Caste Education and White Double Consciousness: Du Bois, Racial Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the White World

• In Event: 60.042 - W. E. B. Du Bois and Caste Education: Racial Capitalist Schooling and Caste Formation From Jim Crow to Neoliberal Reconstruction

Abstract

The central concern of this paper focuses on educating for the divestment in whiteness and for the cultivation of allies that continues to be an issue in social justice education (Allen 2002; Ignatiev and Garvey 1996; Kicheloe and Steinberg 1998; Leonardo 2009; Matias 2013). As such, this paper endeavors to clarify the potential and innate limits to white allyship. Using the epistemological and ontological analyses of the ‘White World’ provided by W.E.B. Du Bois (2003, 2009a, 2009b) in addition to contemporary literature on epistemologies of ignorance (Alcoff 2007; Mills 1998; Outlaw 2007) and white racial knowledge (Leonardo 2009), evidence for a theory of white double-consciousness is presented that facilitates a substantive look at white-ontology and the barriers to white allyship.

The paper’s argument is rooted in Du Bois’s conceptualization of caste and caste education (Du Bois 1970, 1998, 2002; Pierce 2013). Du Bois’s understanding of caste focuses on the intersecting and concomitant nature of white supremacy and capitalism. Du Bois saw public schooling in the U.S. as a primary technology for the maintenance of caste, hence “caste education.” Considering Du Bois’s frequent epistemological critiques, I suggest that caste education should also be understood as a public pedagogy. After all, the operative racial capitalism that curates the social production of caste could not exist without the epistemology that validates it – a caste epistemology.

In this paper caste epistemology serves as a mode of inquiry which facilitates an analysis of white allyship that accounts for racially constituted subjectivities in line with the epistemic norms of racial capitalism. By utilizing an epistemological analysis framed by caste, I critically assess the limits and capacities of white allyship imposed by the dominant epistemology dictating the quotidian norms of white folk.

Du Bois himself (1970) spoke to these limits in his analyses of caste epistemology and considered some of them to be inescapable, and “the more [whites] try to escape it … the more they become, what they least wish to become, the oppressors and despisers of human beings (233)”. Du Bois’s position is in reference to the way white supremacy unwillingly conscripts white participants and hosts a self-maintaining epistemology. Meaning, that despite an individual’s intellectual and moral position, their body will be marked, read and acted upon according to the parameters set by a system of white supremacy. This social engagement – how one is treated within the social world – results in a situation where social conceptions of race are continuously imposed on individuals and communities across racial demarcations, ultimately influencing individual identity.

In response, this paper outlines a theory of white double-consciousness suggesting that the inescapable aspects and innate limits of caste must be embraced and constantly struggled with by whites if they carry an ethic of social justice. Additionally, the theory of white double-consciousness is offered up in hopes of informing the problems and the potential of pedagogies for the abolition of caste education and the disruption of the “fatal body of folklore” defining reality in the ‘White World’ (Du Bois 1945, 26).

Author

• Gardner R Seawright, University of Utah