Du Bois framed early Black assimilationism as shame-driven and antiracist separation as self-discovery

Evidence

In the September 1933 issue of The Crisis, Du Bois published “On Being Ashamed,” a look back at the lifelong course of his own thinking, which he generalized as Black America’s thinking. From emancipation to around 1900, the “upper class of colored Americans,” he said, had striven “to escape into the mass of Americans,” practically “ashamed” of those who were not assimilating. But since then, “colored America has discovered itself,” and Du Bois had discovered himself and his singular antiracist consciousness. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 872

Categorization

• XREF: This is a concrete case for the reader’s key discomfort: assimilationism as a racist position, now endorsed by Du Bois himself as something to abandon.
• SEED: Angle: tracing Du Bois’s own intellectual arc — assimilationist ‘On Being Ashamed’ to antiracist ‘Segregation’ (1933-34) — as a worked example of how one leaves assimilationism.