shines on me and it shines on you
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| W.E.B. Du BoisBettmann Archive/Getty Images |
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You may have noticed from my column in Sunday Review last week that I have been a little preoccupied with W.E.B. Du Bois, revisiting his extraordinary body of work and sitting down with volumes and essays I hadn't read before. |
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Most people who know of Du Bois know him as the ideological counterpart to Booker T. Washington and the author of "The Souls of Black Folk," his seminal work on race, racism and the "color line" at the start of the 20th century. But Du Bois was a young man when he wrote that book — he turned 35 in 1903, the year it was published. He would work and write for another 60 years, until he died in Ghana, living as an expatriate from the United States. |
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That's all to say that Du Bois had a long, expansive career. He had an unusually active mind and tackled a wide variety of subjects, writing in different styles, registers and genres, from memoir and essay to poetry and fiction, from detailed academic work to impressionistic verse. |
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This week, I've been reading his 1920 book, "Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil," which moves between these genres and styles, punctuating his social criticism with verse, illustrating a particular point with a short story. I want to highlight one essay in particular: "Of Work and Wealth," an analysis of the East St. Louis "race riot" of 1917. |
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Du Bois doesn't start with the event in question. He starts with a brief sketch of his time as a teacher, and the subsequent analysis is an example of the kinds of material he tried to impart on his students. |
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I taught history and economics and something called "sociology" at Atlanta University, where, as our Mr. Webster used to say, we professors occupied settees and not mere chairs. I was fortunate with this teaching in having vivid in the minds of my pupils a concrete social problem of which we all were parts and which we desperately desired to solve. There was little danger, then, of my teaching or of their thinking becoming purely theoretical. Work and wage were thrilling realities to us all. |
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What did we study? I can tell you best by taking a concrete human case, such as was continually leaping to our eyes and thought and demanding understanding and interpretation and what I could bring of prophecy. |
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The East St. Louis riots are part of an almost-forgotten epidemic of racist violence that swept the United States from roughly 1917 to 1923. An estimated 40 to 250 African-Americans were killed in this particular massacre, and thousands more left the city in its aftermath. You can read this as an example of extreme racial prejudice, but Du Bois takes a different approach. |
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Although a decade away from his immersion in the Marxist intellectual tradition, Du Bois called himself a socialist and brought a materialist and labor-centric lens to his understanding of the riot. But class dynamics, for Du Bois, were mediated by race. White workers, in his view, did not see themselves as allies to black workers. They understood themselves as a "labor aristocracy" (a term he deploys more than a decade later in "Black Reconstruction") superior to unskilled and "colored" labor. When the industrial demands of the First World War began to threaten their position, they lashed out against black laborers rather than work with them. |
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These angers flamed and the union leaders, fearing their fury and knowing their own guilt, not only in the larger and subtler matter of bidding their way to power across the weakness of their less fortunate fellows, but also conscious of their part in making East St. Louis a miserable town of liquor and lust, leaped quickly to ward the gathering thunder from their own heads. The thing they wanted was even at their hands: here were black men, guilty not only of bidding for jobs which white men could have held at war prices, even if they could not fill, but also guilty of being black! |
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It was at this blackness that the unions pointed the accusing finger. It was here that they committed the unpardonable crime. It was here that they entered the Shadow of Hell, where suddenly from a fight for wage and protection against industrial oppression East St. Louis became the center of the oldest and nastiest form of human oppression — race hatred. |
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As Du Bois puts it in the very next paragraph, "Everything in the history of the United States, from slavery to Sunday supplements, from disfranchisement to residence segregation … festered to make men think and willing to think that the venting of their unbridled anger against 12,000,000 humble, up-striving workers was a way of settling the industrial tangle of the ages." |
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Here then is the heart of Du Bois's analysis of the East St. Louis riot. Sparked by labor tensions and industrial pressures, it took the form of an anti-black pogrom because of race hierarchy. But pace an orthodox left-wing view of racism — imposed from above by elites to divide an otherwise united working class — Du Bois saw white workers as independently invested in "color caste" and its advantages. Still, he argued, this wasn't immutable: |
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If the white workingmen of East St. Louis felt sure that Negro workers would not and could not take the bread and cake from their mouths, their race hatred would never have been translated into murder. |
