Mutual understanding must come under a working hypothesis which will give scope to historian as well as biologist.
W. E. B. Du BoisFootnote 1
This article traces the influence of social Darwinism, eugenics, and fin de siècle race sciences in W. E. B. Du Bois’s early political thought. My aim is to show how these served both critical and constructive purposes in Du Bois’s program of racial uplift, informing his analyses of the damages of racial segregation and of the political arrangements redressing them. Darwinism, I argue, shaped Du Bois’s understanding of the harms that formalized systems of social, legal, and political inequality—slavery, its aftereffects, and Jim Crow segregation—visited on black and white Americans alike (though, of course, not in equal measure). More controversially, I suggest that social Darwinism also shaped his defense of democratic equality. Setting aside its other virtues, democracy, Du Bois contended, would remove “artificial” constraints on the competitive struggle, enabling the best of both races to succeed. It was, then, eugenically advantageous.
This may sound counterintuitive since Du Bois’s view of racial advancement centers African American education. He is, also, widely credited with debunking the biological essentialism pervading the period’s social Darwinism, elaborating an empirically grounded sociology demonstrating that black disadvantage was environmentally conditioned. True as this is, it in no way indicates that he rejected the race sciences of his day rather than the prejudices he saw as distorting their findings. Du Bois’s politics (and sociology), I contend, are importantly colored by those sciences and by the social Darwinism of his intellectual milieu. Against the common view that he rejected Darwinism, Lamarckism, and eugenics, I show that his relation to them was far more ambivalent and that his racial politics in fact drew on them.
A significant literature addresses Du Bois’s connection to social Darwinism, most of which highlights his resistance to the assumption of inborn black inferiority that it often countenanced.Footnote 2 Commentators detail his deconstruction of social Darwinist presumptions attributing black “deficiency” to biological constitution and, at the extreme, portending the race’s march toward extinction. In its eagerness to pit Du Bois against the racist excesses of social Darwinists, however, much of this scholarship adopts a bifurcation between the former’s supposedly social-constructivist view of race and the latter’s biological essentialism.Footnote 3 In this article, I muddy the distinction by recovering the strains of social Darwinism, reform Darwinism, and eugenics embedded in Du Bois’s racial politics. That his account of racial uplift emphasizes environmental conditioning and education does not imply that it forsakes Darwinism and its cognates altogether. My aim is to excavate these elements and show how, though in a minor key, they shape his understanding of the intersection of race, law, and politics. Far from dismissing the lessons Darwin might impart for social organization, Du Bois aimed to get them right by redressing, as he put it, “widespread ignorance of the doctrines of race survival and human efficiency.”Footnote 4 The idea, then, is to retrieve the productive usage to which Du Bois put Darwinism, race science, and eugenics in his program of social reform and black advancement (generally) and in championing democratic equality as eugenically beneficial (more specifically).
I focus on the period from the mid-1890s to 1910, during which Du Bois sought to develop a strictly scientific understanding of race. Despite its early formulation, this concept of race remains pivotal for his political thought for several reasons.Footnote 5 First, most of the scholarship addressing his view of race focuses on essays from this interval, in particular, “The Conservation of Races” (1897). Second, Du Bois most directly broaches Darwinism, eugenics, and race science at this juncture, since they permeated the scientific and sociological discourses in which he situated his efforts. He determined “to put science into sociology through a study of the condition and problems of my own group,”Footnote 6 readily drawing on its Darwinist and Lamarckian terms. Finally, these essays form the setting and substance of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’s most widely read work. They delimit, in Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s words, “the epistemic horizon that both situated and yet was distinctively configured across the texts of Du Bois’s discursive production during the last years of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth.”Footnote 7 The essays are interwoven with the period’s major writings conceptually, by way of intellectual background, and also directly, through direct incorporation into The Souls of Black Folk and John Brown. They “comprise the specific discursive prehistory, so to speak, of the production of The Souls of Black Folk … a cultivated terrain on which that emergent book of essays could be situated.”Footnote 8 This notion of race is, then, most closely associated with his political philosophy.
The argument proceeds as follows. The first section wades into debates on whether Du Bois’s early notion of race is sociohistorical-constructivist, biological-essentialist, or some combination of the two. Situating his account within its historical and intellectual contexts, I defend the view that he regards race as biologically grounded but subject to the sway of environmental (historical, cultural, legal, social) conditions.
This duality permits him, I argue in the second section, to weigh the effects of social conventions (such as legal and political systems) on the biological constitution of given populations, against social Darwinists positing race as biologically fixed. Before reaching that conclusion, however, I trace two distinctive ways that Darwinism and eugenics inflect Du Bois’s racial politics.
The first draws on Darwin, Spencer, and Weismann to undermine the conceptual foundations of commonly held “extinction theories” depicting African Americans as inexorably degenerating toward annihilation.Footnote 9 Synthesizing a nuanced understanding of Darwinist race science and the German historicism he absorbed during his stint in Berlin (1892–4), Du Bois dismantles the white supremacism of extinctionist teleology and advances a near-Herderian alternative based on the efflorescence of black civilizations. The second is a eugenic argument that accepts social Darwinist and Lamarckian presumptions concerning social degeneration, genetic fitness, and selective breeding, but decouples them from race. I argue that Du Bois does not oppose social engineering to ameliorate a population’s genetic stock; he opposes the attribution of “good” or “bad” stock to particular racial groups, contending that all races contain equal measures of both. His concern, then, is not with eugenics per se but with the social Darwinists’ (and general public’s) mistaken view that genetic fitness tracks racial lines.
This informs his political argument. For Du Bois, at least part of the problem with slavery, its aftereffects, and Jim Crow segregation is that they are biologically dysgenic by artificially buoying “bad” white stock over “good” black stock, to the detriment of both. Segregation—particularly in the South—inhibits the interaction between the “best” of white and black populations while enabling their “pathological” segments to interact freely. Democracy, by contrast, would allow the best of each race to mix and remove legal constraints impeding interracial competition, both of which would improve overall American genetic health. Democracy was, then, not only a moral imperative; its abolition of “vertical race distinctions” would eliminate “emphatic hindrances to human evolution.”Footnote 10 In the “age of Darwin,” Du Bois muses, democratic freedom means “not individual caprice or aberration, but social self-realization in an endless chain of selves; and freedom for such development is not the denial but the central assertion of the evolutionary theory.”Footnote 11
The substance of race
Du Bois’s concept of race is subject to a significant scholarship divided over whether he treats it in biological-essentialist (fixed in genetic or biological traits) or historical-constructivist (a legal, historical, or cultural construction) terms, or through some combination of the two. The debate largely revolves around his programmatic account in 1897’s “The Conservation of Races.”
