 Hi, and welcome back to 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown, and today we're talking about W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin and the context of African American and Africana philosophy. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, or just W. E. B. Du Bois, was from Massachusetts. He was trained at Harvard, first in philosophy with William James, whose pragmatism significantly influenced him. And then in history under Albert Buschnell Hart. Du Bois' work spans philosophy, history, political commentary, fiction writing, and sociology. In fact, he has a good claim on being one of the founding figures of the discipline of sociology. The unifying theme of Du Bois' work is what he called the race problem. Du Bois more or less invented the area of philosophy of race as it exists today, or at least was a key crucial founding figure. Du Bois worked in the first part of his career as faculty at Atlanta University, the first Southern historically back college university, or HBCU. In 1910, he left Atlanta University to work full time at the newly founded NAACP as their director of publicity and research, where his main function was as editor of the Crisis Magazine, put out by the NAACP. But Du Bois returned to Atlanta in the 1930s. He was caught up in a wave of anti-communist persecution that swept the United States in the 1950s, although he was cleared of any of any crimes. He suffered significantly at the hands of the federal government, and he eventually died in Ghana in 1963, the day before the March on Washington. Du Bois developed a theory of race as a complex of history, ancestry, and culture, rather than a purely biological conception. He was, some will call him a race realist. He believed that race really existed, right? But it's important to qualify that with his understanding of race depending on history and culture and ancestry and not being purely biological. One of Du Bois' most important and influential ideas is the theory of double consciousness. It's been taken up by a lot of people, and there are, of course, with any suitably complex philosophical concept, some interpretive questions about what exactly the double consciousness theory entails. But it involves a kind of epistemic, you might say, or experiential asymmetry between black folks and white folks, right? So Du Bois' idea is not only, okay, so white folks only sort of experienced the world through their own eyes, right, through the perspective of their sort of dominant cultural paradigm. But black folks in America, right, they experienced, and in many other places as well, I suppose, they experienced the world in this kind of double way, not only through their own experience, their own ideas and cultural norms and so forth, but also they experienced themselves the way that white people see them, right? They have to, just in order to survive in our society, be able to adopt that perspective on themselves, which on the one hand is bad, right? They see the sort of denigrating negative way that white folks see them. They experience themselves in that way as well as through their own lenses. But it also means that in a sense, when it comes to sort of the social matters of race, black folks have an advantage in being able to see things from both sides, right? And that's a theme that's taken up in The Souls of White Folks, right? The reading for today, which revisits a little bit later in 1920, some of Du Bois' central ideas about race and double consciousness in the context of his analysis of white supremacy. And this idea of Du Bois' is going to be one of the many things that contributes to a later notion of standpoint theory or standpoint epistemology. So that's W.B. Du Bois. We're also talking today about James Baldwin. Baldwin was born in 1924, so he's a little bit further along than some of the other figures we've discussed so far. He was born in Harlem, New York City. Like several important 19th century philosophers, but unlike many figures in the sort of rapidly professionalizing 20th century scene, Baldwin had no formal education beyond high school, which is not to say he wasn't extremely well educated. He was an avid reader from childhood, a member of various literary and intellectual circles, first in New York and later in Paris, an accomplished writer, but he wasn't trained in philosophy in the way that some of our more recent figures were. And I think that's like Du Bois working on the margins rather than within the profession is partly explained by a certain amount of racism and exclusionary attitudes within the profession. At 14, James Baldwin had a kind of religious conversion experience. His stepfather was a minister and he became a kind of junior minister whose sermons drew large crowds. He was a very popular speaker even at a very young age, but already by 17 he grew quite disillusioned with religion and sort of parted with any form of organized religion from there on out. He moved to Paris and although he would travel back and forth to the U.S., most notably he returned to the U.S. to participate in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and all through the 1960s. He settled back in France in 1970 and died in the 1980s. Baldwin was influenced by Du Bois, he refers to Du Bois in a number of places and Baldwin himself became another great theorist of the black experience in America as Du Bois was. Baldwin wrote many essays on race relations and he believed in and advocated for the great imperative of racial equality and racial integration in this country. On February 18, 1965, James Baldwin debated William F. Buckley Jr. at the University of Cambridge. They met to debate the proposition, the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro. Baldwin arguing for Buckley against. And by all accounts absolutely crushed Buckley in this debate, arguing forcefully that the wealth of America was built by black Americans in large part and it was expropriated from them and that this is the kind of original sin of America, this sort of American apartheid society was standing in the way of any hope for the American dream. So Baldwin not only argued that this notion of the American dream for white Americans is possibility of social advancement and sort of security and wealth was at the expense of black people in America. He also argued that the very idea of the American dream was threatened by segregation and inequality in our apartheid society and I think there's a lot of relevance to those ideas today. John Dewey in our reading for last week called for philosophers to let go of the technical problems of philosophers in order to take up the problems of men or we should say I think the problems of humanity. Now I think more so than any professionalized philosophers in the early and mid 20th century Du Bois and Baldwin took up that call as did many other African American and feminist philosophers in America. Many of them working outside of the academy until later in the century and so I think a really important aspect of the philosophical world is happening in these kinds of texts. So that's Du Bois and Baldwin for this week. Next week we're going to shift our focus across the pond so to speak into the late 1920s and early 1930s philosophical scene in Germany in the Germanic philosophical world where events were brewing that would have an enormous impact on the shape of professional philosophy in not only the Germanic but also the Anglophone world in the latter half of the 20th century. So if you have any questions or comments about Du Bois and Baldwin I look forward to discussing those with you on Discord or in the comments of the video or in class later today. If otherwise I look forward to seeing you next week.