INTRODUCTION

This interview is part of a larger project on the Black prophetic tradition and its impact on today's ongoing struggle for justice and equality. We are concerned with the special challenges facing Black public intellectuals and activists, particularly with the impediments deriving from their position as outsiders in society; we consider the philosophical and political voices that helped form their own thinking as well as the social conditions that shaped them; and we reflect on the role of religion in their lives and its specific function in the Black community.Footnote ²

While Cornel West has written extensively on the Black intellectual tradition in the past, his current emphasis is on the radical nature of African American political thought and its universal suppression in collective memory. As a public intellectual and activist who builds upon this very tradition, he attempts to lay bare and revitalize its revolutionary core for the sake of the radicalization of contemporary debates.

When we sat down to talk about W. E. B. Du Bois, we had many of his writings and a small selection of research at hand, which we consulted and, in a few cases, quoted from during our conversation. The comments offered in footnotes focus on providing quotations from Du Bois's later and lesser known works.

Christa Buschendorf: Given W. E. B. Du Bois's long and eminent career, his versatility and productivity, any assessment of his life work is a challenging, if not daunting undertaking. It seems to be appropriate to start out by evoking some of the points you have made in your own writings on Du Bois. You have written extensively on Du Bois: in your study on American pragmatism you characterized Du Bois as “a Jamesian organic intellectual” (West Reference West1989), and in your essay “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization” (West Reference West, Gates and West1997) you called him “the towering black scholar of the twentieth century” (p. 55) and “the brook of fire through which we all must pass in order to gain access to the intellectual and political weaponry needed to sustain the radical democratic tradition in our time” (p. 55). In addition, you put forth an extended critique of some of Du Bois's basic tenets.Footnote ³

Cornel West: Absolutely. Of course, I want to begin by thanking you again for this wonderful conversation. We have gone now from Douglass to Du Bois. That's good stuff.

But let me first start off by saying that W. E. B. Du Bois alongside John Dewey is the towering public intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century in the American empire. And when looked at through the international lens, he is even more important than Dewey, because Du Bois understood the centrality of empire, and he understood the centrality of White supremacy and the shaping of the U.S. Empire in a way that John Dewey did not. And when we look fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years from now, when the American Gibbon puts pen to paper to the ‘Decline and Fall of the American Empire,’Footnote ⁴ it will be Du Bois's work that will be most insightful as opposed to Dewey or even [William] James or some of the other great figures that we know. And so in that sense we may not even be yet in a position to fully appreciate the breadth and the scope and the depth of W. E. B. Du Bois as a scholar, as a public intellectual as well as an activist, as someone who offered an astute critique of capitalism and class hierarchy and understood the latter's intimate relation to White supremacy and racial hierarchy. And so I think we are still very much in the early stages of the kind of appreciation of Du Bois's contribution to our understanding of especially a post-American world or a world in which the American empire is no longer at the center. And in that regard, I think, we have to proceed very tentatively, provisionally, and yet also firmly to try to understand the variety of different dimensions and aspects of this towering genius.

Buschendorf: It's interesting that it took him a while to get to the internationalization of the problem, as he mentions in his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn (Du Bois Reference Du Bois2007a).Footnote ⁵

West: That's true. I think it is the 1915 “The Negro,”Footnote ⁶ where he really begins to understand the centrality of empire and again race in the U.S. Empire. You can just see him beginning to become awakened and any time he becomes awakened there are two fundamental consequences. One is the radical character of what he has now to say and secondly the problem of how to come to terms with the marginal status of such a radical perspective. After all, most of America, and especially the American academy, is just not ready, they can't assimilate, they can't incorporate, they can't render intelligible the radical message that Du Bois is putting forward. I think this is going to be true for a whole subsequent slew of figures, including myself.

Buschendorf: It certainly was true during Du Bois's lifetime, when he was not recognized adequately in the academy, though he was one of the foremost sociologists, who came up with a new method—interdisciplinary empirical studies.Footnote ⁷ If he had been a White man, this would have been celebrated, and he complains that he was not even published, and that when his book on the Negro in Philadelphia came out, there was no review.Footnote ⁸

West: Yes, the 1899 classic Philadelphia Negro. Yes, it's true. But I think that even if Du Bois had been White his radical view would still have been very difficult for mainstream America and mostly the American academy to come to terms with. Being Black made it even more difficult. There is no doubt about that. So, the response has been to domesticate Du Bois, sanitize and sterilize him, and to make him part of a kind of a domesticated view about Black nationalism on the one hand, integrationism on the other hand and, of course, his dispute with Booker T. Washington and so forth. And those are part and parcel of who he is, but they are just small slices of what his project was, and I think in the twenty-first century it's up to us to begin to see what he was actually about. How is it that this emerging cultural freedom that comes out of an enslaved and Jim-Crowed people presents a challenge to an imperial power with very deep roots in White supremacy and driven by a capitalist project or driven by capitalist forces and tendencies? For Du Bois, this becomes the central problematic and it very much is our problematic today.