Race, he there argues, refers to “a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less conceived ideals of life.”Footnote 12 Drawing on the authority of Darwin, Huxley, and Ratzel (himself a thoroughgoing social Darwinist), Du Bois confusingly claims that the “forces” demarcating racial groups “have generally followed the natural cleavage of blood, descent and physical peculiarities [but] at other times swept across and ignored these.”Footnote 13 Acknowledging its limitations in defining race, Du Bois takes science as delineating “at least two, perhaps three, great families of human beings.”Footnote 14 But by widening the vantage point to include “the sense in which History tells us the word must be used,” he advances an inconsistent taxonomy of “eight distinctly differentiated races.”Footnote 15 Probing their “real distinction,” Du Bois asserts that while “physical differences play a great part … no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the[ir] deeper differences.”Footnote 16 These are “spiritual, psychical, differences—undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them.”Footnote 17 The characteristics defining racial groups are, then, “race identity and common blood; secondly, and more important, a common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life.”Footnote 18
These ambiguities have generated a cottage industry of commentary.Footnote 19 The terms of discussion were largely set by Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “The Uncompleted Argument,” which claimed, controversially, that Du Bois’s notion of race rests on nineteenth-century biological sciences. Appiah showed that the culturalist elements in Du Bois’s concoction could not, on pain of circularity, belong to its definitional status since they presumed an already existent group. “Common ancestry”—and so, “biologically defined races”Footnote 20—thus remained at the core, a position that Appiah saw as unwavering over Du Bois’s life. Tommy Lott reaches a similar conclusion: the concern with race mixing at the heart of “The Conservation of Races” shows it to be “primarily a biological process.”Footnote 21 Against this, commentators such as Aldon Morris, Carol Taylor, and Dorothy Roberts read Du Bois as a social constructivist.Footnote 22 They take his admissions that biological factors are outweighed, and at points transcended, by cultural-historical ones as evidence that the former cannot be constitutive of race.Footnote 23
Others move between these extremes. Lucius Outlaw, for instance, highlights the persistence of both sociohistorical and biological elements in Du Bois’s definition.Footnote 24 Paul Gilroy complicates the biological/conventional split, treating Du Bois’s view as “ontologically” essentialist, based on a “highly mystical and organic conception of community” irreducible to biology.Footnote 25 Paul Taylor interprets him as a pragmatist less concerned with the “reality” of race than with its social and political outcomes.Footnote 26 Intellectual histories by Robert Gooding-Williams, Adolph Reed, and Wilson Moses also capture the nuances in Du Bois’s thinking, situating it within his intellectual, scientific, and sociological communities of discourse.Footnote 27
A few such contextual details are worth noting. First, at this juncture, Du Bois aimed to develop a scientific understanding of race. Against the prejudiced and speculative twaddle comprising its social-scientific treatment, Du Bois sought to put knowledge of race on firm ground.Footnote 28 His approach reflects the influence of the German historical school of economics and of Gustav Schmoller, particularly in relation to epistemological and methodological questions. From Schmoller, Du Bois inherited the conviction that sociological inquiry should be grounded in a social group’s particular environment—its history, culture, mores, and conditions—rather than in abstract universalizations.Footnote 29 His sociology thus adhered to a rigorous empiricism analyzing black Americans’ lived realities, on full display in the meticulous ethnographic research, statistical analysis, and primary interviews scaffolding The Philadelphia Negro and Atlanta University Studies. He also absorbed Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinction between the epistemic scope of the natural and human sciences, and between the physical and mental facts each treated.Footnote 30 While natural science (Naturwissenschaften) addressed the material realm, “that of the Geisteswissenschaften, of history and sociology, refers to the spiritual, psychical sphere.” Du Bois thus echoed Dilthey’s view that “natural science cannot conceptualize and articulate the character of spiritual life.”Footnote 31 As knowledge of causal relations, it generated factual truths about the corporeal world. The science of man, by contrast, concerned humanity’s moral and cultural nature, knowledge of which was acquired through “understanding” and interpretation.Footnote 32
These methodological commitments shape Du Bois’s skepticism toward reform-oriented moralists and social Darwinists alike. Neither “abolitionists with their pure and lofty ideals of human brotherhood” nor biological determinists harboring “deep-seated doubt as to the capabilities and desert of the Negro” managed “to study the Negro problem honestly, and to inaugurate measures of social reform in the light of the scientific study.”Footnote 33
The problem with the reformers lay in their failure to differentiate the tasks of social transformation and scientific inquiry, the latter of which alone should serve as the basis of sociology. Du Bois’s critique is two-pronged. First, he rejects the metaphysical excesses of Spencerian sociology, whose cosmological scope was both baseless and scientifically suspect.Footnote 34 The “Spencerian Sociologists,” he charges, “could only limn a shadowy outline of the meaning and rhythm of human deed” by taking “biological analogy as a suggestive aid.” The trouble was that “analogy implies knowledge but does not supply it”; that, he maintains, could only “be filled in when scientific measurement and deeper study came to the rescue.”Footnote 35 Sociology, then, had to be placed on a sound scientific footing. His second qualm is with do-gooders who confused their ethical projects with sociology’s proper objectives.Footnote 36 German methodology led Du Bois to distinguish sociology, a truth-seeking scientific enterprise, from social reform, which directed sociological data toward ethical or political ends. This separation was especially important in democratic contexts, where public confidence in policy rested on the value-neutrality of its scientific bases.Footnote 37 Schmoller and his colleagues were clear-sighted that the policy implications of their research should follow empirical data, not lead it.Footnote 38 Du Bois’s early sociology integrates this methodological division of labor, and not always comfortably.Footnote 39 Commentators note the tension between his early scientism and reformism, which he ultimately resolved by abandoning the former for the latter, leaning into his self-described role as a “master of propaganda.”Footnote 40
