Juneteenth: An American Problem

W.E.B. Du Bois: Of Our Spiritual Strivings

Growing up in Texas, I always knew what Juneteenth was about. I was surprised to go out into the world and realize that it wasn’t common knowledge.

Thanks to Joe Biden, it’s now a Federal Holiday and its history is more widely understood.

Briefly, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Lincoln in January of 1863. However, enforcing the end of enslavement was difficult, especially in the south, where they weren’t exactly on board with it in the first place. It wasn’t until Union soldiers were sent to Galveston, Texas to enforce the already-2.5-year-old law that freedom could truly be celebrated throughout the entire country. June 19, 1865 marks this celebration.

In honor of it, I want to take a deep dive into W.E.B. Dubois’s “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” from The Souls of Black Folk - an essential American text! This is in MLA format so that you can easily follow along with my exegesis.

Philosophy of race is the reason that I became a philosopher and I’ve taught several courses in this field. Justice and equality have been on my heart since I was a child, living in a small town where segregation still existed - not on paper, of course, but in ideology. I didn’t understand then why racism existed, but I understand why now, because I’ve studied it so deeply. Yes, I am a white woman who will never grasp the lived Black experience. But the more I read about it, the more I learn over the years, the better I’m able to determine how to teach white people about racism, in ways that encourage them to think better, to do better. I specialize in whiteness, but only through the work of people like Du Bois can I truly deconstruct it.

This particular piece from Du Bois is male-centered, so it’s important to note that it was a Black woman, Opal Lee, who spear-headed a grassroots campaign to make Juneteenth a National holiday. She grew up near where I grew up in East Texas. Today, we celebrate her, and all the Black women who have made this country what it is, and what it can be - from Sojourner Truth to Phillis Wheatley to Harriet Tubman to Rosa Parks to Mary McLeod Bethune to Dorothy Height to Michelle Obama, to another Texas girl, Jasmine Crockett, and every woman in between.

Soundtrack for this writing: Louis Cato’s “Black Man Blues” was released today and it is glorious.

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An American Problem

Though “being a problem is a strange experience” (4), Du Bois is able to exposit the aggrieved past of Black Americans and address the frustrating present, while still revealing his hope for a future in which these spiritual strivings eventually culminate in hard-earned successes and equalities. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” reminds us of our shared humanity amidst a cultural experience that is, even today, wholly and pointedly unshared. The text is an inspiration to continue striving towards freedom and equality, as well as to implore the oppressors, “with loving emphasis” (9), to listen to and gratify that striving. Du Bois illustrates how these reciprocal acts of striving and listening can commence in the establishment of a cooperative and equitable culture for all Americans.

The text opens with a poem by Welsh poet Arthur Symons entitled The Crying of Water: “O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand / All life long crying without avail” (4). For Du Bois, the water that cries endlessly, in vain, is a metaphor for the Black souls who strive endlessly, crying for freedom, in vain. “The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea” (4) are representative of the two voices, the concept of double-consciousness, for which Du Bois is best known. The citation of the poem conveys an interminable drive toward relief, with no avail; “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” however, offers glimpses of hope for a possible amelioration.

Du Bois commences his personal narrative by situating himself, as a Black American, in “the other world” (4), a world in which he is the “other” to the white person, experiencing a completely different world from theirs. His is a world in which the white person perceives him as a “problem.” After all, he has “never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe” (4). Du Bois reveals that this problem is a white ideological problem of perception, an innately American problem. He doesn’t feel this way in Europe. And yet, Black people are the ones who are striving to resolve this problem, a problem they simply are, in their otherness, according to the dominant culture. Du Bois writes, “I remember well when the shadow swept across me” (4). Otherness, he knows, is unnatural. It is a forced identity, and for the Black American, it is inherited in this country. But the child knows nothing of these representations that await him. The personal account of young Du Bois exposes the unjustifiable loss of innocence: “The revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day,” he laments. “I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” (4). As only a child, he must come to terms with the reality that it is your skin color – not your heart, life, and longing – that determines your place in a society of division. Acceptance of this reality, however, cannot dismantle it, and its consequences are clearer from within this awareness, an awareness that, for Du Bois, seems to inspire his resilience and his motivation to write this piece.

One’s personal striving may encounter blockades so numerous that an ambitious man like Du Bois must realize that “all their dazzling opportunities were theirs, not mine” (4). It is this revelation that inspires him to “wrest from them” (5) these prizes and opportunities, a reaction that seems quite natural in a society that breeds conflict and competition. While Du Bois pursued academic and philanthropic endeavors, he did not lose sight of the other Black boys around him, who harbored “silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?” (5) The lives of his fellows culminated in the prison-houses, their striving truncated before it could flourish. Du Bois bears witness to “sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation” (5), helpless against the systems intent upon their oppression in their own house, their own country. When Du Bois calls his strife “sunny” (5) in comparison to these “sons of night,” the reader can’t help but wonder if there is guilt at play. In any case, there is certainly the sense of responsibility to wield his minimal privilege to speak towards equal freedom, education, and opportunity. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” is a work that unapologetically takes up that responsibility, and asks that white people take it up, too.

