Ergo Blago, I think therefore, I blog.

John Perry
Well, you can pick up podcasts of our program on the website, as well.

Ken Taylor
You hear that sound? That signals my favorite part of the show?

John Perry
You mean the commercial? This is commercial free radio kid? No,

Ken Taylor
I mean, the conundrum. It’s conundrum time. And we have a caller on the line now. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. And Alright, thanks for taking my call. Where are you calling from in

Unknown Speaker
Portland, Oregon.

John Perry
Oh, lovely. Portland, Oregon. What a great place. We’re gonna be we’re gonna be up yet. We’re

Ken Taylor
gonna be up there to do a couple of live shows. Stop in for a cup of coffee. What do you do up there in lovely Portland?

Unknown Speaker
I’m a museum curator.

Ken Taylor
So why don’t you tell us your a conundrum?

Speaker 3
Well, it’s been going on for about a year now. My I have a very good friend who died. And her adult children asked if I would make a quilt out of her clothing.

Ken Taylor
Are you a quilt maker? quilt maker?

Speaker 3
I am I actually never take commissions or agree to make quilts for people because it is such a labor intensive thing.

Ken Taylor
So this sounds like a real gift from you. I mean, it’s something you did really like kindness and goodness and concern for your friend.

Speaker 3
So my friend who died Yes, I don’t know her kids as well. But But I, I loved her. And I finished them by Thanksgiving which was, which was working very hard and fast. And I called them at Thanksgiving, each the son and the daughter and got no response. And I called again, and reached the son who said that they were on their way out of town, and that they would call me when they got back after the holiday. I didn’t hear anything from them. And I called again at New Year’s, and called both of them and left them email messages. A year went by and heard nothing. And I had two quilts in my sewing room and I had pretty much just decided that I would never contact them again because I had already done my part to let them know that the quilts were done and ready and I felt pretty underappreciated. Last October I ran into the daughter at a store and she talked briefly about the year and how things had been going for them. I’ve been getting regular emails from them because they’re in a folk music group. And she said Why Haven’t you come to hear us? And oh, and by the way, I wanted to talk to you about those clips that you said you’d make. And at that point, I said, Well, you know, I did make them and I did contact you. And you said, you’d call me back. And at this point, I think, I’m going to do something else with the clip. She was shocked and hurt and said, Well, it’s been a very hard year for us. And I acknowledged that, you know, I, thank God have not lost my mother. I know that it’s got to be a hard year not so hard that they couldn’t get their folk music group up and running and not so hard that they couldn’t take trips, but so hard that they couldn’t email me and say, we can’t come get the quilt right now. I told her that she couldn’t have them. And then she left. And now that I’ve done that, my conundrum is, I feel like I might have accomplished what I set out to do, which was to not feel like a doormat, but I did intend the quilts to go to them, and however badly they acted, I feel like those clothes are always going to be their mother’s clothing. You

Ken Taylor
don’t want to be a doormat, and you think that by standing up for yourself, and expressing your displeasure with him, you kind of made it the case that you weren’t a doormat, but now you want to give them the quilt, you’re worried that that would make you a doormat all over again. Is that right? Well, I

Speaker 3
agreed to make them they asked something and I said that I would and isn’t really my place to punish them for behaving badly.

John Perry
You know, when you said she says she’s had a rough year, but how rough gonna be they kept the music thing going? Well, you don’t really know that either. I mean, basically, you probably don’t know much about what happened to her. She’s got lots of other relatives, she could have had some illness or something, when they I think you ought to consider is inviting her to lunch and kind of clearing the air between you. So you know, I think you underestimated how much trouble it was to make this quilt and I maybe I was a little harsh in my judgment of you’re not calling me. So why don’t we talk this out? Don’t

Ken Taylor
you sound like such a wise caring person?

John Perry
Sound like a worse

Speaker 3
idea makes it sound like that gives her the opportunity to apologize. Yes.

Ken Taylor
Well, what’s wrong with it? That

John Perry
sounds my problem is if she does apologize, you probably have created a situation you pretty much have to give her the quilt anyway. Yes,

Speaker 3
I think if I do that, that’s only if I’ve already decided that she gets the quote, it’s clear

Ken Taylor
to me. You don’t want to be a doormat, you put it that way yourself. One other kind of person do you want to be you want to see yourself as a forgiving person? Me? How much does it matter to you to see yourself as a forgiving person? Because if you want to see yourself as that, then make yourself that. I mean, if you don’t want to see yourself as a doormat, then don’t be a doormat. So tell me, what do you want to see yourself as

Speaker 3
well be really horrible to not say I want to see myself as a forgiving person, wouldn’t it? Well, I

Ken Taylor
don’t know. Does that weigh more than not wanting to see yourself as a doormat?

Speaker 3
Well, I think I think complicating everything is the fact that I have in the last year decided that I’d really like one of these quotes.

John Perry
Well, I think, you know, here’s one possibility wrap up one of the quilts very nice, send it to the daughter with a note saying, I really feel you ought to have this. Right now I’m feeling a little unappreciated, but maybe someday you’ll make a quilt and understand how much love went into this. Well, that

Unknown Speaker
sounds like a perfect solution.

Ken Taylor
But and I think you made that John’s day you said a perfect solution. I don’t think anybody’s ever said that. But I hope we’ve helped you think about your conundrum. I

Unknown Speaker
certainly did. Thank you very much.

John Perry
Okay, thank you and say hi to Portland for me. Looking forward to seeing you.

Ken Taylor
Come listen to us when we get up there I will.

John Perry
Aasif II talk is a presentation of Ben Minella productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producer is David to Demarest Special thanks

John Perry
go to Rooijen Shen Neil Van Leeuwen, Nicole. So why have been tension and Alan Farley

Ken Taylor
support for Philosophy Talk comes from the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association also

John Perry
from various groups at Stanford University. The Friends of Philosophy Talk and the members of Ka LW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ken Taylor
The views expressed or mis expressed in this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

John Perry
The conversation continues on our website, www dot Philosophy Talk dot o RG. I’m John Perry. And

Ken Taylor
I’m Ken Taylor.

John Perry
Thank you for listening and thank you for thinking.