Du Bois’s second target here is race science, biological essentialism, and social Darwinism. At Harvard in the late 1880s he “began to face scientific race dogma; first of all, evolution and ‘Survival of the Fittest.’ It was continually stressed in the community and in classes that there was a vast difference in the development of the whites and ‘lower’ races.”Footnote 41 Du Bois spent much of the next two decades refuting this “race dogma” by exposing its total lack of scientific foundation.Footnote 42 Sociological studies such as The Philadelphia Negro demonstrated that black “inferiority” stemmed from historical, political, legal, and social conditions rather than genetic inheritance.Footnote 43 He also contested the common view of African American “degeneracy,” most directly in essays repudiating Frederick Hoffman’s influential Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896).Footnote 44 Against Hoffman’s prognostications on African Americans’ “innate” tendencies toward degradation, Du Bois marshaled staggering volumes of empirical evidence on rates of black literacy, education, property ownership, economic success, and contributions to industry to demonstrate their actual levels of achievement. Despite inhabiting a social context systemically geared toward their failure, African Americans had made considerable strides by every quantifiable metric.Footnote 45
Still further, Du Bois consistently and carefully confronted social Darwinism and its relatives.Footnote 46 In “Heredity and the Public Schools” (1904), for instance, he chronicles social Darwinism’s evolution, from the “hardening of human hearts” occasioned by Spencer’s “survival of the fittest,” through the Lamarckian faith in inherited (good white and bad black) acquired characteristics, to the racialized uptake of August Weismann’s germ-plasm theory. This culminated, he laments, in “the modern doctrine of higher and lower races, of superior and inferior nations” based on a complete misapprehension of Darwinism.Footnote 47
That Du Bois contested facets of social Darwinism, however, does not indicate that he rejected it wholesale. It would have been difficult for him to do so given its ubiquity in his intellectual setting. Adolph Reed goes as far as to suggest that Du Bois was “unambiguously in step with the conceptual orthodoxy defined by the Lamarckian social science of his day.”Footnote 48
He could hold these seemingly conflictual poles together because social Darwinism was a far more fluid set of propositions and ideas than is often recognized. Social Darwinisms varied enormously in their details and implications, incorporating and often intermingling Darwinian, Spencerian, and Lamarckian elements.Footnote 49 Darwinism was, also, ideologically bivalent. On the right, Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and Franklin Giddings saw natural selection as operative in human societies, regarding overly intrusive governments as impeding “natural” laws of struggle and competition.Footnote 50 On the left, socialists, reformers, and radicals such as Peter Kropotkin and Karl Pearson, alongside scientists like T. H. Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace, took mutual aid and social combination as evolutionary advantages in humanity’s corporate struggle against nature.Footnote 51 Militarist Darwinists such as Ludwig Gumplowicz and Gustav Ratzenhofer read international conflict through the lens of existential race struggle, while peace activists like Norman Angell and Jacques Novicow also drew on Darwin to criticize them.Footnote 52 Darwinism and its cognates were, then, pervasive in the era’s natural and social sciences, particularly in the nascent field of sociology.
It’s in this context that we return to the essentialist–constructivist debate. Du Bois appears to regard race as biologically grounded but also subject to environmental conditions. It is, in Outlaw’s words, a “cluster concept” incorporating biological and circumstantial elements—“common blood” and “common history.”Footnote 53 Du Bois reiterates this view in “Heredity and the Public Schools.” “[P]hysical heredity,” he maintains, is “by no means the only heredity in the world.” While a child “receive[s] the endowment, or in other words physical heredity,” from its parentage, “it receives its thought, the larger part of its habits … from the society in which it is placed; and this heredity which is not physical at all has been aptly called social heredity.”Footnote 54
His sociology also registers the intersection of biological and human drives, treating both “physical forces” and “self-directing wills” as shaping “the laws underlying the conduct of men.”Footnote 55 Reflecting Dilthey’s influence, Du Bois charges Spencerian sociology with misunderstanding “the relation of the science of man and physical science” by regarding human action as governed by inexpugnable laws.Footnote 56 Sociology’s aim, as he reconceptualizes it, is precisely to distinguish the parts of human activity determined by “physical law,” on one hand, and free will, and the element of chance it introduces, on the other. As subject to both, a full comprehension of human behavior had to “give scope to historian as well as biologist.”Footnote 57 The study of “the deeds of men” was thus not reducible to the determination of biology, but neither could it ignore the rhythms and regularities of our patterned action. “[F]rom the point of view of Science,” human beings inhabited “a world of Chance as well as Law”Footnote 58 in which biological fixities and human conventions shaped racial realities.
Du Bois thus does not reject biological, scientific, and Darwinist accounts of race. He sees race as anchored in biology but socially affected, reflecting—and adapting—the Darwinism of his intellectual environment. As Wilson Moses notes, Du Bois was “writing with the dominant social theories of the time” and he integrated their Darwinist premises.Footnote 59 Adolph Reed likewise situates his thinking “within this evolutionist frame,” treating his “basic view on race at the time [as] proceed[ing] explicitly from the conventions of neo-Lamarckian social science.”Footnote 60 Lott traces the “influence of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism” over Du Bois; despite critiquing his sociology, he worked “[w]ithin Spencer’s evolutionist conceptual frame.”Footnote 61 He also absorbed Franz Boas’s views on race and cultural evolution, which rejected Spencerian teleology but incorporated Darwinism.Footnote 62
Du Bois’s early essays reflect these currents, addressing a who’s who of social and reform Darwinists, including Darwin, Spencer, Giddings, Galton, Huxley, Weismann, and Ratzel.Footnote 63 Lott thus cautions against taking Du Bois’s “opposition to the racism in scientific practice to mean he was opposed to all biological views of race.”Footnote 64 He criticized some race scientists (such as Hoffmann and Joseph Tillinghast) while citing others (such as Ratzel and Giuseppe Sergi).Footnote 65 That the prevailing scientific account “had been misguided by racism” did nothing to obviate race’s biological grounding.Footnote 66 Du Bois’s “skeptical view of racial categories,” Lott ironizes, “did not deter him from employing racial classifications with a vengeance.”Footnote 67
Reading Du Bois as straightforwardly opposed to social Darwinism, then, misses the extent to which Darwinism was not a fixed doctrine, the extent to which it conditioned his early thinking on race, and the extent to which he directly engaged it. In their rush to demonstrate Du Bois’s opposition to biological essentialism, Morris, Taylor, and Edwards court anachronism by treating constructivism and essentialism as strictly opposed. Morris, for instance, claims that Du Bois “discarded the straitjacket of grand theories, including social Darwinism, and replaced them with an inductive method seeking sociological knowledge.”Footnote 68 This neglects the variability of Darwinist positions and their often ready compatibility with “sociological knowledge.” The bifurcation of biological and constructivist accounts of race rests on contemporary categorical judgments, obfuscating their fluidity in the period’s social sciences and in Du Bois’s political thought. Du Bois’s rejection of biological explanations of black “inferiority” is not inconsistent with his acceptance of race’s biological basis. And if race was both biological and conventional, then racial uplift should target both biology and convention.
