Now that the century of Du Bois’s prophecy is over, the liberatory potential of a Third World front, or of previous figurations of Afro-Asian solidarity, seems thoroughly exhausted. The color line is not the problem of the twenty-first century, even if the problems associated with it remain. From this vantage, his faith in an Afro-Asian future can actually function as a constraint on the imagination of freedom—a trap you might evade by considering a contemporaneous vision that consigned an Afro-Asian century to an unrealized past before it even began. To recover this possibility, I return to the earlier suggestion that Du Bois’s 1899 address is surprisingly unoriginal within African American discourses of its moment.
Although its central conceit, that issues of race must be viewed from a global perspective, could appear as a revelation a hundred years later, as ethnic studies and American studies undertook a transnational turn, it was hardly unconventional in 1899. For example, at the previous year’s American Negro Academy meeting, Howard University professor Charles C. Cook presented “A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem.” Assessing English and Japanese histories of national emergence, Cook comments, “What it took England ten centuries to accomplish, the United States has done in two hundred, and Japan in thirty years” (3). While the latter was clearly not Cook’s area of expertise—at least half of his brief section on Japan was a long quote from William Elliot Griffis’s popular 1876 volume, The Mikado’s Empire—it shows that Du Bois’s impulse was hardly unique.
More substantive engagements with global affairs can be found across a range of black newspapers and journals of the period, including the A.M.E. Church Review.30 Indeed, the same October 1900 issue that published Du Bois’s address featured a series of aphoristic “Editorials” that tartly and succinctly capture the ambivalent perspective on imperialism theorized by Du Bois. Presumably written by editor Hightower T. Kealing, an educator, lay A.M.E. church official, and A.N.A. member, they range from a sentence to several paragraphs. One item pungently captures the common-ground position between growing antiwar black popular opinion and the concerns of some black elites that challenging Republican administration policies would deliver the election to their enemies: “Imperialism seems to mean the bringing of more colored people within contact with American contempt; while anti-imperialism is saving all this contempt for the colored people already on hand”! Other items illustrate the preoccupations of uplift ideology, bemoaning American drunkenness in the Philippines and celebrating the attendance of Cuban schoolteachers at a summer program at Harvard, and speculate on the rise of China (175). A longer piece relates the Zionist Max Nordau to A.M.E. bishop Henry M. Turner’s support for African emigration, offering a sympathetic critique of both (179).
Another item puts the promise of imperialism’s racial justice in stark terms. Analytically linking three ongoing imperial wars in China, South Africa, and the Philippines, it condemns the “motives” of the Western powers as “undeniably and declaredly selfish and sordid,” while upholding their core justification: “the rape of Africa, Asia and the islands will open them up to Western progressiveness, invention, comfort, personal liberty and the Christian religion.” The logic of uplift detaches itself from white corruption, operating providentially, for “beyond” and “in very antagonism to” their reprehensible intentions “will come the elevation and equalizing of the protesting semi-savage that is despoiled.” Following the occidented logic of imperialism to the same end predicted by Du Bois, he imagines that colonial violence will leave this semisavage “fresher from the fount of rejuvenation than his late master,” eventually to achieve “domination in things commercial, literary, artistic, and economic, over the Western world” (177). The bluntness of Kealing’s assessment strains against the resignation of its conclusions, illustrating the severe constraints he faces as a political actor. Indeed, the next item proclaims imperialism to be the highest moral issue in the upcoming presidential election, one the incumbent gets wrong and his challenger gets right, then endorses President McKinley anyway, citing his opponent’s damning reliance on anti-black Southern Democrats.
In the end, what’s the difference between Du Bois’s and Kealing’s analytical responses to U.S. imperialism? Read together, it seems largely rhetorical, a matter of tone rather than substantive effect: the prophecy of a coming Afro-Asian world collapses into an affirmation of imperialism’s own justifications, fully recognizing that its actualization is indistinguishable from violence. The limitations of their responses trace the constrained and compromised structural condition of the American Negro intellectual, whose capacity for action is given within relations of empire. But to identify the difference between them as rhetorical is merely to say that Du Bois’s great contribution, again, is poetic. Its originality and genius lies in the unexpected way it reads, or learns to read, the positionality of the American Negro intellectual within imperial competition. Where Kealing endorses imperialism’s principle of racial justice with a curse, Du Bois offers an inspirational exhortation. Both draw on rhetorical traditions of prophecy, yet only Du Bois articulates his insight in a singing phrase that would become a great watchword of antiracist and anticolonial struggle.
Yet on the far side of that prophecy, as a century’s visions of Afro-Asian liberation recede in disenchanted dusk—the long-awaited rise of China, the election of an African American commander in chief—you might recover a more apposite rhetorical formulation in one additional item from Kealing’s editorials. It reads: “If Aguinaldo were the statesman he is reputed to be, he would form an alliance with King Menel[i]k of Abyssinia and do something worth while” (175). Here, the fantasy of Afro-Asian liberation, joining the leader of the Philippine resistance to the hero of African opposition to Italian imperialism, can be expressed only as a sarcastic counterfactual—it comes into view only after it is deemed impossible. Kealing’s conception of racial justice cannot be extricated from the imperialism against which he would turn it, and the best rhetorical figure he can find to evoke the volatility of this paradox is a bitter joke.
To appreciate the operation of this joke, I borrow a term sometimes used in English language teaching to describe the grammar of conditional sentences. In the so-called first conditional, the relation between a condition and its consequence foretells a possible future (if X occurs, Y will occur), whereas in the “second conditional,” a condition represented as unfulfilled determines a potential consequence as unreal (if X were true, Y would occur). Du Bois’s exhortations follow the logic of the first conditional—if you take up the black man’s burden, white supremacy will fall; Kealing’s joke takes the form of the second—if Aguinaldo were the hero advertised, he and Menelik would form the Afro-Asian alliance you desire. But Kealing’s tone and his other editorials make it clear that he has abandoned any fantasy of a Filipino-Ethiopian alliance, and is left unable to foresee any Afro-Asian future but what is bequeathed by uplift: that the semisavage could one day ascend to the position of the master.
In other words, Kealing already occupies the place where you now stand, on the far side of despair, gazing out at an unreal possibility already consigned to the past. This is the structure of the “third conditional”: if the antiracist and anticolonial movements of the twentieth century hadn’t fallen short of the extravagant hopes invested in them, they would have achieved another world. Just as this bitter-mouthed joke is the sole rhetorical figure through which Kealing can express a desire excluded by the terms of racial uplift, it may be that this negated image of a future lost to history, this third-conditional world, offers you an apposite structure for expressing those desires for freedom that elude the epistemological and aesthetic constraints of imperialism’s racial justice.
For his part, Kealing can go no further in expressing this desire, at least not in words, for what words he can find are capable only of betraying it. But where the words