A Letter from W.E.B. DuBois to Charles Chesnutt

To My Dear Colleague Charles Chesnutt:

We have dutifully worked together for years and although I should certainly know your heart and intention -- I am a bit surprised and disturbed by the thrust of your recent article "What is a White Man?"

You speak so eloquently and knowingly of the 'citizen who values his birthright' but so disaffectedly and distally of the 'genuine Negro'. Despite our complicated and multi-colored personal racial histories aren't we ‘genuinely Negro’ as well? Colored, Negro, formally educated, illiterate, slave or free -- the lot of the Negro in America is virtually the same. Yes, Charles – even you and I are bound by our entangled and entwined sovereignty with our darker brethren.

I appreciate your ability to invigorate the banal absurdity and illogicality of race enumeration and detail the breadth of the Negro experience, but please do not lose sight that this is indeed the subjective experience of all Negroes in America. 1/8 in Mississippi; 1/16 in Georgia; 1/4 in South Carolina ... the place and parcel of the color line is haphazard and meaningless indeed.

You offer that race is a structural problem of sorts that is arbitrarily levied from region to region. However, upon closer inspection your suggestion might almost appear that the Negro has been denied Whiteness -- and that this element of note is the decidedly critical watermark to which we aspire. Negroes in America have been denied their dignity and humanity – and it is this above all else that we desire – not Whiteness. Our aspiration to equality is not a moving towards Whiteness, it is instead progression towards a guarantee that we are privy to as Americans. Please do not hastily conflate the two. Your title itself harkens an affirmation to Whiteness that is unnecessary and undeserved.

As I detail in The Souls of Black Folk -- the place of the Negro in the United States -- our place -- is tragic and unique. The line that separates the races will not be 'obliterated' despite the intermingling of race. In fact, intermingling may only exacerbate the nature of the Negro experience in America

I am confident that you will consider my missive with the best of spirits. Our brethren -- in every hue -- are reliant upon your committed and sustained devotion to racial uplift.


Yours in brotherhood,

W.E.B. DuBois


Questions:

Does Chesnutt subscribe to a (perhaps unintended) pervasive privileging, ennobling and honoring of Whiteness that his conception of Blackness disallows?

Does Chesnutt’s idealistic notion of a singular American birthright, inheritance and nationalism allow for racial pride?