Du Bois’s Darwinism
As is well known, Du Bois’s program of racial uplift centers the educational improvement of African Americans through the stewardship of a black elite. His emphasis on instruction, however, does not indicate that he disregarded the biological dimensions of racial advancement, as he understood them. As Wilson Moses notes, “black nationalism was influenced by Darwinian science [and was] steeped in the theories of Darwin and other evolutionary theorists—Benjamin Kidd, Piotr Kropotkin, and Herbert Spencer.”Footnote 69 In the previous section, I showed how this Darwinian science inflects Du Bois’s view of race. Here, I consider how it shaped his understanding of racial justice. I trace two distinctive Darwinist logics in Du Bois’s racial politics, addressing teleology and eugenics. Darwinism, I argue, belongs to Du Bois’s constructive efforts toward a future state of racially egalitarian democracy.
History, teleology, Volksgeist
Darwinism grounds Du Bois’s resistance, in “The Conservation of Races,” to the historicism underpinning white supremacy. Against the biological separatism of the social Darwinists, he takes “Darwin himself” as espousing the fundamental likeness of all persons and the “scientific doctrine of Human Brotherhood.”Footnote 70
This Darwinist critique is sharpened in essays that confront the teleological fatalism of extinctionist theories. This was the endpoint of a biological determinism taking black “pathologies” as evidence of an inborn tendency to degeneration. The “Darwinian doctrine of survival … applied in America to the negro problem,” the logic went, showed that “inevitably the negro will die out.”Footnote 71 Rather than refuting Darwinist race science itself, however, Du Bois targets the “widespread ignorance of the doctrines of race survival and human efficiency” leading to its misapplication.Footnote 72 The thesis of innate black inferiority was among “the many tales of nineteenth-century enterprise in civilizing the heathen, and arranging for the survival of the fittest.”Footnote 73 This mistook cause and effect: brute force and colonial extermination created the conditions for European supremacy, which was then taken as evidence of superior fitness. “But do the theories of Darwin and Spencer, properly interpreted, support any such crude views of justice and right and the spread of civilization as those current today?” Du Bois muses. “It may safely be answered they do not. Ignorant and selfish interpretation of great sociological laws must not any longer be allowed to obscure and degrade those laws.”Footnote 74 Such misreadings of Darwin and Spencer sustained a “theory of races which assumes that white-faced men must inherit the earth simply because they have bigger guns and looser morals, and which forestalls the writhings of other races by branding them as inferior and then sitting on them.”Footnote 75 Its historicism amounted to a retrospective warrant for inhumane violence, an existential form of might making right. But “that is not the survival of the fittest,” Du Bois fulminates; “it is plain murder.”Footnote 76 Black extinction would not vindicate the social Darwinist case, but rather “simply add a few million more murders to the account of civilization.”Footnote 77
Du Bois’s critique, however, entails “no denial or disparagement of the great light thrown upon race development by the theories of evolution.”Footnote 78 Julia E. Liss observes that he “continued to employ categories of racial types, including those based on ‘blood’ and ‘genius’,”Footnote 79 while undercutting the normative arguments into which biological racists pressed them. Du Bois’s own Darwinism is readily apparent in his proclamation that “races and nations as well as men may be healthy and vigorous, may contract diseases and waste away, may commit sin and pay the penalty … circumstances and surroundings which favor one race may be fatal to another.”Footnote 80 Still more starkly,
If, for instance, under conditions of civilized life as favorable as ordinary justice can make them a race of people have not the sheer physical stamina to survive, then, however pitiable the spectacle, there is little that surrounding civilization can do. And it certainly cannot jeopardize the lives and prospects of the great mass of people by efforts to save a doomed remnant.Footnote 81
Du Bois accepts the premises of social Darwinism: populations maladapted to their conditions would, and should, die out. His reservation is with their misapplication to black Americans, whose adaptive capacities were clearly evinced by the successes catalogued in his sociological studies.
This Darwinism fuels Du Bois’s resistance to the white supremacism implicit in extinctionist teleology. As Adolph Reed recognizes, Du Bois absorbed the period’s “reform Darwinism,” which criticized the ethical naturalism of social Darwinists like Spencer, Sumner, and Giddings by distinguishing the struggle for survival in nature and in society.Footnote 82 Reform Darwinists held that competition, struggle, and natural selection governed the lower animal orders, but humanity’s advanced capacities set it apart from such brutalities. For Huxley, Kropotkin, Novicow, and Edward Bellamy, human evolution advanced through social altruism, cooperation, and mutual aid.
