Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk propagated complementary-race racism alongside antiracism

Evidence

In the midst of this overpowering segregationist discourse, W. E. B. Du Bois had the audacity to publish the most acclaimed book of his career. Released on April 18, 1903, the book title decreed in profoundly antiracist fashion that Blacks were not soulless beasts. Black folk were fully human, and Du Bois made Americans “listen to the strivings in the souls of black folk.” … Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Du Bois’s fourteen essays drilled much deeper into the American mind the racist construction of complementary biological race traits, of the humble, soulful African complementing the hard, rational European. Blacks should be fostering and developing “the traits and talents of the Negro,” Du Bois proposed, “in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack.” Black people were “the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 766

Categorization

• XREF: This is exactly Kendi’s broader scheme: well-meaning antiracist Du Bois nonetheless trafficked in racist complementary-trait framing. Ties to the reader’s goal of placing arguments into segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist boxes, and resists the common reflex to treat Souls as purely antiracist.
• SEED: Angle: how even the most celebrated ‘antiracist founding text’ quietly embeds the complementary-race hierarchy Kendi attacks, and what that means for how we read canonical reform texts today.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this complementary-trait framing in Du Bois make him assimilationist by Kendi’s scheme, or antiracist despite it?