Microaggressions and “The Souls of Black Folk”

W.E.B. Du Bois begins the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk by voicing sorrow and pain. Here Arthur Symons’ song “The Crying of Water” (1903) sets the tone.

O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,

All night long crying with a mournful cry,

As I lie and listen, and cannot understand

The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,

O water, crying for rest, it is I, is it I?

Unresting water, there shall never be rest

Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,

And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;

And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like

the sea,

All life long crying without avail,

As the water all night long is crying to me.

Eight times in thirteen lines Symons speaks of crying. Understanding the souls of Black folks, Du Bois implies, requires listening to the cries they voice. Hence, Du Bois’s decision to immediately follow Symon’s song with the Negro Spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

Du Bois suggests that his predominately White US audience realizes Du Bois must start here, must begin with sorrow and pain. As those on the other side of the racial Veil, US Whites know misery and suffering follow Black folk. As Du Bois writes:

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?

These White interlocutors aren’t colorblind. They see Du Bois—see his racialized Black flesh. And they see his socio-historical environment: Du Bois is a Black man suffering under US racial apartheid—under the racist oppression of Jim and Jane Crow. He is a Black citizen in a White Nationalist project, a Union steeped in and shaped by white supremacist ideologies from birth. Even the Civil War didn’t change these facts. Du Bois’s White interlocutors recognize these truths, but they lack the virtue—the courage, mercy, and justice—to speak honestly with him, to use their conversations as occasions for antiracism rather than evasion.

Du Bois recognizes these Whites’ failures to promote multi-racialized belonging. Some of the people and their failures render him angry, requiring him to “reduce the boiling to a simmer.” Others, however, leave him contented to smile or exchange interest-bearing pleasantries. None compels him to speak to the deeper, underlying question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” To this question, Du Bois writes, “I answer seldom a word.”

But Du Bois chooses to lift the racial Veil and allow his readers to read about when he first realized he was a problem—a Black male in a country constructed to support white patriarchy. He writes:

It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first burst upon me, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my cared,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and long, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

Du Bois’s interlocutors talk of Black men, Civil War Battles in Virginia, and racism in the South. Du Bois details being a young, little boy in New England—on expatriated Indigenous land—joyfully exchanging cards with his classmates. And then it happens. Du Bois experiences a racial microaggression.

As I noted in my last post, racial microaggressions are the subtle and stunning racialized slights and put-downs racialized minorities regularly suffer. And as Chester Pierce, the psychiatrist who introduced the term “microaggression,” notes, the cumulative effect of these violations takes a toll on victim and victimizer alike. The racial microaggression Du Bois suffers is a girl’s refusal to exchange cards with him because he’s Black. Recall Du Bois’s words: “The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall new comer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance.” The tall White girl’s glance violates the self-described little Black boy’s soul. Du Bois has suffered racial trauma.

But we mustn’t stop here. Du Bois has summoned his readers to listen to the cries of Black folk, and he has more crying to do. For the girl’s violent, racist act of refusal has lodged a case of lifelong racial trauma within Du Bois’s body and soul. Du Bois writes:

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a footrace, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all…

A White gaze taught Du Bois he was a racial problem. He kicked against that gaze by competing, by striving to prove he was better than his White peers.

But here Du Bois reveals that he swapped one white gaze for many: All Du Bois’s competing happened within a white normative frame. Even when Du Bois “won,” he played according to White terms. Moreover, when Du Bois, thoroughly exhausted form his John-Henry-like attempts, realized that he couldn’t have all the kingdoms of the White world, white normativity shaped how he compared himself to other blacks. Like the other Black souls, Du Bois found himself in a racial prison with “wall strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to the sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.”

One White girl’s racist glance awakened Du Bois to the truth that he inhabited a racist world. One microaggression sent him headlong into games rigged to maintain white supremacy and white normativity. Reading this retelling, one may now read Du Bois’s presentation of his present White adult interlocutors recognizing that their failure to promote multi-racialized belonging flare up an old, elementary school wound. Du Bois hasn’t fully healed. Perhaps he never will.

Rather than stop here, I want to press a final question. What do the microaggressions Du Bois experienced do to those who perpetrated them? What of his tall, White, female classmate? What did her refusal to exchange cards to do her? Did she carry a lifelong scar, the kind of disfiguration that can only come from carrying out subtle racist acts? Did she develop—or more fully strengthen—vices of racism within herself? How about Du Bois’s White adult intelocutors? What did their microaggression-carrying comments or questions do to them? Did these microaggressions further cement these White adults’ in an inability to promote justice, mercy, and courage across racial lines? Did these White adults keep saying and asking the same things because they became blind to how morally deficient their words were? Du Bois never answers these questions; indeed, he never takes them up. That’s fine. He is, after all, writing about the souls of Black folks. Still, if we’re to be good students of Pierce and take his account of microaggressions seriously, we must ask: What is the impact of a microaggression upon the one who perpetuates it?

Perhaps the White prison is much worse than Du Bois realized. Perhaps there are reasons to cry for Du Bois’s White interlocutors and the tall White girl.