Du Bois appeals to precisely this logic in claiming that “the era of physical struggle for survival has passed away among human beings.”Footnote 83 Modern culture’s principal achievement was “the diffusion of its benefits among the lower strata of society … a flat contradiction to the theory of the natural aristocracy of the races.”Footnote 84 Against the racialized teleology treating this “natural aristocracy” as genetically destined to lead human progress, Du Bois traces the contingency of all civilizations’ ebbs and flows. Why were whites presently preeminent? “A Greek of the age of Pericles,” he counters, “might have put just as puzzling and unanswerable a query to the ancestors of the present Europeans, who were crawling about the forests of Germany half-naked and periodically drunk. And the ancient Egyptian in the day of their glory might have put equally uncomfortable queries to the ancestors of the Greeks.”Footnote 85 That the “Soudan should linger a thousand years in culture behind the valley of the Seine … is not more puzzling than the fact that the valley of the Thames was miserably backward as compared with the banks of the Tiber.”Footnote 86
Numerous essays of the period appeal to Darwinism to contest deterministic doctrines of racial supremacy. In “Evolution of the Race Problem” (1909), for instance, Du Bois lauds “the splendid scientific work of Darwin, Weismann, Galton and others” while criticizing their popular misinterpretation.Footnote 87 The problem is that the belief “that civilization is a struggle for existence whereby the weaker nations and individuals will gradually succumb and the strong will inherit the earth” became coupled with “the silent assumption that the white European stock represents the strong surviving peoples and that the swarthy, yellow and black peoples are the ones rightly doomed to eventual extinction.”Footnote 88 Du Bois’s concern here isn’t with social Darwinism; it’s with the white supremacism tying fitness to race without any scientific basis. Such abuses of the “Darwinian theory added to the idea that the white races were about to inherit the earth because of a certain innate superiority, and the Weismannic theory clinched this.”Footnote 89 Properly understood, both Darwin and Weismann in fact refuted the canard that African Americans comprised “degenerate or undeveloped specimens of humanity.” The “clear and unequivocal” scientific conclusion was that “Negro races are from every physical standpoint full and normally developed men.”Footnote 90 Du Bois isn’t arguing against Darwinism and race science. He aims, rather, to get them right.
While these appeals to Darwinism and evolutionary biology “destabilize the idea of a fixed ceiling for racial development and criticize the naturalization of white rule,”Footnote 91 teleology does not altogether disappear from Du Bois’s race thinking. It is, rather, recast in a racialized providentialism concerning the “full, complete Negro message of the whole Negro race … not as yet … given to the world.”Footnote 92 Robert Bernasconi reads this racial messianism as translating Du Bois’s Darwinism into a philosophy of history.Footnote 93 It retains a “mystical, teleological rhetoric,” Moses observes, that orients Du Bois’s vision of racial evolution in “The Conservation of Races” and other essays of the period.Footnote 94
As with Darwinism more generally, Du Bois appears not to discard teleological developmentalism. Instead, he reconstitutes it relative to African Americans’ world-historical destiny. This isn’t a rejection of a civilizational historicism, but its revaluation based on a political expressivism voicing black spiritual identity and distinctive “ideals of life.”Footnote 95 “[T]he Negro race,” he intones, in near-Herderian language, “have not as yet given to civilization the[ir] full spiritual message.”Footnote 96 For Paul Gilroy, the “volkish outlook” of such passages exposes Du Bois’s early flirtations with the “supposedly authentic, natural, and stable ‘rooted’ identity” anchoring the period’s black nationalisms, an evasive racial “essence” fusing biology, history, culture, and nation.Footnote 97 The efflorescence of this black culture, Du Bois prophesized, would serve humanity’s overall advancement.Footnote 98 African Americans were thus duty-bound “to conserve our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals” for the sake of “the realization of that broader humanity.”Footnote 99 The same intersection of Darwin, Herder, and Hegel informs his critique of social Darwinisms pitting “the ‘higher’ against the ‘lower’ races.”Footnote 100 Against this, a “higher synthesis of civilization and humanity” would enable the “two world races [to] give each to each those characteristics which both so sadly lack.”Footnote 101
Finally, Darwinism informs Du Bois’s contention that a racial group’s advancement turns on its capacity for ongoing adaptation to its social environment. While social Darwinists tied evolutionary success to racially fixed traits, Du Bois comes closer to Darwin himself in connecting it to group-based adaptation. In “Study of the Negro Problem,” (1897) he defines social problems as “the failure of an organized social group to realize its group ideals, through the inability to adapt a certain desired line of action to given conditions of life.”Footnote 102 Since this adaptation was affected by variations in time, place, and circumstances, the so-called “Negro problem” wasn’t determined by genetics (as social Darwinists would have it) but rather mutated “with the growth and evolution of the nation.”Footnote 103 It shifted across different periods, culminating in what Du Bois decries as “the great deficiency of the Negro” in his own era, resulting from a maladaptation “to the life of the group which is the essence of civilization.”Footnote 104 These challenges, he stresses, impressed the need to “understand thoroughly, the underlying elements of this example of human evolution.”Footnote 105
While confronting social Darwinism’s biological essentialism, Du Bois’s rejoinder remains Darwinist: black Americans’ extant shortcomings were failures of adaptation caused by slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Against the presumption that racial character was cemented in genetics, he counters that “the Negro at the time of emancipation has passed through a social evolution which far separated him from his savage ancestors.”Footnote 106 As conditions changed, so too did racial groups relative to their successes or failures of adaptation. Tracing the evolutionary transformations of the black masses throughout American history, Du Bois shows that the “Negro problem” is not a problem, but an evolving set of problems of adaptation.Footnote 107 The essay is, in fact, framed as an inquiry into “the form under which the Negro problems present themselves to-day after 275 years of evolution.”Footnote 108 These “problems” were no more determinate than were the capacities of African Americans responding to them. This was the “great and important truth in the often-spoken-of interdependence of condition and environment in the rise of a social group.”Footnote 109
Darwinism and race science were, then, not just objects of Du Bois’s criticism; they were also important resources. His critiques of social Darwinism belong to a recuperative effort to understand race with scientific rigor—to understand it correctly. That ambition extends to the science of eugenics.
Eugenic democracy
Du Bois’s program of racial uplift revolves principally around educational progress. Against Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism, centered on trades and economic development, Du Bois champions higher learning to move black Americans toward social, political, and economic equality. Led by a “talented tenth,” African Americans would develop the capacities to raise them out of peonage and serve as a vanguard for the “darker races” of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines,Footnote 110 and Hawaii becoming incorporated into the United States.
