Cooperation, Black Populism, and the Dilemma of Du Bois's Racial Theory

Double-consciousness has, for Du Bois, a dual meaning. It is both the experience of always seeing oneself through the eyes of the dominant race as an inferior, subjugated person and the experience of seeing the possibilities of a life free of racial hierarchy while living in a world defined by such hierarchy. By posing the duality of double-consciousness, Du Bois gave himself a problem that he spent much of his life grappling with: how does a life spent as a marginalized other create a vision of an ideal future and the belief that such a future is attainable through one's own agency? Du Bois answered this question by pairing his social-constructionist account of race with an essentialist one, imbuing his theory of race with legacies of European, colonial discourse that undermine its value for contemporary anti-racist struggles. This paper argues that the solution to this dilemma is not found in Du Bois's writings on race but in his empirical studies of Black associational and cooperative activity. These texts, read in the context of turn of the 20th-century Black Populism, offer an experiential, rather than an essentialist, solution to the problem of Black agency and Black emancipation put forward by the concept of double-consciousness.