By TIANNA S. PASCHEL*
Preface to first edition in Portuguese of the book by WEB Du Bois.
1.
It is with great enthusiasm that I write this preface to the first edition in Portuguese of the important and rigorous book by WEB Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro. Firstly, I want to congratulate Cristina Patriota de Moura for a job well done. This translation required a deep understanding of the intellectual debates in which Du Bois was involved, the cultural, political and economic contexts contained at the heart of the book and obviously a command of the English language. It is an immense undertaking both because of the importance of the book and its length.
I write this preface as a black American woman and intellectual who carried out her studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, during the first decade of the 2000s, where there was not even a mention of Du Bois in any of our mandatory courses . I remember making a passionate appeal to my Social Theory professor at the time to have Du Bois included in the canon of sociological theory after a semester in which exclusively male European authors were read, one of whom (Max Weber) had been influenced by Du Bois, but no mention of his contributions. I write this preface almost twenty years later, when the sands have moved considerably and when the work of Du Bois, and in particular The Philadelphia Negro, has been receiving renewed and often new attention among social scientists and sociologists in particular. What I offer in this short preface is my own perspective on why this work is so relevant and why its translation into Portuguese is not only unprecedented, but absolutely necessary.
2.
In 1896, a 28-year-old Du Bois arrived at the University of Pennsylvania not as a professor, or even a lecturer, but with the specific task of conducting a study of the black population of Pennsylvania. Seventh Ward (Seventh Region) of Philadelphia. Despite his pedigree – he had studied at Harvard and in Europe, he had given a guest lecture in Germany – he was not considered for a teaching position or even an instructor position. Instead, he was hired as an assistant instructor with the caveat that he could not teach white students, a restriction that would essentially bar him from teaching altogether.
Later, in an autobiographical essay, Du Bois recalled that he had only been able to teach once, when he took a group of university students on a visit to a degraded black area, a black slum. He also said of his experience at the University of Pennsylvania: “I was offered a salary of $800 for a limited period of one year. I was not given a real academic position, nor an office at the university, nor official recognition of any kind: my name was even omitted from the catalogue; I had no contact with students and very little contact with faculty members, even those in my department. With my wife, for three months now I have been living in a room above a cafeteria run by a College Settlement, in the worst part of the Seventh Region. We lived there for a year amid an atmosphere of filth, drinking, poverty and crime. Murders occurred on our doorstep, the police were our government and philanthropy appeared with periodic advice.”[I]
Understand the context in which The Philadelphia Negro was written reveals a lot about the debates that are at the heart of the work. Despite being written under the auspices of a wealthy northern university, few resources were made available to Du Bois. More than that, Du Bois was writing about black Philadelphians at a time of moral panic regarding the growing black population not only in Philadelphia, but throughout the Northern United States. Indeed, in the decades after the Civil War, many of the formerly enslaved were moving to Northern cities like Philadelphia at an increasing rate, seeking better opportunities, desiring peace, and praying for freedom from explicit racialized violence.
Instead of being welcomed with open arms in this progressive city, they were greeted with the message that their presence was causing moral decay and ruining the city. The prevailing idea was that this growing population would somehow contaminate the city, an idea based on pseudoscientific racism that linked blackness to hypersexuality, unstable family structures, alcoholism and moral backwardness more generally. Perhaps of greater importance was the great concern over what his presence would mean for Philadelphia politics, given his growing voting power and the possible corruption and vote-buying taking place in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward, where Du Bois's study would be anchored.
In addition to this moral panic and political anxiety, there was the fact that Du Bois was writing against several powerful trends in public discourse and the abundant academic literature surrounding the so-called “Negro problem.” First, there was the tendency to see the Black problem as inherent to black people. The commissioned study had been formulated to always think about the black problem as an analysis of what was wrong with black people in Philadelphia because they were not experiencing the same type of social ascension that other groups were experiencing in the city.
This premise would be difficult to overcome given the scope of the project and the ideological weight of racism at the time. More fundamentally, Du Bois was writing against the tendency to view black people as not fully human, lacking the capacity to “develop” themselves. In another of his canonical books, Black Reconstruction in America 18601880, Du Bois concludes the preface with the following warning: “I will tell this story as if Blacks were ordinary human beings, aware that this attitude will initially limit my audience.”[ii] Let us imagine, then, the possible reader envisioned by Du Bois when writing The Philadelphia Negro almost four decades earlier. The humanity of black people was far from assumed.
In this way, Du Bois's work was deeply personal. In his canonical article “The Race for Theory",[iii] Black feminist Barbara Christian famously stated that “what I write and the way I write is done to save my own life.” In Du Bois's case, this certainly must have been true, especially when he embarked on the study. By arguing rigorously and powerfully that Blacks were a product of their history and structural and ideological conditions, he also cast himself as a product of his own circumstances.
He was educated and more than capable, even if this was not recognizable to his alleged peers at the University of Pennsylvania, or Chicago, or elsewhere. In this way, Du Bois' project that culminated in The Philadelphia Negro It was work of great urgency and importance. In addition to his curiosities about the world, Du Bois, like many African-American intellectuals of that time, inscribed his own humanity into existence. We see this in the works that preceded him, such as that of Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells, as well as in the works that came after.
It is not possible to cover all the numerous contributions of The Philadelphia Negro, and many of them are well pointed out by the translator and technical reviewer of this volume, who wrote the presentation. However, I will list two that I consider especially important for us to think about the life of this great work in Portuguese.