As with his conceptualization of race, Du Bois’s account of racial uplift has a biological undercurrent by way of a novel eugenic argument. Most of the commentary addressing his eugenics focuses on his infamous advocacy for a talented tenth, and most of it is exculpatory, pitting him against the eugenics movement’s racism.Footnote 111 Carol Taylor, for example, traces his reaction against “the eugenicists’ total disregard of the influence of environment,” but neglects his support for conscious, “intelligent” breeding among black Americans.Footnote 112 Aldon Morris and Juliet Hooker flag the rise of eugenics as background to Du Bois’s thinking, but do not broach his own engagements with it.Footnote 113 Like Morris, Dorothy Roberts infers Du Bois’s denial of eugenics from his emphasis on black education.Footnote 114 But the positions aren’t incompatible: if race is partially biological and partially social, there’s no reason for racial advancement to ignore the quality of black genetic stock. Du Bois’s rejection of biological essentialism does not imply a rejection of racial biology, and neither does it suggest that better breeding wouldn’t contribute to the amelioration of black (and white) populations. These commentators demonstrate that Du Bois disavowed the racial bias pervading the eugenics movement, not eugenic science itself.
Daylanne K. English comes closer to Du Bois’s views, situating him within a constellation of African American intellectuals, including E. Franklin Frazier, A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, James Weldon Johnson, Kelly Miller, and Marcus Garvey, endorsing some version of eugenics in this period.Footnote 115 While showing the extent to which he absorbed the era’s eugenic temper, English builds her case on Du Bois’s more allusive, literary, and metaphorical references to racial progress, genetics, and biological hygiene from the 1920s and 1930s. Most of her evidence is drawn from Dark Princess, photographic features in The Crisis (“Men of the Month,” “Baby Numbers”Footnote 116), and Du Bois’s perorations on his own family, which only touch on African Americans’ genetic health indirectly.
In the late 1890s and early 1900s, however, Du Bois developed explicitly eugenic arguments regarding black progress. While these recur across multiple essays, “Evolution of the Race Problem” (1909) is particularly illustrative. Drawing on the authority of Francis Galton—the creator of eugenics—he contends that
assuming that there are certain stocks of human beings whose elimination the best welfare of the world demands; it is certainly questionable if these stocks include the majority of mankind and it is indefensible and monstrous to pretend that we know to-day with any reasonable certainty which these stocks are. We can point to degenerate individuals and families here and there among all races, but there is not the slightest warrant for assuming that there do not exist among the Chinese and Hindus, the African Bantus and American Indians as lofty possibilities of human culture as any European race has ever exhibited.Footnote 117
As with Darwinism more generally, Du Bois accepts the premises of eugenics: humanity contains better and worse stocks, biological degeneracy is detrimental to a group’s genetic health, the eradication of degraded stock serves the general welfare, and a population’s gene pool would be improved through selective breeding and/or nonbreeding. This tallies with other writings of the period and is crucial to his corrective to eugenic racism. “Negroes have their degenerate types in the dwarfs and Hottentots,” Du Bois acknowledges, but “so have the Europeans; they have their mixed types of all degrees and kinds of mixture—so have the Europeans. But it is an unproved and to all appearance an unprovable thesis that the physical development of men shows any color line below which is a black pelt and above the white.”Footnote 118 This doesn’t refute eugenics, but rather its distortion through racism.
Du Bois thus denies neither eugenics’ governing assumptions (that humanity contains better and worse stocks) nor its normative upshot (that better stock should be elevated above worse through selective breeding). His argument is, rather, that fitness and degeneracy have no demonstrable correlation with race, decoupling genetic health from racial groupings. Du Bois isn’t unconcerned with the biological quality of black populations; he simply doesn’t see that quality tracking racial lines. Indeed, as Liam Kofi Bright notes, Du Bois defended “eugenicist positions which separated out a belief that selective breeding could improve human capacities from the belief that selecting for purer Caucasian types was the way to achieve this.”Footnote 119 Good and bad stock existed in all populations and the best social and political arrangements would encourage the former and dampen the latter across racial groups. The “survival of the best blood” is, in fact, central to his view:
The civilized method of preventing ill-advised marriage lies in the training of mankind in ethics of sex and childbearing. We cannot ensure the survival of the best blood by the public murder and degradation of unworthy suitors, but we can substitute a civilized human selection of husbands and wives which shall ensure the survival of the fittest. Not the methods of the jungle, not even the careless choice of the drawing room, but the thoughtful selection of the schools and laboratory is the ideal of future marriage.Footnote 120
Without reaching to the extremity of sterilization, as American eugenic policies would, Du Bois’s argument remains eugenic. Refuting the worry that unrestricted interracial marriage would lead to genetic deterioration—white America’s perennial anxiety—he assures that “intelligent human beings can be trained to breed intelligently without the degradation of such of their fellows as they may not wish to breed with.”Footnote 121 Degeneration wasn’t the result of race mixing but of bad sexual selection, which “thoughtful” reproduction could redress.