We return now to “double-consciousness,” in which the Black man can only “see himself through the revelation of the other world… measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (5). The one who is othered, consequently, internalizes the dominant view of himself. The self becomes splintered into a “twoness,” and for Du Bois, that means “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (5). This is our first encounter with two ruptured strivings. Du Bois feels that he strives as an American, and he strives, quite unconnectedly, quite contrarily, as a person of color. The desire to “merge his double self into a better and truer self” (5) haunts him. This twoness is a consequence of this American problem: a dominant ideology ensnares an entire race, fragmenting the consciousness of each individual. For Du Bois, he writes that he would not give up either self, but “simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon… the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face” (5). A phrase like “spit upon” is effective in its violent imagery. The capitalization of the word “Opportunity” illustrates just how separated from white prospects is the “spit-upon” Black American. But this hopeless illustration could fade in the face of the possibility of merging that double-consciousness and ending his “hesitant and doubtful striving” (5), so that he might become “a co-worker in the kingdom of culture” (5). This is the ultimate outcome for which the text strives – an acceptance of the person of color as a fellow American whose contributions and opportunities are equally valued.

Du Bois comments poetically that, throughout history, Black men have been “like falling stars,” but here in America, they face “a contradiction of double aims” (5). He must “plough and nail and dig,” toiling, laboring amongst “the poverty and ignorance of his people” (5) in order to produce for white consumption, just as the Black artist, as a creator of white commodities, must suppress “the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised” (6).

Du Bois outlines the Black American fight for liberty, from the “days of bondage” to Emancipation, through the forty years that have passed at the time of his writing, and “yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast” (6). This passionate language paints pictures of chains and relentless ghosts, haunting not only the Black American, but all of American history. “In vain, we do cry to this our vastest social problem: - ‘Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves / Shall never tremble!’” (6) Utilizing this line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth - during which Macbeth encounters the vengeful ghost of the murdered Banquo sitting upon the throne - Du Bois returns to Symons’s poem: crying in vain. Confrontation of a brutal past, both for Macbeth and for the American people, can tear the mind asunder and can sit mockingly on the throne, impeding any progress. “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (6). This peace, this freedom has eluded the people of this country, “like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host” (6). Du Bois invokes Macbeth to provoke us to consider the lingering of the ghost of our national past, and to refuse its madness.

With the passage of time, the Black American, according to Du Bois, began to regard the ballot as the “chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty” (7). This “dream of political power,” of voting themselves “into the kingdom,” eventually gave way to “book-learning… the longing to know” (7). Both avenues were a possibility for the freedom for which the Black American was ceaselessly striving. Inspired anew by the hope of education, Du Bois writes that they strove to learn “faithfully… piteously… it was weary work” (7). We see again here the image of toiling, a labor of love towards this mission. This journey brought self-consciousness, perhaps consciousness of twoness. “His own soul rose before him, and he saw himself – darkly as through a veil” (7). This is the same veil that Du Bois mentions early in the text, the shadowy separation of his world from theirs, the tear that creates the double-consciousness. But the newly educated man began to “analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem” (7). The mask/veil complicates this problem – again, an American problem, a “test of the underlying principles of the great republic” (9).

Behind this veil, the Black American recognizes the systems of oppression that have shackled him – poverty, the gatekeeping of eductaion, the legal system. Du Bois passionately states that these systems have “handicapped” (today, we would say “disenfranchised”) Black Americans, who “stand helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless” in the face of this prejudice. A people who have overcome such disenfranchising for centuries might be uniquely positioned to continue to strive against it, and to show themselves more resilient, and consequently, more successful, eventually, in spite of it. But there is inhumanity in the demanding of this, from one’s own nation, a guilty nation that “echoed and enforced this self-criticism – self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals” (8). How might the Black American continue in hope and faith when their own nation says, “what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud?” (8)

It has been over a hundred years since Du Bois wrote these words, lamenting, “Storm and stress today rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul” (8). Not much has changed, it might be argued. Most importantly, the solution to this American problem, perhaps, remains the same:

          “All these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the  
          schools, we need today more than ever, - …the broader, deeper, higher culture of 
          gifted minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot, we need in sheer self-
          defence, - else what shall save us from second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-
          sought, we still seek… Work, culture, liberty, - all these, we need, not singly but 
          together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each other, and 
          all striving toward that vaster ideal… of human brotherhood, gained through the 
          unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents 
          of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large 
          conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic” (8).

Bibliography

Du Bois, W.E.B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” The Souls of Black Folk. Atlanta, GA: Millennium Publications, 2014.

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With love, Your Friendly Neighborhood Philosopher