I think there is a sense in which W. E. B. Du Bois is probably the most contemporary figure in the twenty-first century for us, he is the most relevant for us, and we ignore him at our own peril. Very much so. And in that sense, you know, we all stand on his shoulders. When I had written fifteen years ago that he is the towering Black scholar of the twentieth century, there was no doubt about that, and I'm more convinced of that fifteen years later than I was then.

Buschendorf: You have just remarked that it is from the position of an outsider, or, as he himself calls it, a “group imprisonment within a group” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois2007a, p. 67), that he could analyze the empire, and, actually, I think he is of the conviction that it is only from the margin that one can criticize society because of the distance one necessarily has from it.Footnote ⁹

One does not fully identify with it. So that, though in general there is a great disadvantage in being at the margin, in this one respect there is an advantage in marginality, and I would think that you have that view on your own condition as well.

West: Yes, I think that's true. Of course, you can be marginal and an outsider and still get it wrong. But in terms of those who are willing to tell some of the most painful truths about the emergence and sustenance of the American empire alongside the precious American democratic experiment within the American empire and the tension between those two, certainly being on the margins or an outsider is almost a precondition. I think he is right about that.

The problem is when it comes to solidarity and its preconditions, which is to say the conditions under which collective insurgency can emerge, the conditions under which agency among the oppressed can emerge, it becomes oftentimes a rather depressing matter because, you see, it seems as if there is a relative impotence or relative powerlessness, and you see the folks suffer generation after generation with unjust treatment unattended to, and then layers of suffering begin to mount just like the ninth thesis of Walter Benjamin's (Reference Benjamin, Arendt and Zohn1968) “Theses on History,”—that history of catastrophe, the piling of wreckage, generation after generation all of those precious lives lost, wasted potential, witnessed generation after generation.Footnote ¹⁰ One wonders how Du Bois, who lived ninety-five years, was able to witness that wreckage, see the U.S. Empire shipwrecked at the very moment when it viewed itself as victorious and sailing uncontested in the sunshine. You can imagine what a tearing of the soul that must have been for him. Of course, he began as a much more naïve Enlightenment figure, naïve Victorian figure, who was initially tied to empire and tied to the West in its contemporary incarnation. He never gives up on the West, he never gives up on Enlightenment, he never gives up on the Greeks, so the legacy of Athens, the legacy of Jerusalem, the legacy of the Enlightenment mean much to him. But once he really discovers the Marxist critique of capitalism, once he discovers the variety of critiques of empire and weds it to his profound resistance and critique of White supremacy, he's in a different space. I think he began to realize that.

Buschendorf: He acknowledges himself that he was naïve (Reference Du Bois2007a)Footnote ¹¹ and that he had to go through…

West: Stages. Absolutely.

Buschendorf: In the beginning, he thought you just have to teach people, you just have to tell them the truth, and they will accept it and they will change [laughter], but then he acknowledged that there was irrationality, that there was habit you have to cope with.Footnote ¹²

West: Absolutely, the cake of custom and the gravitas of habit. You are absolutely right. I think in a certain sense he had a naïve conception of evil—evil as ignorance, evil as not knowing the facts as opposed to evil being tied to interest, evil being tied to power and privilege within various social structures that have to be contested politically, organizationally, collectively. And, you know, that Du Bois is the Du Bois that remains our Du Bois, he is a figure of our times. I mean it's amazing that it has taken American history fifty, seventy-five years to begin to catch up with Du Bois in terms of this problematic of the U.S. Empire that will decline as political system, will be broken as culture, will decay, if it does not come to terms with the kind of very deep democratic reforms and structural transformations required for that empire to revive and become something that's worthy of affirmation.

