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Nigritude about Du Bois

by Prometheus 6
June 6, 2004 - 1:48pm.
on Race and Identity

You know, I'm looking around the web for some information today. I've found a basket of interesting links, but sometimes the links are stale, like one that should have been to a list of web resources at the University of Virginia.

I decided to search on "african american" at the university's web site. The search turned out to be of their libraries' book catalogs. And during a quick scan of the results, this caught my eye:

Unnatural selections : eugenics in American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance / English, Daylanne K. (2004)

This was a connection I never even considered before.

Check the publisher's description of the book:

Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics in the Progressive Era. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding.

English's interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimké as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes The Crisis magazine as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race.

English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot. Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.

Having not read the thing I can't critique it, but my reflexive reaction ain't good. The approach reminds me of a sig I used to use: "There's a pattern to everything; but EVERYTHING makes the pattern. The human failing is making a pattern from parts and calling it the whole." Still, the ability to stretch Du Bois into a eugenicist shows impressive creativity.

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Submitted by Kim Pearson (not verified) on June 6, 2004 - 6:10pm.

Actually, it's not as much of a stretch as it might appear. In the early 20th century, eugenicists were in two camps: positive and negative. The positive eugenicists believed that social and environmental reforms would improve people, making them fit to contribute and compete.

Du Bois believed that, as did his allies in the Black Women's Club Movement, the Settlement House movement, and advocates for public health, family planning and education. Negative eugenicists believed that some people were inherently unfit and should be prevented from reproducing. Du Bois wrote articles favoring family planning, education for women and health education.

The most extreme form of negative eugenics of course, was Nazism. Du Bois was a consistent opponent of Nazism -- his warnings about Hitler go back to 1936.

In fact, David Levering Lewis argues that Du Bois' interference with his daughter's romance with a jazz musician and encouraged her to marry Countee Cullen was fundamentally eugenicist. The marriage was ill=fated, of course, because Cullen ran away to Europe with his best man, Harold Jackman, with whom he lived the rest of his life.

It's important to remember that Du Bois thought of himself as a modern, scientific man, as that was understood at the turn of the 20th century. He understood eugenics as a scientific means of advancing a people and improving their quality of life.

Here's more on eugenics:
Eugenics Image Archive

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Submitted by P6 (not verified) on June 6, 2004 - 6:45pm.

The positive eugenicists believed that social and environmental reforms would improve people, making them fit to contribute and compete.

Wouldn't that make us all eugenicists? Who doesn't believe that?

I guess the official definition is broader than what I think of as eugenincs…improving the race by specific breeding ("positive") and culling (negative). And I don't want chasing off a guy you don't like for your daughter "eugenics" on the strength of that alone.

I don't know, like I said I never considered the possibility of eugenics as a root element of the Harlem Renaisance and the Niagra Movement. I'm still not feeling it, given my own understanding of the term.

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