Response to DuBois, or, Why Humanism Can Be a Good Thing...

Dubois’s insistence on the value of liberal education is what stood out the most for me in his text, particularly as he opposed this, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, to Booker T. Washington’s emphasis on industrial training at Tuskegee. As a confessed humanist myself, I cheer as DuBois, in reference to Washinton’s disapproval of the boy studying French grammar amidst weeds and dirt, writes, “One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would say to this” (26). And DuBois’ point, that “neither the Negro common schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open for a day were it not for teachers trained in Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates” (31), is one that seems inarguable and, at least to my biased self, a pretty persuasive statement for the value of a liberal education.
And at the risk of sounding overly sentimental, I resonate with what he has to say about the benefits of a liberal education in general, that it concerns itself with “searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living” (51), and that it “seeks as an end culture and character” (59). Most important, in my view, is DuBois’ insistence that liberal, humanistic education is of value for his race—specifically, that such an education affords “a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-development,” and that it honors, and gives his race a space to explore, the “unknown treasures of their inner life” (66). Lastly, I favor his humanistic rationale for reading as a kind of spiritual instruction, as when he writes, “I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with truth, I dwell above the Veil” (67).
It is DuBois’ humanism, I believe, that makes him a more accurate interpreter (than, say, Washington) of the psychological state of his race. Dubois writes, for example, that “[i]t is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition” (113). Yet while it is here, perhaps, that Washington would stop and urge his race to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Dubois continues: “nor [is it enough] for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. Both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent” (113). In Dubois’ language, there’s a humanity, a sense of grace and understanding, that is absent from Washington’s assessment of the racial divide. I can hardly imagine, for example, Washington writing, as did DuBois, of the painful doubleness of African-American life, and how from it “must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence” (122). Observations like these are ones Washington is either unable or unwilling to make. Indeed, after having read Washington and DuBois back-to-back, it’s easy to see how more African-Americans could be frustrated at best—and despondent at worst—after reading Washington’s account, whereas DuBois’s would be more uplifting (to use his word), because his account is more sympathetic. (Of course, I have no figures to back up my hunch, but it seems like a reasonable hunch nonetheless.)
I can’t help but draw a parallel here between the positive uses of DuBois’ humanism/liberal education and that of Richard Rodriguez. In Hunger of Memory, he discusses how in the British Museum, his dissertation work stalled due to the felt dissonance between his present and past, and how such dissonance left him feeling alienated, a feeling that he was eventually able to explain to himself with the help of Richard Hoggart’s work on the plight of the “scholarship boy.” Reflecting on this, Rodriquez writes, “The ability to consider experience so abstractly allowed me to shape into desire what would otherwise have remained indefinite, meaningless longing in the British Museum. If, because of schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education had finally given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact” (77-78). Like DuBois, Rodriguez employs his intellect—an intellect formed by a liberal education—to articulate and understand a very real spiritual and emotional crisis.
It is Dubois’ and Rodriguez’s insistence on using their training as Burke’s “equipment for living” that I find ultimately appealing. Consequently, I can’t help but notice our field’s ambivalence (and, at times, animosity) towards this purpose of literacy. In chapter 2 of Composition in the University, for example, Sharon Crowley expresses a thinly veiled contempt for those humanist compositionists who in their classes want to use literature for its life-affirming purposes. Insofar as the use of literature takes away from the teaching of writing, or enforces a narrow subjectivity on students, Crowley’s critique is justified. Yet I can’t help but think she’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It makes me wonder if there’s a larger cause of our field’s unease with anything that smacks of using literacy for self-exploration, discovery, or formation. At the very least, writers like DuBois and Rodriquez can help us notice this blind spot, and encourage us to work to fill it in in theoretically sound ways.