Buschendorf: One of his ideas of how to try to accomplish that was that he believed in a special role of African Americans. He believed—maybe idealistically, naïvely (I wonder what you think about that?)—that due to their tradition, due to roots in Africa and the communal spirit that he thought derived from that African culture and was in a way transposed to the New World, that African Americans could and actually should be a counterforce to American capitalism by forming communal and economic projects by deliberate separatism (a controversial word, of course). His ideas remind me of Malcolm X's notions of how African Americans should create their own businesses and keep them separate so that Whites would not be able further to exploit and make profit from their labor, suggesting that anti-capitalist forces might be based on the African American community, something not often taken up, I think.

West: Yes, I've never been convinced of that aspect of Du Bois or Malcolm in that regard [laughter]. It seems to me that these Black business men and women tended to be as deferential to capitalist forces and willing to embrace the market forces on the capitalist conditions just as readily as anybody else.

Buschendorf: But maybe there is a difference between Malcolm X and Du Bois in that the latter really means no compliance with the capitalist system but introducing a Communist—he didn't call it that—but a Communist way of doing business, without profit, you know, oriented toward the community and its needs without giving in to capitalism.Footnote ¹³

West: Yes, at the normative level I can see Du Bois putting that forward. It reminds me in some ways of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad whose economic cooperatives were going to be different than the competitive capitalist models. And yet when you actually look at the practice of Black business men and women, some of whom may have partly even been influenced by Du Bois (very few probably), but those few who are—they still find themselves caught within the ravages of the capitalist market, and therefore at the aspirational utopian level, yes, I see that, but it's just hard to see how that's translated on the ground.

I do think that one of the most important texts Du Bois ever wrote is The Gift of Black Folk (Reference Du Bois1924). It's a classic that tends to be overlooked and underappreciated like so much of Du Bois's magisterial corpus, and there I think he is on to something, when he talks about the gift of Black folk to America and the world, being a reconstruction of the notion of democracy looked at from the vantage point of enslaved Jim-Crowed people or a reconstruction of the notion of freedom and then a kind of cultural gift as well, in song and so forth. Each one of those contributions are quite powerful and they certainly constitute counter-hegemonic forces in making American capitalist democracy a more fully inclusive capitalist democracy, there is no doubt about that. The question is how these gifts did become counter-hegemonic in a more radical way, you see.

Now one of the things that has always fascinated me about Du Bois—and I have been quite insistent in my critique of Du Bois—is that when it comes to popular culture, he was in love with the “sorrow songs” to use his wonderful phrase in the last chapter of Souls of Black Folk (Reference Du Bois1903), he was in love with the spirituals, but I've never been convinced that he had an appreciation, let alone a deep comprehension, of the blues and jazz. We know he was very, very suspicious of blues and jazz, he had a distance from blues and jazz, and yet for me they constitute crucial indispensable counter-hegemonic forces in terms of keeping alive ideals of humanity, ideals of equality, ideals of humility, ideals of resistance and endurance in the face of the catastrophe that the U.S. Empire has always been for the masses of Black people, be it slavery, Jim Crow or be it the new hyper-ghettoes that our dear brother Loïc Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2009) has written about better than anybody else, or the hyper-incarceration that has targeted poor people, specifically Black men. When you look at the forms of agency of those particular brothers and sisters the music has been central, and it's not spirituals for the most part, because they are unchurched, most of them, most of them are unmosqued and unsynagogued, they don't have any ties to religious institutions at all. So it's fascinating to me that there is still a certain relic of cultural elitism in the radical democratic, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist project of Du Bois, and this creates a tension for me.

Buschendorf: The reason I see for why he was so distanced to that part of the African American tradition is that he was so much afraid of hedonism, of entertainment as something that is just distraction, part of capitalist consumer culture distracting people from what they should try to become, and he probably didn't see the serious contribution to cultural work that jazz and blues ultimately makes.

West: I think that's a very good point. There is an irony here, because you know the great August Wilson used to say that Black people authorize reality by performance, that performance in a communal context, where call and response is central, creates a form of agency, creates a form of self-confidence and self-respect that are preconditions for the creation of new realities. You see that in churches in the past under slavery, we've seen it in communal artistic practices under Jim Crow, and we see it today in Hip-Hop. They are not revolutionary forces, but they do constitute spaces, spaces that are very rare, because most of the spaces in the U.S. Empire colonize always already. But to have certain spaces by means of performance that provide a view of a different sense of who you are: you're human as opposed to subhuman, you're human as opposed to being a commodity, you're human as opposed to being an object, you're human as opposed to being an entity to be manipulated, and that's again the profound role of Black music, especially within those communal contexts. I'm not sure Du Bois understood that because of his fear of the hedonism and cheap entertainment, and the stereotype of Black people as, you know, born singing, born dancing, born moving and so forth and so on [laughter], you know what I mean.

