an Afro-Asian century and a third-conditional world
When the 1899 address lists those peoples expected to follow the American Negro example, there is one notable omission—the only other nonwhite group whose historical agency Du Bois celebrates, a counterpoint to what otherwise passes as an exceptionalism. This group’s encounter with “advanced races” had not involved direct colonization or minoritization, and pointedly, it had not disavowed struggle through military force. Identified as the “one bright spot in Asia to-day,” it is “the island empire of Japan,” whose “recent admission to the ranks of modern civilized nations by the abolition of foreign consular courts within her borders is the greatest concession to the color-line which the nineteenth century has seen” (98).
Unlike the dramatic reference to the Philippine war, the rhetorical climax to the text’s discussion of the United States, Du Bois’s comment on Japan is relatively unstressed. Because the casual ascription of world-historical significance to current events is central to the text’s method, the superlative phrasing barely delays its rapid inventory of the “congeries of race and color problems” (97) that is Asia. Further, Du Bois’s rhetorical decision to relegate this recent event to the century that is ending suggests some effort to distance the Japanese example from his model of American Negro striving. Nevertheless, the text may be justifiably described as prescient regarding the significance of Japan’s challenge to global white supremacy. In a later section on Russia’s designs in northeast Asia, Du Bois muses, “Perhaps a Russia-Japanese war is in the near future,” concluding, “At any rate a gigantic strife across the color line is impending during the next one hundred years” (104).
Within five years Russia and Japan were at war, and Du Bois was quick to see a confirmation of his arguments. At the conclusion of a 1905 lecture titled “Atlanta University,” Du Bois revisited his color line thesis, warning that a declining interest in African American concerns was ignorant of the direction of global affairs. After a succinct summary of the thesis’s geopolitical grounds, he turned to the “epoch-making” event of the moment: “To-day for the first time in a thousand years the great white nation is measuring arms with the yellow nation and is shown to be distinctly inferior in civilization and ability.” “The foolish modern magic of the word ‘white’ is already broken,” he averred, “and the color line has been crossed in modern times as it was in the great past.” If “the awakening of the yellow races,” and eventually their “brown and black” counterparts, was now inevitable, the question is whether this “awakening … be in accordance with and aided by the greater ideals of white civilization or be in spite of them and against them.” “This,” he concludes, “is the problem of the yellow peril and of the color line, and it is the problem of the American Negro.”19
Returning to the 1899 speech, it becomes clear that, while the format of its global survey runs predictably from Africa through Asia and South and North America to Europe, ascending a hierarchy of race or “civilization,” the logic of its geopolitical analysis identifies Asia as the stage upon which the most strategically consequential imperial conflicts are taking place. There, two great events define the historic occasion, that dawning century, that modern black striving must seize. In short, the color line concept was articulated as a direct response to the transpacific rise of U.S. and Japanese global power amid the shifting dynamics of imperial competition in Asia.
If this association was merely incidental to the 1899 address, rightly jettisoned as the color-line thesis became a catchphrase, it might hold little interest. Yet subsequent history suggests it was prophetic, as the changing conditions of African American social and political life in the coming century would prove deeply interconnected with events in the region. Corresponding to Du Bois’s logic, two major aspects of an Asia/Pacific interest in African American culture may be identified. The first turned toward Asia in a kind of messianic anticipation, entertaining fantasies—usually casual and speculative, though here and there surprisingly devout—of the arrival of a champion of the darker races against white world supremacy. Though occasionally associated with other countries, this racially alien figure was most often identified with imperial Japan. The second aspect traversed the Pacific along U.S. imperial pathways, pursuing opportunities for racial uplift, particularly in the Philippines and Hawai‘i.
Through the first half of the century, an intermittent but abiding interest in Japan was present across all the locations of a vibrant African American intellectual life, from the academy to the press, the church to the literary salon, the juke joint to the street corner, and the offices of respectable civil rights organizations to the meetings of ragtag radical groups. Rather than attempting to determine any singular coherence to this interest, it is best approached as a series of debates. For every editorial, lecture, or sermon promoting the modernizing and uplifting lessons Japan could teach, another might reject such claims. Similarly, intellectuals argued for and against the prospect of Japanese leadership of the darker races, and popular and elite sentiment oscillated between identifying with Japanese and Japanese American struggles against white racism and dismissing them for setting themselves above black people.20
Primarily shaped by geopolitics, this interest peaked around major events—the Russo-Japanese War; the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where President Woodrow Wilson defeated the Japanese delegation’s proposal of a racial equality clause for the League of Nations Charter; and the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, in which widespread hopes of Japanese intervention were ultimately disappointed. The latter largely confirmed the attitudes of a younger cohort of intellectuals, whose leftward turn in the 1930s led to critiques of Japanese imperialism, sometimes recasting China or India in familiar pro-Japanese tropes. Yet the earlier influence of Marcus Garvey, who promoted “Asia for the Asiatics” and upheld Japan as a model of racial pride and self-determination, was not entirely dislodged. To a lesser extent, African Americans also monitored the anti-Japanese movement and Japanese American civil rights campaigns against school and housing segregation, restrictions on immigration and land ownership, as well as the Supreme Court 1922 case Ozawa v. United States, in which a challenge to racial restrictions on naturalized citizenship, on the grounds that Japanese should be considered white, was denied. These currents crested during World War II, as African Americans contemplated both the mass incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans and the demands and opportunities of national loyalty in wartime.
Yet the larger historical significance of this interest may lie in its more shadowy and imaginative manifestations. It was given freer rein, for example, in speculative fiction by prominent intellectuals. John Edward Bruce’s uncompleted 1912 short story, “The Call of a Nation,” and James D. Corrothers’s “A Man They Didn’t Know,” published in The Crisis in December 1913 and January 1914, both imagine a race war, in which Japan’s initial triumphs in the Philippines and Hawai‘i lead to an invasion that the United States can defeat only by abandoning white supremacy to ensure the support of black soldiers. Fifteen years later, Du Bois himself contributed to the genre with Dark Princess, whose protagonist, a talented African American in Berlin, stumbles into a secret international council of the darker races plotting the overthrow of the white nations.21 The greatest influence of this interest may have been in the pro-Japanese activities of a range of religious, nationalist, and emigrationist groups uncovered by Ernest Allen, including the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, the Ethiopian Pacific Movement, the Moorish Science Temple of America, and the Allah Temple of Islam (a predecessor to the Nation of Islam led by Elijah Muhammad).22 It almost certainly conditioned Noble Drew Ali’s influential theory of “Asiatic” blackness, as well as Muhammad’s vision of a Japanese-built UFO or “Mother Plane.” Broadly understood, you may recognize its significance in the ways this interest offered imaginative realms for conceptualizing