3.
The first is the spatial and relational analysis of power and inequality that the author develops in this work. One of the first moves that Du Bois makes in the work is an analytical and methodological intervention to think of the Seventh Region of Philadelphia as a city within the city. He was given the specific task of studying the Seventh Region of Philadelphia, but he did not do so. Instead, he argued that it would be impossible to study a slums without systematically studying other parts of the city.
As he succinctly states on page 40 that “a slums is not a simple fact, it is a symptom, and knowing the removable causes of slums black people in Philadelphia requires a study that goes far beyond the districts so named.” Thus, he develops a relational analysis that draws our attention to both social groups and the built environment, history and culture of a place.
Du Bois applies this approach perfectly in Chapter II, in the cleverly titled “The Negro Problems of Philadelphia”: “[…] the scholar must clearly recognize that a complete study must not be limited to the group, but must take special note of the environment; the physical environment of the city, sections and houses – the much more powerful social environment – the surrounding world of custom, desire, whim and thought that surrounds this group and powerfully influences its social development” (in this volume, p. 39) .
Ultimately, their findings reveal that black people are not exceptional and that their lives reflect the ways in which they are subject to certain structural and ideological conditions. One demonstration of this is Du Bois's attention to the heterogeneity of Philadelphia's black population and its diverse histories of immigration. Among other things, this maneuver helped to denaturalize the relationship between blackness and poverty, a lesson that is still relevant to us today. Indeed, both within academia and beyond, there is a frequent slippage between race and class, or more specifically between blackness and poverty, a reductionism that is often reinforced by the lack of attention or recognition to a black middle class.
The second contribution I would like to highlight here has to do with thinking about racial inequality in a place that imagines itself as being outside the more explicit legacies of racism and slavery. In fact, just a generation after formal slavery and the Civil War, Northern cities like Philadelphia – which fought against the Confederacy – thought of themselves as more evolved and civilized regarding issues of race. Slavery was not as prominent in the state of Pennsylvania (where Philadelphia is located) as it was in the Southern states, and it had been gradually abolished decades before it was abolished nationally.
Du Bois is aware of this, and says early in the book that he was writing explicitly against a tendency to think of life in the North as either a life of true freedom or as more oppressive than in the South. Instead, he proposes thinking of life of blacks in Philadelphia as an empirical question, “to extract from the complicated mass of facts tangible evidence of a social atmosphere surrounding blacks.” He is obviously halfway there. The fact that the study was carried out in a city in the North is crucial because its findings reveal that, even in the absence of overt and legally sanctioned racism like that which existed in the South of the United States, racism was still in force and racial inequality was still reproduced in the Philadelphia in ways that had devastating impacts on people's lives.
The implications of the work are that color-blind universalist laws may be a long way from producing, in practice, universalism without reference to color, since extralegal ideological mechanisms can act as powerful engines for the perpetuation of racial inequality. This lesson may be of special interest to those who study Brazil.
4.
The Philadelphia Negro offers the world a model of how to use all available methodological resources to carry out academic work of empirical rigor, theoretical audacity and political urgency. The work is a testament to the humanity and resilience of black people, even as we still struggle to live lives of dignity on the margins of American citizenship.
However, as admirable, pioneering and intellectually fruitful as he is The Negro in Philadelphia, the book is still just one piece in the composition of Du Bois’ vast work and intellectual legacy. For just over a decade, Sociology has begun to reclaim and revisit Du Bois. This is an admirable and necessary turn in the area. Yet as we reclaim Du Bois, we must also remember the scope and genius of his life's work.
The Du Bois of The Philadelphia Negro He was a young Du Bois, a true empiricist, a sociologist, possibly the first of his kind in the United States. However, as he experienced the world as an intellectual and activist, he necessarily became interdisciplinary in his methods, continuing to analyze archives and conduct ethnographic work, while also incorporating other ways of telling stories related to the humanities.
It must be remembered that Du Bois wrote about what Émile Durkheim would call “social facts” in a way obstinately attached to the evidence, but he also wrote poetry throughout his life. We must not forget that Du Bois told multidimensional stories about the complex lives of black Americans, and about the contradictions of American democracy and capitalism through the empirically tied narratives we see in The Philadelphia Negro, but also through the lyrical prose of The souls of black people. In this way, Du Bois planted the seed for the Black Studies in the United States and around the world, a field that would be unapologetically interdisciplinary and radically committed to telling humanizing stories of black life and death. This may be the reason why there is no Black Studios in the United States where Du Bois has not been taught continuously for decades.
So, when we remove the dust accumulated on the book The Philadelphia Negro and as we give Du Bois, the social scientist, all the recognition he deserves, let us also remember the multiple ways of telling stories he chose throughout his life. Let us consider that, ultimately, Du Bois decided that the “black problem” was complex and multifaceted, requiring many different methods, many different voices.
Tianna S. Paschel is a professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Reference
WEB Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Translation: Cristina Patriota de Moura. Belo Horizonte, Autêntica, 2023, 438 pages. [https://amzn.to/4cMFhsx]
Notes
[I] DU BOIS, WEB My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom. In: LOGAN, Rayfor (Ed.). What the Negro Really Wants. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
[ii] DU BOIS, WEB Black Reconstruction. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935.
[iii] CHRISTIAN, Barbara. The Race for Theory. Feminist Studies, v. 14, no. 1, p. 67-79, 1988.
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