Buschendorf: And another point might be his own upbringing. He was from New England, and it's really funny to read his account when he first came to the South and was overwhelmed by how his people (and he calls them “his people”) behaved, but he is completely alien to their traditions, for example in church.Footnote ¹⁴

West: That's exactly right.

Buschendorf: It was difficult for him. This reticent gentleman, he had problems; he embraced the culture, but it never became part of his own habitus.Footnote ¹⁵

West: Absolutely. I mean one of the great ironies of W. E. B. Du Bois is that he is the greatest and will probably always be the greatest Black intellectual ever to emerge out of the U.S. Empire and the problematic that he ended up wrestling with that we've talked about of U.S. Empire—centrality of race and class and gender, but especially the capitalist core—needs to be hit head on. But he was not the spiritual extension or the spiritual property of the very people that he was willing to give his all for, the very people he was willing to live and die for. Billie Holiday would have scared him to death, James Brown would have sent him into conniptions, and he just would not have been able to fully embrace brothers George Clinton and Bootsy Collins, and the Funkadelics would have generated a heart attack. If he had shown up at a Funkadelic parliament concert with Garry in diapers and brother George and all his colors, Du Bois would have gone crazy. Or if he listened to a Reverend C. L. Franklin sermon when the hooping began, he would have been ashamed, you see. You would want to say, “Du Bois, this is the spiritual genius and part of the very people you're talking about.”

And yet at the same time we know that there could be no Franklin, there could be no Clinton, there could be no Funkadelics without the genius of W. E. B. Du Bois, because he has given his all, his intellectual wherewithall, his political activism, his time, his energy to affirm the humanity of the Clintons and the James Browns and the C. L. Franklins and the Jasper Williams and Manuel Scotts and all of the great cultural geniuses, the Cecil Taylors, and so forth. So that's a fascinating irony. One of the things that I have been able to really both revel in and benefit from—and you see it probably more in Democracy Matters (West Reference West2004)Footnote ¹⁶ than in anything else—is trying to unite this radical intellectual legacy of Du Bois that hits the issue of empire and White supremacy with the popular cultural expressions of genius and talent be it in music, be it in dance, be it among the younger generation or older generation, so that you actually have a kind of an interplay between on the one hand Du Bois's radicality and militancy when it comes to politics and economics, empire and race, and on the other hand the antiphonal forms of call and response, the syncopation, the rhythm, the rhyme, the tempo, the tone that you get in the best of Black cultural forms that are requisite for sustaining Black dignity and sanity, sustaining Black people as a whole.

Buschendorf: He was so afraid of ‘uncivilized’ behavior, he would probably have taken much of what you are talking about to be just that, and his concern with education—and maybe we could talk about his idea of the Talented Tenth—was quite different from any attempts at grassroots political socialization or education in general.

West: Absolutely. Of course, Du Bois should consider Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainy or Bessie Smith part of the Talented Tenth, you see. Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, Aretha Franklin, they are certainly part of the Talented Tenth, Stevie Wonder is part of the Talented Tenth, but given Du Bois's elitist conception of education, they would be mere entertainers. So I do resonate with his need for a conception of education that has to do with awakening from sleep-walking, an awakening into a wrestling with reality to be transformed that illuminates and liberates—I do resonate with that. But because of his conception of who would be candidates for that, it seems to be still too narrow for me. The irony is that for Du Bois, the non-literate or illiterate slaves who created the spirituals would probably be candidates for the Talented Tenth, because when we look closely at his readings of their products, their songs, their expressions, he sees their genius, he really does!

Buschendorf: In the expression of suffering.

West: Yes, yes.

Buschendorf: It is here that his empathy shows. There is a piece, a conversation Du Bois has with a White person, I think, who does not understand what Jim Crow is like, even in 1920,Footnote ¹⁷ and he explains it in terms of his own daily experience, and how humiliating it can be. This is his way of expressing the suffering of the people under oppression.

