shades of a world problem
Given the dizzying reflections and refractions of this red ray, how might you begin to theorize the traveling operations of race across the domains of early twentieth-century U.S. imperialism? These movements flicker across what have been historically understood as two regionally distinct racialized regimes: Negro segregation, in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South, was consolidating both in law (as in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision) and in extralegal violence, while in the Philippines, U.S. colonial governance was being established through military conquest. Further, for U.S.-based scholarship, such historical understanding passes through and is inflected by two additional settings: the industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast, like Wells’s Chicago, where small black communities would be dramatically expanded by the long process of African American urbanization known as the Great Migration, and the West Coast, where the Asiatic exclusion movement, already turning from the Chinese to the Japanese, would eventually encounter a wave of Filipino migrants, establishing the conditions for their inscription in what would one day be termed Asian American history.
To draw together these historically and geographically distant domains, you must first acknowledge that the conditions of such articulation have their genesis in acts of overwhelming violence. But while a link between black and Filipino racialization was initially forged by U.S. imperial conquest, it was quickly seized upon by Filipino nationalists, in the Sam Hose propaganda, to foresee a different destiny for both groups, surpassing the telos of inclusion within the United States, as nation or as empire. And it was not only the Filipino nationalists who saw this.
In seeking a theorization of race sufficient for this task, I turn to Du Bois’s concept of the color line. Best known from his epochal 1903 Souls of Black Folk, it appears in an earlier speech at the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London, “To the Nations of the World,”9 but its most comprehensive formulation is found in “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind,” Du Bois’s presidential address for the third annual meeting of the American Negro Academy in Washington, D.C., in December 1899.10 It is likely, if perhaps impossible to definitively prove, that this is the first text in which his oft-quoted declaration of the problem of the twentieth century appears.11 More to the point, where the others merely present this statement as a striking premise, only this text presents it as a thesis to be demonstrated. Indeed, its express purpose is to establish the claim. Read closely, it offers a series of insights upon which the methodological and historical framework of this book is built.
Announcing itself as a characteristically ambitious inquiry into race “in its larger world aspect in time and space” (95), Du Bois’s address takes his audience on a whirlwind tour of social conflicts spanning five continents and four centuries of world history, to argue that a crisis of accelerated imperial competition is generating intensified processes of racialization within imperial states, at their borders and at their centers, legitimizing both conquest and mastery in racial terms, whose ultimate horizon is global. This is the crisis he is naming in his proposition that “the world problem of the 20th century is the Problem of the Color line” (104). Crucially, he secures this claim at the end of his section on Europe, where “the question of color” arises unpredictably in a new racialization of metropolitan populations, as in the controversy over “the Jew and Socialist in France,” and in aspiring powers’ pursuit of global standing—for example, Russia’s whiteness is questioned when contrasted with Germany but enhanced in conflicts with “the yellow masses of Asia” (103). Du Bois’s color line, then, is better understood not as a binary or a bar to be lifted or crossed, but as a traveling analytical concept for examining how race is made and remade, in uneven and unpredictable ways, across a global field of imperial competition.
If this concept helps theorize the circulation and reconfiguration of race in the Philippine-American War, this is no accident. For the war, Du Bois claims, was the occasion for his address: “But most significant of all at this period is the fact that the colored population of our land is, through the new imperial policy, about to be doubled by our ownership of Porto Rico, and Hawaii, our protectorate of Cuba, and conquest of the Philippines. This is for us and for the nation the greatest event since the Civil War and demands attention and action on our part” (102, emphasis added).12 The text’s internal logic and historical context together indicate that what’s decisive in this event is the U.S. decision to conquer the Philippines. In the transition from the 1898 Spanish-American War to the Philippine-American War, African American popular opinion had largely turned against military-imperial policy, and the Philippines focalized a range of heated debates over U.S. expansion and African Americans’ place within it. While Du Bois, who opposed the war, obliquely criticizes its prosecution later in the text, here he takes conquest, if not annexation, as a fait accompli, in order to contemplate the consequences of a massive increase in the nonwhite population including eight million Filipinos.
This event, Du Bois argues, must be embraced as a problem, an opportunity, a duty, depicted in ringing patriotic terms: “What is to be our attitude toward these new lands and toward the masses of dark men and women who inhabit them? Manifestly it must be an attitude of deepest sympathy and strongest alliance. We must stand ready to guard and guide them with our vote and our earnings. Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian, all must stand united under the stars and stripes for an America that knows no color line in the freedom of its opportunities” (102). What began as a matter of demographics attains world-historical importance, as Du Bois continues, assimilating these new populations to a benevolent project of racial uplift whose privileged American Negro subject ascends to autonomy on the geopolitical stage: “We must remember that the twentieth century will find nearly twenty millions of brown and black people under the protection of the American flag, a third of the nation, and that on the success and efficiency of the nine millions of our own number depends the ultimate destiny of Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Indians and Hawaiians, and that on us too depends in a large degree the attitude of Europe toward the teeming millions of Asia and Africa” (102–3). Here, Du Bois’s attitude looks disturbingly similar to McKinley’s infamous justification for conquest as a duty “to educate … and uplift and civilize and Christianize” Filipinos deemed “unfit for self-government” (qtd. in Rusling). But Du Bois turns from this implicit mimicry of McKinley to signify explicitly on Rudyard Kipling: “No nation ever bore a heavier burden than we black men of America, and if the third millennium of Jesus Christ dawns, as we devoutly believe it will upon a brown and yellow world out of whose advancing civilization the color line has faded as mists before the sun—if this be the goal toward which every free born American Negro looks, then mind you, my hearers, its consummation depends on you, not on your neighbor but on you, not on Southern lynchers or Northern injustice, but on you” (103). In his elegant rhetorical sweep, Du Bois drives the ideology of the civilizing mission to the occidented conclusion that its manifest destiny is the end of white world supremacy, and presumes his American Negro audience’s global solidarity