The first weeks of the Biden Administration saw a very, very old story get played out again. Namely the U.S. political establishment’s, and the Democratic Party in particular’s, institutionalized policy of taking black people and black votes for granted. I don’t agree with Tim Wise on a lot of things, but he was spot on ten years ago when he titled one of his books “Between Barack and a Hard Place” and warned about something called “racism 2.0”. What he meant by that was that a certain segment of White America, the liberal segment, was now willing to “make exceptions” when it came to certain black people. That it was willing to recruit certain black people into high political office so long as they served the corporate interests of the capitalist state and didn’t do anything to fundamentally challenge white privilege. Barack Obama played that role well: he was a neoliberal, he bailed out Wall Street, passed legislation favorable to the capitalist class, waged wars to expand and maintain the American Empire, and passed only the most token reforms. Now we have Kamala Harris, a woman who built her career on the mass incarceration of other black people in California, buttressing Joe Biden, one of the key architects of mass incarceration in America, who further masked his racist political record by hiding behind a twelve-year-old black poet on inauguration day. And given Biden’s record with women and girls, I’m just glad that he kept his hands to himself that day.
I’ve mentioned on this show before that Du Bois, who was among the founders of the NAACP and helped spearhead the founding of the modern civil rights movement around the turn of the 20th Century, was originally hopeful that US involvement in WW1 would lead to meaningful reform and a breakdown of racial segregation. He even hoped that the Versailles Treaty in 1919 would lead to self-determination for colonized peoples in Africa and Asia, who, like many African-American soldiers, had shed their blood for the Allied cause during the war. Great promises had been made, US President Woodrow Wilson was talking about a new era of democracy around the world and it seemed like change was coming.
But all that Du Bois and the other hopeful reformers received, both in Black America and the Global South, including people like Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, was a knife in back. European colonization continued with the British and French Empires carving up the Middle East between themselves and refusing to relax their grip on Africa and Asia. Returning African-American veterans were greeted by the so-called Red Summer of 1919, with Black Americans being lynched and murdered in record numbers amid absolute impunity. More than anything else, even the 1917 October Revolution which inspired them greatly, this betrayal of colonized and oppressed peoples by Western governments is what made W.E.B Du Bois and many others around the world into revolutionaries.
Now compare this betrayal in 1919, both in Versailles and in Washington, with the betrayal currently underway in 2021. Biden has initiated “prison reform” that frees no one, nor does it remove the profit motive from the American prison system or address the atrocity of kids being put in cages in ICE detention facilities – an issue that has dropped out of the media almost entirely since Trump left office. He has promised $2000 stimulus cheques which have still not appeared. He promised a $15 federal minimum wage…but not until 2025. He has promised to withdraw support for Saudi Arabia over the genocidal war against Yemen, but to keep “defensive” military aid in place. Virtually every executive order he has signed over the past few weeks has proven to be hollow window dressing upon closer inspection. This is what betrayal looks like and it’s a betrayal that disproportionately affects black people and people of color in general.
In the words of Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist, “Words of peace but no treaty are signs of a plot.”
And this is why W.E.B. Du Bois was put on trial in 1951, along with the other leaders of the Peace Information Center (PIC), one of the first organizations in the world to push for a ban on nuclear weapons, and accused of being a foreign agent. The US government blocked Du Bois from attending the Bandung Conference of Third World nations in 1955 for similar reasons: it didn’t want to see Black Americans joining hands with other formerly colonized peoples in defiance of imperialism.
But, of course, alongside these “bad” black people whom the US power structure has framed as criminals and traitors, there are “good” black people like Obama and Harris who always play by the rules and always work within the system and for the system. Du Bois was rightfully angry that the NAACP, the same African-American civil rights organization he helped to found decades earlier, basically abandoned him when he was put on trial in 1951 – it didn’t want to be associated with “radicalism” and lose its access to the Washington elite. The NAACP was also, at best, a fair-weather-friend to Martin Luther King and utterly condemned him when he began to vocally oppose the Vietnam War in 1967. This is the way colonial regimes work: those among the oppressed who serve the colonial power structure are often elevated and given privileges, while those who push for genuine emancipation and liberation are repressed. But compradors are rewarded; White America loves them and might even vote for them.
White America doesn’t like black people who say things like what W.E.B. Du Bois said at the New York Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace in 1949: “I tell you, people of America, the dark world is on the move! It wants and will have Freedom, Autonomy and Equality. It will not be diverted in these fundamental rights by dialectical splitting of political hairs…Whites may, if they will, arm themselves for suicide. But the vast majority of the world’s peoples will march on over them to freedom!”
This is not the kind of stuff that the White Power Structure likes to hear. But it loves when Barack Obama plays to white stereotypes by lecturing black men about morality and fatherhood.
In the 1950s, and when he was well into his eighties, Du Bois wrote an essay entitled “Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the United States”. In a truly prescient paragraph, he argues that: “The organized effort of American industry to usurp government surpasses anything in modern history…From the use of psychology to spread truth has come the use of organized gathering of news to guide public opinion, then deliberately to mislead it by scientific advertising and propaganda…Mass capitalistic control of books and periodicals, news gathering and distribution, radio, cinema, and television has made the throttling of democracy possible and the distortion of education and failure of justice widespread.”
W.E.B. Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868 and died on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95 and his political/academic career spanned nearly seventy years, hundreds of books and articles and every major African-American social movement of the early 20th Century from the Niagara Movement to the Haarlem Renaissance to the NAACP to the Communist Party and beyond. In 1895, he was the first black man to gain a PhD from Harvard and spent most of his life as an academic and/or newspaper editor.
On the day after he died in Accra, Ghana, the celebrated March on Washington took place on August 28 1963. Speaker Roy Wilkins asked the hundreds of thousands of marchers to give a moment of silence for Du Bois, honoring the man who had stood in vocal and active defiance against a racist society for nearly a century…a society that had tried hard to shut him up, but failed time and again.
Du Bois had come to Ghana to work on the proposed Encyclopedia Africana, a work that would place the history of black people front and center rather than subordinated to white European narratives, but he was destined never to complete it. On their last meeting, he took Kwame Nkrumah’s hand and thanked him for making it possible for him to finish his life in Africa. He had only one regret: “I failed you – my strength gave out before I could carry out our plans for the encyclopedia. Forgive an old man.” Even at 95, Du Bois had wanted to do so much more. The first president of the Republic of Ghana left the room in tears.
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