West: Very much so. You could be alluding to what I consider to be one of the most powerful essays that he wrote—and he wrote so many powerful essays and texts—but “The Souls of White Folk”Footnote ¹⁸ is probably the most militant, radical, illuminating, and counter-hegemonic texts that we have. I know it was a favorite of the great John Henrik Clarke, who was a great Pan-Africanist and who viewed Du Bois as one of his precursors, but again fascinating that John Henrik Clarke viewed Du Bois as a precursor in the same way that William Julius Wilson, concerned about class but more about integration, would view Du Bois as a precursor. In the same way, a NAACP liberal integrationist would view Du Bois as precursor, so that Du Bois is rich enough and his work polyvalent enough, subject to multiple interpretations enough, that he ends up with all of these different progeny. But that essay “Souls of White Folk” is a devastating thing. I remember the first time I read this, I said, “Oh my God, this is a Du Bois we don't really get a chance to look at too closely.” He writes:

That's just one moment.

Buschendorf: There is yet another one, where there is the perspective of the daily life of Blacks and their suffering from discrimination, etc. He exposes that in a dialogue that is really powerful. Which brings me to another point, namely that within the limits of his concept of culture he in principle would have agreed with you that it is not enough to explain something scientifically but that one should also try to express it by other means, in different styles. This is what he did in his work, be it in his novels or in his very early essays in The Souls of Black Folk, where he combined scientific essayistic writing with the poetic.

West: Absolutely.

Buschendorf: And the reason for this was really that he wanted to reach out, he knew he could not reach people otherwise, though one would doubt that he could reach them today with his at times lyrical “Suada” [German for “harangue”]. [laughter]

West: No, but there would be other artists who would appropriate his work and make it more popular, because they could see the genius at the center of it. One of the things that makes me smile is Du Bois putting on these pageants, these plays, you know, thousands of Black people, trying to get them to see the greatness of African civilization, hundreds of actors and so forth, I mean that's popular culture at its core and it's again his attempt to reach out. I love his passion to communicate by any means relative to what he thinks are going to be the most effective means, you know.Footnote ¹⁹

Buschendorf: True, and also as to media, in his time he was avant-garde as an editor of The Crisis. This is what he could do as an activist.

West: Absolutely. That was popular. Any of us who try to expand the publics, expand the public spheres into film and music and books and magazines and what would be some of television, of course, radio—I think we're building on Du Bois, even if we have slightly different conceptions of culture. I think that in an interesting kind of way Du Bois was an indisputable radical democrat in his ideology. I'm not sure he was an indisputable radical democrat in his temperament, in his personality [laughter]. I think he was shaped at a time where his temperament and personality was much more rooted in a kind of elitist formation essentially, and yet he never allowed that to impede or obstruct his sensitivities and his inclusivity when it came to the suffering of other people. That is part of his greatness to me, even though I tend to accent a much more radical democratic temperament, personality, and way of being in the world.

Buschendorf: Again he saw the problem himself. He revised the concept of the Talented Tenth, because he wondered about it; he again said, “I was naïve, idealistic, because what I counted on was character and you cannot count on that, I've made that experience.” So when he revised his concept of the Talented Tenth he was contemplating how to actually realize his concepts and how to solve the problem of organization.Footnote ²⁰

West: That's right.

Buschendorf: And this essay shows to me that there was a certain helplessness on his part, but then, aren't we all at a loss, when it comes to organization? It is so difficult a task.

West: Oh absolutely. Yes, I think it's true. And I do think that at the center of his conception of the Talented Tenth was an ethos of service to the poor, service to those who have been left behind, as it were, or in the religious sense, service to the least of these (echoes of the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew), and I like that core very much. It's just that early on in 1903 when he put forward that notion, it was deeply bourgeois and elitist. In the 1940s when he revised it, he had been radicalized by Marxism, he had been radicalized by the Communist movement. And so he knew that that ethos of service had to be now cast in such a way that the class elitism of 1903 had to be rejected and also the sexist elitism.

Buschendorf: He was a nineteenth-century person in that regard, but he moved forward.

West: Yes, he had come a long way from where he was in the early part of the twentieth century. Of course, you are absolutely right, “The Damnation of Women,” and so forth. I was blessed to take courses with his second wife Shirley [Graham] Du Bois. She was an intellectual powerhouse. She was on fire for justice and would not put up with any kind of patriarchal mess from anybody. She taught at Harvard in the early 1970s. She was something, and she had wonderful memories and reminiscences of her husband.Footnote ²¹

Buschendorf: Yes, and Du Bois then writes in Darkwater about servants, female servants.

West: Yes, yes. Absolutely. “The Servant in the House”; “The Damnation of Women”. That's powerful.

