The Struggle for Multiracial Democracy & the Specter of White Sadism: Re-Reading Du Bois in the 21st Century

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Abstract

W.E.B. Du Bois’s account of compensatory whiteness within an American regime of racial capitalism has been enormously influential. Black Reconstruction (1935) famously argued that whiteness served as a “public and psychological wage” in the U.S., delivering to poor whites a sense of status dependent on their classification as “not-black.” This thesis shaped many analyses of American political culture, including post-2016 accounts that posit a contemporary “whitelash” or probe the vexed conditions under which multi-racial democratic coalitions might be built today.

This paper complicates the conceptualization of whiteness-as-metaphorical-wage associated with Du Bois by investigating his insights into what he deemed the “irrational” qualities of anti-black racism. I turn to Du Bois’s middle-period work, which alleges that “unconscious” and “subconscious” forces help uphold America’s tenacious racial order. In particular, I reflect on Du Bois’s treatment of anti-black brutality and his disturbing suggestion that it serves as a source of white comfort and enjoyment, a problem that seems to have haunted Du Bois’s writing for decades.

Tending to the problem of “white sadism” as it appears in Du Bois’s work, against the backdrop of his more-well known Marxist commitments, offers a new angle on contemporary interpretations of the U.S. racial order. The first of these holds that antiblack racism operates primarily as a tool of capitalist social control that rewards whites, however poor, for their allegiance to an abusive economic regime. This interpretation is challenged by the thesis which contends that antiblack racism obeys no such “logic” and is animated instead by base cruelty directed at black persons who remain symbolically marked as “enslaveable.” Popular debates over Trump’s election, especially on the left, have played out along these lines, between commentators who mobilize a “wages of whiteness” argument to explain Trump’s support among voters seemingly disadvantaged by his policies and those who reject this class-based analysis to argue that sheer racist animus, fueled by generations of white supremacy that traverses economic divisions, enabled Trump’s election. Can Du Bois help us think through the relationship between these propositions? Does the “irrationality” he uncovers render the “wages of whiteness” explanation wholly inadequate? Or might his work model a both/and approach that captures the plural, inconsistent dynamics by which racial hierarchies are made and re-made? Finally, what might this mean for the question that persistently animated Du Bois’s massive and varied body of work: what actions are required if we all are to be free?

Author

• Ella Myers, University of Utah