"We find upon the world's stage today eight distinctly differentiated races [...] There are, of course, other minor race groups, as the American Indians [...]"
"We believe that the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races--commonly called the Negro Problem--lies in the correction of the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which remains as a heritage from slavery."
In all I'd read by and about W.E.B. Du Bois, nothing prepared me for "The Conservation of Races." That as a young man he wrote such a decidedly 19th-century essay should not have shocked me--"Conservation" was, after all, first published in 1897. But coming after his staggering monograph The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, "Conservation" read like a betrayal.
Will, I thought I knew you.
As though anticipating his future reader's discomfort and embarrassment, as though deliberately and cruelly to banish all hope that "Conservation" could be laughed off as a hoax, Du Bois not only stamped it from beginning to end with his inimitable style, but anticipated in it some of the great ideas he later became famous for. Consider these two passages, both worthy of Darkwater or The Souls of Black Folk: (1) "What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? [...] Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?" (2) "We [Negroes] are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy."
As a historical document, then, and as a marker of Du Bois's intellectual maturation, "Conservation" is difficult to place. It has sat uneasily with me for weeks now: on trains, in conversation, and while jogging through Central Park, I've considered and reconsidered how to make sense of this essay.
Over time, two clues have inched me toward an answer.
The first is the essay's obsession with "the purity of black women": "Conservation" asserts that "an alarmingly large percentage of [Negro] men and women are sexually impure," and laments "that vast army of black prostitutes that is today marching to hell"; like most rants against sex, these passages smack of hypocrisy, all the more so as they come--in the words of a recent Du Bois biographer--from a "priapic adulterer."
The impurity Du Bois hates most could very well be his own.
The second clue is the similarity between the passages in "Conservation" I quoted in italics above, and ideas Du Bois would later attribute to Booker T. Washington:
In Souls Du Bois attacks Washington as a "compromiser" whose "counsels of submission" and "indiscriminate flattery" "practically [accept] the alleged inferiority of the Negro races."[T]he distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first,
that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of
the Negro's degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro's failure
to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his
future rise depends primarily on his own efforts.
Even with all its skirting and concessions to (always qualified) praise, Du Bois's take on Washington has always struck me as false, his anger as misplaced and disproportionate. I now wonder if the true object of his scorn was the young man who wrote "Conservation"; he did have, as we've seen, a record of projecting his demons onto others.
In fact across Du Bois's life he all but made a habit of antagonizing other black civil rights leaders. His first fight was with Washington; later he would war famously with Marcus Garvey and Walter White.
Did Garvey and White also represent to Du Bois unflattering images of himself? I've got theories, but have yet to think them through.
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