Buschendorf: What I appreciate is his self-reflexivity on his own development, his self-criticism. It is very honest.

West: Yes. You wonder though whether the major impact of Du Bois's corpus will be providing the launching pad for that American Gibbon I was talking about, i.e. a turning away from Du Bois's challenge and the escalation of the refusal of the deliberate ignorance—the willful evasion of the realities Du Bois was talking about at the level of empire and White supremacy that will constitute the downfall of the American project. America slowly but surely moves toward a second-world, maybe even a third-world, status with ruins and relics of its great democratic past being completely trampled by the kind of neoliberal obsession with unregulated markets, indifference toward the poor, and polarizing politics of scapegoating the most vulnerable. And Du Bois's magisterial corpus sits there and says: “You should have listened. I've spent my whole life trying to get you to listen, to wake up, to heed the challenge that I was talking about because I was concerned both about you but first and foremost about my people that you've been trampling.” And there is a very, very good chance that that's where we are headed. The irony would be that the indisputable relevance of Du Bois was not heeded: we didn't listen, we didn't take him seriously. Shame on you, America! Shame on you, the American academy! Shame on you, the American intelligentsia that your narrow individualism, your truncated rapacious marketeering, your deep dedication to paradigms and frameworks that are too truncated to come to terms with the realities that were undermining your democratic experiment, have led toward the need for the American Gibbon. That's very much where we are right now.

Buschendorf: Yes, but it is really a question of bringing the more radical Du Bois to the fore. Before I had read more of Du Bois, I used to focus on The Souls of Black Folk. That is not to say that this is not a great work, with all the metaphors that have shaped academic discussions such as “the veil” and “double-consciousness.” But I am also deeply impressed by his metaphor of the cave which is describing the same caste system,Footnote ²² but in much more radical terms, or rather, it's darker, more pessimistic, and you hardly ever see it referenced. He plays on Plato's cave, I think.

West: Absolutely. Straight out of Republic. No, it is darker here. It is darker here. He writes:

And yet he is one of those who emerges out of the provincialism, he shatters the narrowness and becomes the grand cosmopolitan and internationalist that we know him to be. I mean, that's one of the reasons why in my own classes I read Souls of Black Folk, but I also read Reconstruction, the 1935 classic, especially the more literary, more metaphoric sections of that text alongside the analytical sections,Footnote ²³ because by 1935 he has become someone wrestling with the legacies of Marx and Freud and others, wrestling with Lenin's conception of imperialism based on HobsonFootnote ²⁴ and others, and that is a different Du Bois, I mean, there are continuities, but it is a very different Du Bois, you are absolutely right. Very, very much so.

Buschendorf: When I was thinking about the issues we would be talking about, I thought your perspective might be that in the end he is just too dark. Where is the hope that you would insist on? But, in contrast, one of your points of criticism in The Future of the Race (Gates and West, Reference Gates and West1997) is that you think he partakes in American optimism.Footnote ²⁵ So you probably meant a different phase; but what do you think about his optimism or pessimism?

West: Remember, when he was on the boat and he looks back he says: “The Negro cannot win in America. I must go international, got to go to Ghana linked to China, Soviet Union,” and so forth.Footnote ²⁶ I'd have to rethink what I had in mind when I talked about American optimism. That was certainly part of his earlier phase. I think the later phase is closer to the darkness that I was talking about. One of the things that has always disturbed me about the great Du Bois is that I've never encountered in his grand works a substantive wrestling with Chekhov, or I would even say with Russian literary tradition as a whole: Tolstoy, Gogol, Leskov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and we could go on and on.Footnote ²⁷ And part of that means for me that that would have shattered any cheap optimism or any American optimism that informs earlier stages of his work. I'm just amazed that there is no wrestling with Kafka, there is no wrestling with even Beckett in the 1950s from a radical democratic point of view. I want him to hold on to his militancy and radicality in terms of the talk about empire and White supremacy. But, I think there is a connection between him running from the blues and him running from Chekhov and running from the Russian literary tradition and running from Kafka and from Beckett. And yet he has his own kind of darkness at which he arrives on his own.

Buschendorf: … by way of analysis, on the basis of his sociological training.

West: Yes, exactly. When he looks at the structural and institutional forces in play vis-à-vis poor and working people and those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” I think of the Chekhovs and the blues sitting there waiting for him. And yet he arrives on his own, so in that sense I'd have to revise my critique if I was implying that American optimism actually held through all of the phases of his thinking as opposed to just the earlier phases.