Du Bois was not alone in holding these convictions. As Michele Mitchell demonstrates, between 1890 and the 1920s African American reformers in the educated and aspiring middle classes absorbed the period’s eugenic tendencies in relation to racial advancement. Programs and literature targeted black sexual practices to curtail the propagation of “puny,” “degenerate,” and “poorly bred” offspring and improve the race’s genetic prospects. “Reform-minded black women and men,” she shows, held that “race progress was contingent upon eradicating vice, increasing the number of ‘well-born’ children, and monitoring sexuality. In the process they drew from contemporary impulses, many of which were built upon eugenic arguments.”Footnote 122 Like Du Bois, activists such as Ariel Brown, Frances Ellen Harper, and Selena Sloan Butler appealed to hereditary and eugenic “sciences” to encourage better breeding. While “African Americans had to contend with a legion of theory that implied all people of color sprung from degenerate stock, they could actually subvert racism within eugenic thought through the guise of uplift.”Footnote 123
Du Bois’s argument carries a distinctly political edge concerning the genetic implications of bad social, political, and legal systems, such as slavery and Jim Crow. The “present hegemony of the white race,” he asserts,
threatens by the means of brute force a survival of some of the worst stocks of mankind. It attempts to people the best part of the earth and put in absolute authority over the rest not only, and indeed not mainly, the culture of Europe, but its greed and degradation—not only some representatives of the best stocks of the west end of London, upper New York and the Champs Élysées, but also, and in as large, if not larger, numbers, the worst stocks of White Chapel, the East Side and Montmartre; and it attempts to make the slums of white society in all cases and under all circumstances the superior of any colored group, no matter what its ability or culture.Footnote 124
By elevating all whites over all African Americans, white supremacy ultimately preserved weak stock. Segregationist politics were dysgenic by artificially sustaining bad white stock over superior black stock which ought to, and would, prevail under conditions of open competition. White dominance didn’t reflect genetic fitness, as social Darwinists claimed, but rather eroded it. The better elements of both races were corroded through an institutional preferentialism raising the worst of one over the best of the other. This amounted to an “outrageous program of wholesale human degeneration” caused by iniquitous sociopolitical arrangements,Footnote 125 distorting the natural course of evolutionary competition. Black inferiority was not indicative of genetic poverty, but produced by “four hundred years of persistent artificial selection” leading to “the deliberate encouragement of degeneration” aimed at “the deliberate reduction of their chances of survival.”Footnote 126
The greatest danger to white genetic hygiene was not racial mixing. It was, ironically enough, the damaging effects of its systemic prohibition. Whites labored under the illusion “that their stock is threatened with deterioration from without, when in fact its most dangerous fate is deterioration from within.”Footnote 127 Slavery and segregation diminished the genetic quality of white and black populations, harming both: African Americans were directly stifled by inequitable institutions and whites retained the poor specimens that natural selection would otherwise have winnowed out. In this, Du Bois is curiously close to social Darwinists such as Sumner. Both treat the interference of bad political institutions and overly intrusive states—slavery for Du Bois, welfarist government for Sumner—as artificially propping up weak genetic material to society’s detriment. This encouraged, in Sumner’s words, the “survival of the unfittest.”Footnote 128 Such state-sponsored “unfitness” is for Du Bois plainly apparent in white and black races alike. His sociology chronicles black pathologies, and, for whites, “many signs of degeneracy have appeared among them: their birthrate is falling, their average ability is not increasing, their physical stamina is impaired, their social condition is not reassuring.”Footnote 129
For Du Bois, then, at least part of democratic equality’s good lies in improving American biological health. Truly democratic conditions would enable black and white populations to interact and compete on an even footing, ameliorating the gene pool. They would remove the institutional mechanism preventing superior stock from reproducing itself across racial lines. The abolition of racial separatism would permit “survival of the fittest by peaceful, personal and social selection, a selection all the more effective because free democracy and equality of opportunity allow the best to rise to their rightful place.”Footnote 130 Such an equality would provide “the great stocks of mankind every reasonable help and incentive to self-development,”Footnote 131 allowing the best of both races to strengthen themselves consciously and unconsciously. It would also progressively eliminate society’s pathological elements—pauperism, prostitution, “criminals, degenerates and defectives”Footnote 132—and thereby benefit all Americans. Democracy thus served natural selection by eradicating the artificial pressures of segregationist politics. Du Bois upturns the social Darwinists: rather than taking black genetic inferiority as a justification for political marginalization, he shows how political marginalization creates this presumptive inferiority.
Such Darwinist and eugenic arguments recur across the period’s writings. In “The Future of the Negro Race in America” (1904) Du Bois highlights the folly in whites promoting the deterioration of African Americans. “Can anyone but a fool,” he admonishes, “think it is to his interest to make every eighth man in his country a pauper and a criminal, in addition to the growing load of his own degenerates?” Whites’ own “selfish interest” should motivate them to reduce “tendencies to degenerate among the negroes,”Footnote 133 since this bred social vice in their own backyard. Du Bois’s anxieties with the spread of black disease, criminality, prostitution, and social pathology also suffuse the concluding section of “The Conservation of Races.” Perhaps most notoriously, “The Talented Tenth” (1903) tackles “the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”Footnote 134 While he emphasizes black education, Du Bois frames the quandary of black deficiency in terms of the “obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts [which] were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit”? The solution was “to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the survival of the fittest.”Footnote 135 While Dorothy Roberts reads the essay as rejecting eugenic claims of black inferiority, its argument remains clearly Darwinist.Footnote 136 It does not refute eugenics, but race’s correlation with genetic fitness. It is thus perfectly congruent with the Darwinism sketched above: slavery artificially maintains unfit populations and its removal would enable natural selection.
Du Bois’s reflections on race relations in the South betray similar eugenic concerns. In “Relationship to the Whites in the South” (1901), he frets that Jim Crow facilitates mixing among the worst of black and white populations while proscribing contact between their better elements. “The Negro Question in the United States” (1906) shows how southern social arrangements degrade both populations, since “separation according to color does not depend on that natural amalgamation of social equals … in practically every Southern locality whites and blacks get acquainted with one another from their worst side.”Footnote 137 “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind” (1900) makes an analogous case in colonial peripheries, criticizing “the moral and physical degeneration which follows the unbridled injustice of conquerors toward the conquered.”Footnote 138 The essay also gauges racial uplift relative to a population’s “social efficiency,” a favored term of art for social Darwinists such as Benjamin Kidd.Footnote 139
Darwinism also inflects Du Bois’s major works of the period. The Souls of Black Folk’s ninth chapter, “Of the Sons of Master and Man,” militates for “a conscientious study of the phenomenon of race-contact” to ensure that “in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true.”Footnote 140 It also reiterates the eugenic anxiety that, under segregation, “the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close proximity” while “both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other.”Footnote 141 “Human advancement” is hindered by isolating the best of each race, “while at the bottom of the social group, in the saloon, the gambling-hell, and the brothel, that same line wavers and disappears.”Footnote 142 Du Bois frames the imparity between black and white workers in Darwinist terms, as an unbalanced struggle ensuring that even the best black workers “who survive in the competition are handicapped so as to accomplish much less than they deserve to.”Footnote 143 In John Brown, he characterizes democratic freedom as “the demand of Darwinism, and this calls for the abolition of hard and fast lines between races.” “Only in this way can the best in humanity be discovered and conserved,” he avers, since the “present attempt to force all whites above all darker peoples is a sure method of human degeneration.”Footnote 144 Given the “intertextual relation” that Nahum Dimitri Chandler traces between Du Bois’s early essays and books,Footnote 145 it is no surprise that these Darwinian currents traverse them. They also carry into his later thinking. In a 1916 letter to W. A. Humphrey, Du Bois denies “that any line separating men according to capacity would be for a single moment a racial line. Among the greatest mentally and morally would be black men as well as white and yellow.”Footnote 146
Circling back to the first section of this article, we can now better see the political implications of Du Bois’s understanding of race. His defense of democratic equality is at least partially indebted to a notion of race that hovers between biology and convention. His analyses of segregation and slavery show the effects that social, political, and legal institutions exert on biological processes, such as natural and sexual selection. Democratic equality sits the juncture of social practices and biology, as a political condition impacting the genetic health of black and white populations. A strictly biological-essentialist view of race would treat it as unaffected by social conditions, and a strictly social-constructivist one would have no eugenic implications. At their intersection, however, Du Bois’s conceptualization allows for a biological foundation and environmental transformation. It’s an account of race that can be ameliorated through political means—neither a fiction nor an iron cage.
