The Problem of the Future World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury

254 Pages·2010·1.05 MB·English

by  Eric Porter

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W. E. B. DU BOIS AND THE RACE CONCEPT AT MIDCENTURY
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For
CARMEN YAMILA RAMÍREZ Y PORTER
and
OMAR RAFAEL RAMÍREZ Y PORTER

My life had its significance and its only deep significance
because it was part of a Problem; but that problem was, as
I continue to think, the central problem of the greatest of
the world’s democracies and so the Problem of the future
world. The problem of the future world is the charting, by
means of intelligent reason, of a path not simply through
the resistances of physical force, but through the vaster and
far more intricate jungle of ideas conditioned on uncon-
scious and subconscious reflexes of living things; on blind
unreason and often irresistible urges of sensitive matter; of
which the concept of race is today one of the most unyield-
ing and threatening.
W. E. B. DU BOIS, DUSK OF DAWN (1940)
I remember once o√ering to an editor an article which be-
gan with a reference to the experience of last century. ‘‘Oh,’’
he said, ‘‘leave out the history and come to the present.’’
I felt like going to him over a thousand miles and taking
him by the lapels and saying, ‘‘Dear, dear jackass! Don’t you
understand that the past is the present; that without what
was, nothing is? That, of the infinite dead, the living are but
unimportant bits?’’
W. E. B. DU BOIS, THE WORLD AND AFRICA (1947)

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction Rewriting Du Bois’s Future 1
1 Race and the Future World 21
2 Beyond War and Peace 63
3 Imagining Africa, Reimagining the World 103
4 Paradoxes of Loyalty 145
Notes 179
Bibliography 217
Index 227