Buschendorf: I wonder what he read in terms of literature, since, he quotes in Souls of Black Folk…

West: … a lot of Shakespeare, Balzac.

Buschendorf: Yes. His famous quote: “I sit with Shakespeare and he…”Footnote ²⁸

West: Oh we know his favorite was Goethe, that's one of the things that I hit him hard on, you see.Footnote ²⁹

Buschendorf: Well, after all, he had spent some time in Germany.Footnote ³⁰

West: Yes, he was deeply shaped by the German conception of Bildung and at that time, and understandably so, the major stellar figures were Goethe and Schiller, who actually mean much to me, too.

Buschendorf: It's the idea of humanism, I think, that shapes him.

West: Yes, absolutely. Yet you don't get a serious wrestling with modernist texts at all in his work. There's little Joyce, there's little Proust, there's little Kafka.

Buschendorf: What I wonder is, did he really not read any of them, or did he choose not to comment on them because they were alien to his thinking?

West: It's a good question. My hunch is that he was certainly aware of them. He was too cosmopolitan and intellectual not to know that Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Proust, Kafka and Mandelstam and others were around. He may have read Hermann Broch's (Reference Broch and Untermeyer1945) The Death of Virgil in German, but we have very little evidence for this, and it would be the same in terms of modernist movements and in Afro-American life. What did he think of Charlie Parker? Was he moved by the pianistic genius of Art Tatum? I would like to know.

Buschendorf: And what about Richard Wright and writers of his time?

West: I think he did read Wright. I recall reading a review of Richard Wright,Footnote ³¹ especially given the Communist overlap both being members of the Communist culture. Wright was actually a member of the party. Du Bois was not, but they actually overlap for a little while before Wright broke. And what did he think about Ellison? I think he did actually write about Ellison, too.

So, again, I mean this not so much as a brick thrown at the great Du Bois, but as a matter of trying to see what constitutes his edifice and which bricks are missing in the building that he was working on. And I think this again resonates with the concerns about popular culture, the contemporary cultural expressions of his day, and the concern about popular culture as a whole.

Buschendorf: There is a heated debate about religion in Du Bois's work, and most of his biographers think he was an agnostic, if not an atheist, due to his Marxism. There are comments that he makes, from which you could conclude that. But then there is an interesting book by Edward Blum (Reference Blum2007), W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet, who argues that Du Bois, though certainly not an orthodox Christian was religious in a way and kept it up. In his view, Du Bois did not just do some window dressing using religious phrases, examples from the Bible, but there was a—let's call it—spirituality that shaped him throughout his life.

West: I think that Du Bois had a self-styled spirituality that was not wedded to cognitive commitments to God talk. He was very similar to his teacher George Santayana. George used to go to mass, shed tears weekly as a lapsed Catholic and say, “the mass was too beautiful to be true.” So he was moved by the passion and the perceptions and the purpose in the eucharist but could not make cognitive commitments to any of the claims. Wittgenstein was the same way, and I think Du Bois is part of that particular coterie of secular figures who are profoundly religiously musical, to use Weber's words—people who resonate deeply with the issues that religious people are wrestling with: what it means to be human, how do you engage in a virtuous life, what kind of character do you cultivate, what kind of sensitivity, what kind of compassion, what conceptions of justice, the centrality of love and empathy without being religious in terms of believers in God, and so on. And I have a great respect for Du Bois's spirituality even as a Christian that makes him in some ways even more of a prophet than most Christians, or religious Jews, or religious Buddhists and so on, because it means that he was able to sustain himself spiritually without the help of the religious apparatus of tradition. He also didn't fall into the kind of narrow reductionist traps of scientistic, positivistic ties to science, the kind of narrow Darwinism that you get today among the number of the more sophomoric atheists like our dear brothers Christopher Hitchens, [Richard] Dawkins and others, who believe that Darwin is here to stay, Darwin has to be, he's the brook of fire through which we all must pass. But you can be religiously sensitive without being religious, and Du Bois certainly was one of the most religiously sensitive of the secular thinkers.

Buschendorf: Du Bois (Reference Du Bois and Foner1970) wrote an essay entitled “The Revelation of Saint Orgne (i.e. Negro), the Damned,”Footnote ³² and there is a concept of a new church which, according to Du Bois, should be based on the “word of life from Jeremiah, Shakespeare and Jesus, Buddha and John Brown” (p. 111) [laughter].

West: That's right.