Conclusion
For all its originality, Du Bois’s antiracist Darwinism obviously offers no template for contemporary progressive politics. My aim here is neither to endorse nor to criticize it. It is, rather, to resist the disciplinary inclination to lionize Du Bois (or any other thinker) at the expense of understanding him correctly. The insistence that he resisted biological essentialism, that he was a strict social constructivist, and that he straightforwardly rejected social Darwinism, eugenics, and race science comes at the cost of misrepresentation. It conceals the tensions that make him a still-productive interlocutor for the sociologists, philosophers, historians, and political theorists who continue to grapple with his often confounding account of race. It misses the elusiveness of his thinking, which steadfastly resists bounding. For Susan Gillman, this heterodoxy, fusing “the scientific study of the Negro, racial mysticism, and transnational activism,”Footnote 147 places Du Bois within the period’s occultisms. Paul Gilroy treats the “genre of modernist writing he inaugurated” as transcending categorization, “a self-consciously polyphonic form that was born from the intellectual dilemmas that had grown alongside Du Bois’s dissatisfaction with all available scholarly languages.”Footnote 148 Clearly, Du Bois’s notion of race exceeds the conventions of his own day as much as our own.
Drafting him into our conceptual frame misses the theoretical contributions that he did make in developing a much subtler notion of social evolution than those on offer, astutely distinguishing between the scientific foundations of race and their distortion through racial prejudice. To disregard his Darwinism and read him as a good social constructivist does him a disservice: it inaccurately forces him into the normative stance that we now occupy, and that we might want him to. It puts him at a remove from the “distinct community of discourse” that he inhabited,Footnote 149 neglecting how deftly he navigated his own intellectual milieu to advance racial progress from the best scientific evidence available. Darwinism, Lamarckism, and eugenics were a common language of that community of discourse and its terms were as elastic as they were pervasive. Social Darwinism’s polysemy enabled scholars to take it up in different ways and press it toward their own ends, which is precisely what Du Bois did. Making him more like us obscures the originality of his own view of American race politics.
What makes Du Bois’s thought fascinating is not that it serves as a precursor to ours. It’s that he wedded the epistemological insights of the German context with American sociology to reformulate widely held presumptions concerning race, history, group identity, genetic fitness, and politics. Bending him toward our norms misses the theoretical complexity of his racial politics, his deftness in navigating competing intellectual worlds, and the originality of his contributions to them. While his embrace of the period’s race sciences “may be offensive to many of us,” Wilson Moses recognizes, “intellectual history is not some sort of smorgasbord from which we select only those delicacies that appeal to contemporary tastes.”Footnote 150
Rather than shying away from the Darwinist elements of his thinking that have, for good reason, fallen into disrepute, we ought to consider what Du Bois did with them and what they did for him. They were the tools through which he denaturalized white supremacist teleology, reconceptualized the place of black culture in human civilization, contested the linkage of race and genetic fitness, exposed the harms of racial segregation, and argued for democratic equality. Darwinism was the water in which turn-of-century sociology swam, and what’s of interest is not a presentist concern to place him above it, but to see what he did within it. Because that was much more complex than simple rejection: Du Bois worked within his scientific setting to completely reconfigure common presumptions on race, biology, and politics.
There is, also, a broader lesson in Du Bois’s racial politics. While eugenics was mostly limited to a particular historical period, the impulse to draw political conclusions on race out of the human sciences is not. It precedes Du Bois in Montesquieu’s climatic theory of racial differentiation, Enlightenment debates over mono- and polygenesis, Gobineau’s racial groupings, and the advent of phrenology; it succeeds him in UNESCO’s four statements on race (1950–1967), the ongoing publication of Mankind Quarterly, Hernstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve, the 2022 establishment of the Human Diversity Foundation, and the resurgence of eugenics and bioengineering in Silicon Valley.Footnote 151 The imbrication of race, science, and politics is going nowhere.
But there is a distinction between appeals to science that fix individuals and groups into political positions and those enabling them to make better decisions about their political positions. The first limits political agency; the second enhances it. Du Bois’s early race thinking does both. But it is telling that with the passage of time, he appears to have largely relinquished the former for the latter, as he leaned into his role as an advocate for racial uplift. It is not that Du Bois necessarily ceased believing the science of race; it appears, rather, that he did not see it as especially useful for ameliorating African Americans’ circumstances. Science dealt with facts and politics dealt with choices, and Du Bois saw with clarity that facts were tools for choices, not determinants of them. It is an insight worth holding on to.
Acknowledgments
This article benefited from audience feedback at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics and at an annual meeting of the Association for Political Theory. I am grateful to Benjamin Nolan, Alex Livingston, William Paris, and Adam Dahl for helpful discussions, and to the journal’s reviewers for their careful engagement.
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