The Sting of Racism in World History

If you have been reading the blog closely since the Season 4 Premiere, you may have noticed a new and significant theme in some writers, i.e. the attention given to perceived racial differences and hierarchies. Rudyard Kipling’s poem, "The White Man's Burden", first published in 1899 in a leading American magazine, is one of the best known illustrations of the late 19th century trend toward racialized thinking in England and the United States. On this same blog, the documents by the English soldier F. D. Lugard and the French Prime Minister Jules Ferry, both written somewhat earlier than the Kipling poem, suggest a context in which the existence of racial hierarchies was taken for granted by many Europeans and Americans. Also noteworthy in documents from around 1900 is the use of racial categories by Kang Youwei, a Chinese reformer of the 1890s, and by Yamagata Aritomo, a Japanese military leader (you’ll be reading both of these documents next week).

The documents I would like you to read now illustrate the rise of racism in the late 19th century by drawing on the memories of two influential writers and political activists who came of age in the 1890s, W. E. B. Du Bois and Mohandas K. Gandhi. Du Bois grew up in a small town in western Massachusetts, earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard (becoming the first African American to do so), wrote numerous scholarly works of history and sociology, was one of the founders of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and had a long career as a writer and activist on behalf of racial and social equality in the United States and internationally. The document I would like you to read from Du Bois (you can read it by clicking here) centers on a memory from his childhood and is taken from his classic collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he wrote that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” Mohandas Gandhi, later called Mahatma (“Great Soul”), was born to a wealthy Hindu family in western India. After completing legal studies in London, he decided to practice law in South Africa, then a British colony with a large Indian expatriate community. The document I would like you to read by Gandhi comes from his autobiography (you can read excerpts from it by clicking here; please read pgs. 111-115), first published in the 1920s, and recalls his introduction to racial prejudice in South Africa shortly after his arrival there in 1893. How do these two documents help one to understand the growing importance of racism in the late 19th century world?

After reading the documents, I would like you all to think about and discuss the following: What did Du Bois mean by “twoness?” How did Gandhi respond to the insults and mistreatment he received in South Africa? What political, economic, and cultural developments explain the rise of racism in the 19th century world? What was the connection between American racism and European discussions of imperialism? To what extent was Du Bois correct about the importance of the “color-line” in the 20th century? What is a race? What has happened to racism in world history since the early 20th century? Your thoughts…