Buschendorf: And it's a church organized “with a cooperative store in the Sunday-school room; with physician, dentist, nurse, and lawyer to help serve and defend the congregation; with library, nursery school, and a regular succession of paid and trained lecturers and discussion; they had radio and moving pictures [now: mark that!], and out beyond the city a farm with house and lake” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois and Foner1970, p. 111) [laughter]. That's his [Orgne's] concept of a church, and what I think is so interesting about it is what is joined here: not just the secular and Christian traditions but body and soul, mind and body, that is what the church would have to offer to help people come to combine the two, to provide food for body and soul. I have noticed that this concept appears in several of his writings and I'd like to follow up on that because I don't think it has been much commented on, though it seems to be part of his later thinking. At first he counted on the mind exclusively and then he changed and said, no that's not enough, and although he does not go as far as you wished him to, namely, to take into account the physical expression in dance and music and so on of the African American tradition, but as a concept he expresses it in that new church that he thinks is needed to raise people to a higher level.

West: I think you are right about that. It reminds me of one of my own favorite figures and thinkers, Nikos Kazantzakis, where you have this kind of self-styled spirituality that appropriates Jesus, Buddha, Lenin, Shakespeare—I mean it's quite a heterogeneous coterie of chaps, not too often women actually, who become part of a kind of ecumenical exemplary group of those who constitute grand examples of high quality living. So it's the beauty of life, it's the quality of life, it's the courage, the freedom that these people exemplify.Footnote ³³ You can go from Socrates to Shakespeare in that regard. And there's something that I've always found fascinating about that, I must say. Again, it has a lot to do with Du Bois's humanism. He is a thorough-going radically democratic humanist drawing on the Renaissance, on the Enlightenment and the Victorian criticism. William Morris was probably the most revolutionary of them, but Ruskin played a role and certain moments in Arnold, certain moments in Carlyle, certain moments in Hazlitt, those are Du Bois's intellectual ancestors.

I do think that Du Bois would be again relevant for our day because the religious traditions—be they Christian or Islamic or Judaic—if they are not radically Socratized and humanized then the fundamentalist wings of all three are going to push us into a living hell, which is to say, radically anti-democratic, radically sexist, racist, xenophobic, capitalist, and so forth. Well, I shouldn't say that radical Islam would be capitalist, though. The fundamental Christians would be capitalist, but not the fundamental Islamic folk, they are just theocratic. Now the fundamentalists in Judaism, that's interesting. They tend to be free-marketeers, too, in general, though there are theocratic manifestations of it, too.

You can just see how badly we need Du Bois today in the midst of our catastrophic circumstances. There is no doubt about it. The rigor of the structural and institutional analysis, the religiously musical sensitivity to the things that religion is wrestling with as opposed to just the truth claims of the God belief or the truth claims of the faith appropriated by religious people, and, probably more than anything else an acknowledgement of subaltern peoples and voices and just how crucial those voices are in helping us come to terms with our crisis, is needed. There is a sense in which Du Bois's witness is such a thoroughgoing indictment of the transatlantic intelligentsia. It really is. If you were to examine much of the intellectual work of the transatlantic intelligentsia (Europe and the U.S.), there is not just a relative silence around Du Bois's work but a relative silence about the issues and problematic that Du Bois is coming to terms with. It's a very sad state of affairs when you look at the kind of pre-Du Boisian condition of much of the transatlantic intelligentsia. And it says much about how far we have not come; how cowardly, how deferential, how careerist, how narrow so many of our beloved colleagues in the academy can be.

Buschendorf: Well, you pay for it. And he paid for it.

West: Absolutely. There is a cost to be paid. But I love Martin Luther King, Jr.'s (Reference King, Clarke, Jackson, Kaiser and O'Dell1970) remarks in his “Honoring Dr. Du Bois” address.Footnote ³⁴ I recall talking with John Hope Franklin before he died about his decision to attend this event, because when they had the celebration of Du Bois's birthday at Carnegie Hall most of the intelligentsia, including Black intellectuals, would not come within a mile or two miles of the gathering, they were just scared. They were afraid, they didn't want to be tainted with the Communist brush during the given anti-Communist hysteria and frenzy that was in place, and thank God, Martin Luther King, Jr. along with John Hope Franklin and a few others had the courage to attend. This is when Brother Martin laid out his statement:

This is powerful stuff. This is very, very powerful stuff. King is right. Martin King is absolutely right.Footnote ³⁵ Good God Almighty.