The early 20th-century American intellectual, sociologist, and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote prolifically about the meaning of race and the democratic ideal.
He also thought deeply about the roots of racism: whether it had its origins in ignorance or in character. By the time Du Bois wrote “Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil” — a volume of essays, autofiction, and poetry published in 1920, less than two years after the end of World War I — he had become convinced that it was the latter and connected to broader cultural forces that degraded democracy.
“Darkwater” and its arguments form the crux of Robert Gooding-Williams’ new book, “Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois” (Columbia University Press) — particularly Du Bois’ ideas about the capacity for beauty to push back against racism and the hopelessness it can engender.
For Du Bois, Gooding-Williams writes, “[b]eauty has a role to play in opposing white supremacy and fostering a more inclusive democracy, first, because it can strengthen our determination to fight it, the obduracy of the white supremacist notwithstanding; and second, because it can unsettle and help to transform the pernicious habits that perpetuate it.”
Robert Gooding-Williams reads from ‘Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois’
Robert Gooding-Williams reads from ‘Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois’
Gooding-Williams is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy, in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His last book was “In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America” (Harvard University Press, 2009). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 and, in 2020, received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He sat down with Yale News to talk about Du Bois’ conception of beauty, its power to override pessimism, and its capacity to provoke a new understanding of the world. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
Before we dive into the arguments in your book, would you describe what Du Bois means by “beauty”?
Robert Gooding-Williams: On one hand, he’s thinking about beauty in fairly conventional terms. If you think of modern aesthetics, he’s thinking about beauty in terms of completeness, perfection, unity. That is to say, a beautiful event or beautiful art. But at the same time, he thinks of beauty as having a kind of explosive power, of bringing to light heretofore unseen, unfamiliar possibilities. Works of art and natural events can be beautiful, but it’s very important to bear in mind that his paradigm case is that of a beautiful life. For Du Bois, the conception of a beautiful life is a satisfying and fulfilled life. There’s a way in which the aesthetic and the ethical kind of merge. Du Bois thinks that, as individuals, we’re born into a stage of ugliness, and we’re tasked with making our lives something whole and complete. If we succeed in doing that, then, he thinks, we will also bring to light possibilities that might encourage other human beings in shaping their lives. A beautiful life is exemplary in a certain way so that we can look to that life and find inspiration for living in ways that may not otherwise have occurred to us or been familiar to us.
You describe a twofold argument made by Du Bois in relation to the power of beauty to defeat white supremacy. First, that natural beauty can act as an antidote of sorts to prevent Black citizens from despairing that they can’t do anything about the societal forces of oppression, and so quit fighting.
Gooding-Williams: Du Bois has the view that poetic, imaginative perception can bring to life and disclose dimensions of reality that aren’t available through social scientific inquiry or natural scientific inquiry. The perception of natural beauty that lets us see that we’re capable of agency that transforms the world. And Du Bois thinks that imaginative perception can be functional in overcoming despair or pessimism at that prospect. Despair is hopelessness, but pessimism is the face of despair. Resignation of agency. Pessimism for Du Bois is not simply a matter of believing that the worst will happen. It involves a spirit of resignation.
You note that he equated pessimism with cowardice, yes?
Gooding-Williams: He does say that. So how does that work? Where does the resignation come from? The resignation comes from fear. Fear gives rise to despair. Despair gives rise to the resignation. The pessimism is precisely the fear that transforming the world and reducing the sway of imperialism and white supremacy is not possible. To that extent, there’s a kind of cowardice involved. Cowardice is about giving in to the spirit of resignation.
The second part of his argument was that beauty can challenge the thinking of some white supremacists who also identify as Christians.
Gooding-Williams: This is an interesting argument. So sometimes people look at racism in the world and think that it is at odds with Christianity. That a Christian who’s behaving in a racist way is hypocritical. That’s not quite what Du Bois is worried about. He’s worried about someone whose understanding of Christianity is compatible with racism and white supremacy. The white supremacist Christian whose understanding of Christianity is such that there’s no contradiction between lynching Black people and living as a Christian. The problem there, from Du Bois’ point of view, and from the points of view of lots of people today, is in the understanding of what Christianity is.
Du Bois thinks that beautiful works of art can cast certain ideas, principles, qualities of character in a new light. And we might find ourselves called upon to reorient ourselves, to think again about what those principles, those ideas really entail, or to think again about the qualities of character we were inclined to praise. To see, for example, that Black people can be virtuous, that Black people are due moral consideration.
In a contemporary context, one of the examples I use in the book comes from Darryl Pinckney’s 2017 review of the movie “Moonlight” in The New York Review. He sees “Moonlight” as putting into question our ordinary conception of romantic love, which doesn’t allow that “big, bad Black men” can fall in love in a romantic way. The thought is that if we look at the representations of romantic love in the culture, they tend to include some folks and exclude others. And they tend to exclude big, bad Black men. To that extent, our operative conception of romantic love involves ideological distortion. A work of art like that movie can pull us up short and challenge us to put into question the ordinary operative way of thinking about something like romantic love.
An “aha” moment of sorts that causes a shift in our belief system?
Gooding-Williams: There can be a kind of shock effect that art can operate on us, in ways that compel us to see things in a different way. Something we were talking about earlier — art can have this explosive power in cases where logical analysis does not.