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Capitalism and racism together produced the explosive violence in East St. Louis. The solution, then, requires two revolutions. One to change the fundamentals of the economy, and another, he says, is to "decide sometime who are to be considered 'men' " and determine whether equality will "apply to all human beings and to all work throughout the world." |
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My most recent column was a look at racism from the perspective of pleasure and libidinal release, as opposed to hatred. I feel like this one was … controversial, so if you haven't read it, I'd love to know your thoughts. |
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The chanting was disturbing and the anger was frightening, but what I noticed most about the president's rally in Greenville, N.C., on Wednesday night was the pleasure of the crowd. His voters and supporters were having fun. The "Send her back" chant directed at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was hateful but also exuberant, an expression of racist contempt and a celebration of shared values. |
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I was also on CBS News' "Face the Nation" this past Sunday and I joined Tanzina Vega on WNYC's The Takeaway to talk moderate Democrats and the 2020 election. |
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Nathan Heller looks at the past and future of the automobile in The New Yorker. |
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Kiese Laymon on being black, living in the South and knowing what's true, in Scalawag magazine. |
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If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week's newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at jamelle-newsletter@nytimes.com. |
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| Johnson Motors in Ensley, AlabamaJamelle Bouie |
About two years ago I was in Alabama to cover the special election where the Democratic candidate Doug Jones faced off against the Republican Roy Moore for the Senate seat left vacant by Jeff Sessions' move to the Department of Justice. I stayed in Birmingham and used my spare time to drive around the city and get a better sense of its character and geography. |
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There's a part of Birmingham called Ensley, formerly an independent city, incorporated into the metropolitan area at the start of the 20th century. It's an old industrial area, with a main street that hasn't seen much change since the mid-20th century. It's kind of my aesthetic, and I took photos of, to my eye, the most distinctive buildings and urban scenes. |
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This was one of them. I had just finished reading "Modern Color" — a compendium of color photography from the Vancouver-based photographer Fred Herzog — and I was trying to evoke the technicolor tones of his work. And so I shot these photos at the peak of golden hour and edited for that warmth. For those who are interested, I used a Leica M-D digital rangefinder and a 35mm Summicron f/2.0 lens, both of which I rented for the trip. |
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Now Eating: Raghavan Iyer's Saag Paneer |
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I was tempted to choose a more interesting recipe from Raghavan Iyer's 660 Curries, but after tweeting about homemade paneer I felt obligated to share a recipe using homemade paneer. If you've never made paneer — or any kind of fresh cheese — it's very easy. |
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What I like about this recipe is the texture. You don't purée the spinach and mustard greens — you chop it. The resulting sauce looks more vibrant than what you'd see in a restaurant, and I think it's more fun to eat too. When I made this for friends, I served it with homemade flatbreads. But rice works too. Also, if you can't find mustard greens, use kale. If you don't like kale, all spinach works too. Oh, and while you won't purée the greens, you'll still need a blender for this recipe. Serves about six. |
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2 tablespoons canola oil 1 medium-size red onion, cut in half lengthwise and thinly sliced 6 medium-size cloves garlic, coarsely chopped 4 lengthwise slices fresh ginger (each 2-inches long, 1-inch wide, and ⅛-inch thick), coarsely chopped 2 ½ teaspoons garam masala ½ teaspoon ground turmeric 2 tablespoons tomato paste 8 ounces fresh spinach leaves, well rinsed and coarsely chopped 8 ounces fresh mustard greens, well rinsed and finely chopped 1 ½ teaspoon kosher sea salt 12 to 16 ounces paneer, homemade or store-bought ½ cup heavy whipping cream
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Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, garlic, and ginger, and stir-fry until the onion is light brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove the skillet from the heat and stir in two teaspoons of the garam masala and the turmeric. |
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Transfer the mixture to a blender jar, and add the tomato paste and one-quarter cup water. Purée, scraping the inside of the jar as needed, to form a smooth, reddish-brown paste. Return the paste to the skillet. Pour three-quarters of a cup water into the blender jar, and whir the blades to wash it out. Add this to the skillet. |
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Place the skillet over medium heat. Pile handfuls of the greens into the skillet, cover it, and let the steam wilt them. Stir, and repeat with the remaining greens. Once they are all wilted, cover the skillet and cook, stirring occasionally, until the greens are broken down to a sauce-like consistency and are olive green in color, 10 to 15 minutes. |
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Stir in the salt, paneer cubes, cream, and remaining garam masala. Continue simmering the curry, covered, stirring occasionally, until the cheese and cream are warmed through, 5 to 8 minutes. Serve. |
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| Imagining the MoonThe moon in art has changed from symbol to something real, but that hasn't changed our will to see it. |
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