Their agenda of white guilt is a cover of “faith” to further coloniality as a guise of “modernity”. Notions of progress rationalize black bodies to imagine formations of “barbarians” forcing concealment within debate.

The idea and promise of progress, an idea that is connected to values such as recognition, equality, and freedom, has always been a fraught object of discussion and interest for black writers, artists, and thinkers. This is especially the case for the philosopher, social critic, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. In “The Souls of White Folk,” a scathing essay written in the aftermath of World War I, Du Bois radically undercuts the pervasive faith that the world is moving steadily on a path toward increased freedom and equality. In this essay, he suggests that the rhetoric of civilization and progress denies a traumatic underside that consists of slavery, the colonization of people of color, war, and conquest. In an expression that resembles a prayer, Du Bois exclaims: “We have seen—Oh Merciful God! in these wild days and in the name of Civilization, Justice, and Motherhood—what have we not seen, right here in America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murder done to men and women of Negro descent.”12 While Du Bois underscores the specific struggles of black Americans during the so-called nadir of American race relationships (a post-Reconstruction period marked by the establishment of Jim Crow segregation and the ritualized lynching of black bodies), he is also thinking broadly about the relationship between civilization, progress, and race-inflected domination within modern life. Similar to Karl Marx, Du Bois contends that many of the material freedoms, advancements, and enjoyments that the modern world introduces rely on systems of exploitation and exclusion. As Du Bois puts it, “High wages in the United States and England might be the skillfully manipulated result of slavery in Africa and peonage in Asia.”13 What is important here is that Du Bois can be interpreted in this essay as saying that modern notions of progress and freedom are inherently flawed and problematic because they rely on and are intertwined with practices and conditions— capitalism, colonial expansion, racial hierarchies, endeavors, and incentives to usurp and possess the earth—that are harmful to non-Europeans, working-class bodies, women, and other groups. At the same time, he can be read as suggesting that these notions of freedom and progress are not necessarily flawed or attached to pernicious desires, endeavors, and projects; rather, these ideals have just not been embodied or practiced properly. If the latter position is taken, then progress and the practices and arrangements associated with this ideal should be embraced and simply expanded to include groups, communities, and collective bodies that are presently marginalized.14 This ambivalence haunts Du Bois’s writing and thought. (But, of course, he is not unique; he inherits, and bequeaths, this ambivalence.) As many commentators have noted, Du Bois occasionally identifies with and adopts rather simplistic notions of progress and civilization. Like other black intellectuals and black people more generally, Du Bois articulates a commitment to something like racial progress or uplift. While historical efforts to uplift the race seem necessary and laudatory, these efforts carry troubling implications and consequences, especially when uplifting black people is defined as civilizing the black masses. As Kevin Gaines points out, the proverbial uplift paradigm, adopted by many black intellectuals and activists since the nineteenth century, calls for an educated, elite class of black people to liberate the masses of black folk from imposed conditions of poverty, ignorance, and moral depravity.15 The demand and struggle for recognition has therefore involved the celebration of certain individuals or groups that “embody” and signify progress and advancement; these are figures that have adopted and learned the ideals, values, and practices of the civilized world (Europe and America), middle-class whiteness, enlightened Christianity, and so forth. Du Bois certainly has moments that betray a strong allegiance to progress, to the idea that recognition for black people requires being inducted into the civilizing process. Here we might think about Du Bois’s fascination with charismatic figures like Otto Von Bismarck, a model for black leadership, according to Du Bois, because he embodied a “forward marching spirit” in his endeavor to unite Germany. Or one could cite his enthusiasm during World War I about black soldiers (and black people’s patriotism) being conduits for recognition, assimilation, and advancement. But to reduce the possibilities in Du Bois’s thought to these moments is to foreclose more ambiguous, and more generative, trajectories and lines of flight as indicated in essays like “The Souls of White Folk.” Throughout his corpus, there are fruitful tensions and conflicts around related notions of progress, recognition, and freedom; while he certainly has one foot in the civilizing processes of modernity, he also acknowledges that these processes are pernicious and terrifying for people of color, working-class bodies, and other kinds of subjects. Du Boisian ideas like the color line, the Veil, and double-consciousness, themes that I discuss in chapter1, suggest that modern life is fractured and broken and that the flourishing of some groups and communities relies on the systemic marginalization, alienation, and death of others—in addition to tendencies to bury and conceal these persistent realities. To better understand Du Bois’s equivocal position, it is helpful to remember that he is responding to ideas, philosophies, and narratives that mark people of color as backward and uncivilized or that locate black bodies outside the movement of history. As Shamoon Zamir reminds us, Du Bois is in conversation with philosophers who adopted and articulated these kinds of narratives, most notably Hegel.16 Hegel is significant in part because of his attempt to fuse philosophy and history, to offer a coherent, systematic account of the development of Reason and Spirit within history.17 For Hegel, world Spirit develops in stages and through various conflicts and contradictions, becoming more coherent and mature in the process. Spirit moves from a lower form of consciousness to a higher form, originating in the East and culminating in the West. During this journey, according to Hegel, Spirit “skips over” Africa, meaning that Africa does not participate in the development of reason, truth, and freedom. Africa, in Hegel’s vision, “is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it—that is in its northern part—belong to the Asiatic or European part of the world.”18 Here my intention is not to simply bash Hegel for his individual blind spots, nor is my intention to neglect the more admirable aspects of his thought and 10 Introduction legacy. What is important here is that Hegel’s thought demonstrates how the logic of progress operates to establish and justify racial hierarchies. Because some nations are imagined as more advanced than others (in politics, technology, culture, religion), these advanced nations are able to rationalize and vindicate the violent treatment of inferior nations as part of a civilizing process. Hegel claims, for instance, that civilized nations are entitled to “regard and treat as barbarians other nations which are less advanced than they are.”19 As Hegel indicates, the colonial system, a set of coercive arrangements and policies that heavily shaped current racial formations and hierarchies, was motivated and legitimated by narratives of progress that located Europeans at the forefront of history’s movement and black and brown peoples behind, or forever outside, the vanguard of history.20