Du Bois’s early assimilationist worldview embraced European imperialism as a model

Evidence

In his Fisk graduation speech in June 1888, Du Bois offered the founder and first chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, as a model for Black leadership. Bismarck was well known for bringing together dozens of communities to form the mighty Germany in 1871. Du Bois said that Bismarck’s Second Reich “should serve as a model for African-Americans ‘marching forth with strength and determination under trained leadership.’” He did not mind that Bismarck had hosted the Berlin Conference in 1885, where European colonizers had partitioned Africa on the dishonest pretext that they were bringing civilization to the continent. “I did not understand at all, nor had my history courses led me to understand,” he later admitted, that colonialism had so viciously exploited African raw materials and labor. “I was blithely European and imperialistic in outlook.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 708

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s key discomfort — assimilationism as racist position — since Du Bois, a canonical antiracist figure, is shown in an assimilationist-imperialist phase early on.
• QUESTION: Useful test case against Kendi’s scheme: does this count as Du Bois being racist by Kendi’s definition, and how does Kendi’s framework handle a figure who later became thoroughly antiracist?