Booker T. Washington Web Du Bois Background Reading
Though long dismissed as a proponent of respectability politics, Washington's ideas about work and nobility merit serious thought in the era of the 24-hr workday.
At the time of his death on November 14, 1915, Booker T. Washington was an international figure, both renowned and reviled for his ceaseless efforts to promote industrial instruction equally the path to economic — and ultimately borough — prosperity for the children and grandchildren of enslaved African American laborers. In a memorial service for Washington the Lord's day later his decease, the Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff eulogized Washington every bit a Moses figure, one who did non accomplish the promised land of racial equality, merely who "showed the way" there. "As the decades and the centuries coil by," Schiff said, "he will rise college and higher in the memory of his race and of all mankind."
A century later, we know that Schiff's prediction was wrong. Although Washington had considerable appeal during his lifetime, his focus on technical skill ahead of liberal educational activity, and economic opportunity ahead of political rights, drew criticism from W. Due east. B. Du Bois, the newly formed National Association for the Advocacy of Colored People, and others. Du Bois argued in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk that Washington's strategy would keep African Americans docile workers, stunt their intellectual and cultural development, and do cipher to upend white supremacy. By the era of the ceremonious rights struggle, Du Bois'southward vision had prevailed, including among white intellectuals and activists. Since and so, Du Bois'southward criticism of Washington has become standard; in today'south academy, Washington receives far less attention than Du Bois and is often dismissed as a proponent of respectability politics.
Nevertheless, Washington is worth taking seriously again as a thinker. In saying so, I follow a handful of scholars — including Curtis Evans, Wilson Jeremiah Moses, David Sehat, and the author of a 2009 biography of Washington, Robert J. Norrell — who have recently delved into Washington's life, piece of work, and context and institute a more sympathetic, conflicted, intelligent, and religious figure than Du Bois allowed. Every bit the historian Pero Gaglo Dagbovie has said, Washington should be studied "every bit a political theorist and perhaps fifty-fifty a philosopher." Booker T. Washington has something to offering academics and activists who are concerned with the ethical and political issues surrounding dignity and labor. His thought can help our efforts to understand the value of work in a social context — like his and similar ours — in which the worker's personhood is often in question.
Every bit a white academic, I hesitate to recommend a figure who for decades has been viewed as a traitor to African Americans. To be articulate, I am non recommending that we pursue racial justice past following Washington'southward program. Treating Washington seriously equally an intellectual would mean setting aside the matter of whether or not he has the right answers to problems of racial justice, and instead seeing him as someone whose endeavour to discover answers to questions nearly the worker'southward part in club — even a fitful, frustrated, and self-contradictory endeavour — can illuminate efforts to practice the same today. If nosotros look to Washington again as a thinker and not only as a figure with troubling racial politics, nosotros might notice that even those of u.s. with different politics do share some of his thoughts — and some of the flaws in his thinking.
Washington believed that people could notice dignity in work — a widespread conventionalities today. Only how does work offering dignity to the worker?
The footing for Washington's entire outlook is the idea that people can find dignity in work. There is null controversial about that idea today. Although there was still an enviable leisure course in Washington's lifetime, today's One Percent flaunt their tireless work, not their idleness. The moral value of work is and then ingrained in the American listen today that no politico would dare question information technology.
But how does work offer nobility to the worker? Washington'due south reply both reflects a mutual view today and leads straight to the issues that Du Bois and after critics find in Washington. On Washington'due south account, dignity is not inherent in the mental or physical activity that comprises our piece of work; it is conferred on the person by those in the customs who benefit from the work. He believed that that was possible because "there is something in human nature which e'er makes an individual recognize and reward merit, no thing nether what colour of skin merit is found." Washington tested this principle in the industrial trades programs, such as brickmaking, that he established at the Tuskegee Institute, which he founded. In his best-known book, Upwardly from Slavery, published in 1901, Washington reports that white residents of the region recognized the quality of the bricks his students made and sought to purchase them. Racial tension was eased, Washington says, by the fair commerce betwixt these black artisans and their white clients. In these exchanges, the school made money, its white neighbors got good bricks, and the students earned "the independence and self-reliance which the ability to practice something which the world wants washed brings."
There is a contradiction in this claim, though, that reveals the ultimately tragic character of Washington's thinking well-nigh nobility: If your reward comes from doing something that others want done, and then yous are not really self-reliant. What happens to your nobility one time the globe no longer wants done what yous tin can practise? This is exactly the question faced past millions of workers — factory laborers, waiters and waitresses, even anesthesiologists — whose jobs are existence automated, or those, like cabdrivers, who are existence replaced by "cloud" labor.
Unless you lot can be confident in your continued employment and in the willingness of others to recognize your merits, it is risky to depend on work as your source of dignity. Washington claimed that "the whole future of the Negro rested largely upon the question as to whether or not he should make himself, through his skill, intelligence, and graphic symbol, of such undeniable value to the community in which he lived that the community could non dispense with his presence." In Washington'due south context, and despite his repeated claims to the contrary in Up from Slavery, African American workers could non rely on communal recognition of their ability; in fact, Jim Crow kept them from adept opportunities to exhibit their skill. Today, few American workers face the constant threat of violence that southern blacks did, only business concern doctrines discouraging long-term delivery to employees ensure that no worker is indispensable. Workers in high-prestige industries like finance and engineering frequently embrace the precarious nature of their employment; they put in eighty-hour weeks in order to demonstrate their "talent," perchance to themselves first of all, and bouncing back apace from a layoff is to them confirmation of their ability. But these workers are unusual; most people value stable employment.
Unless you tin can be confident in your continued employment — and in the willingness of others to recognize your claim — it is risky to depend on work as your source of dignity.
Even if a worker really is coming together others' needs, perpetually striving to meet them and thereby attain dignity will ultimately crusade the worker physical and mental harm. On Washington's model, the pursuit of nobility has paradoxical results; relentlessly working to win others' approval — or even but a off-white wage — can grind the person down.
Amazon'south workers offering a sobering example. From warehouse pickers to software engineers, they all contribute to the effort to "do something which the world wants done": sell and evangelize any production cheaply and conveniently. Simply because the globe wants it done faster and faster, these workers are expected put in long hours and are subjected to withering performance evaluations, as a New York Times exposé of Amazon's Seattle headquarters showed in August. Internal lingo calls Amazon's white-neckband employees "Amabots," though to the balance of Seattle, they're "Amholes." Whichever fashion you lot await at it, though, their piece of work has damaged their human being dignity — and these are the best-paid workers in the most prestigious positions in the company. At the other terminate of Amazon'southward wage spectrum, the assault on dignity is more than firsthand and bodily; a previous exposé past the Allentown Morn Call showed that ever-escalating productivity quotas and heat exhaustion were common at an Amazon distribution center in Pennsylvania.
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Were he alive today, Washington might applaud the Amazon ethos of total devotion to work. His platonic is the worker who "loses himself," or who "completely obliterates himself" in the work. In praising those who pour themselves into their projects, Washington uses language that the New Testament applies to the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Of Dr. Hollis Frissell, the white principal of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, Washington writes that his "abiding effort" was "to brand himself 'of no reputation' for the sake of the cause" of African Americans' education. This language is borrowed from Philippians 2:7, where Paul describes Jesus's kenosis, his activity of "empt[ying] himself, taking the class of a slave."
Information technology's bad enough for an employer to expect a software engineer to give all of her time and try to her work; at least, in addition to the promise of dignity, she's earning a good wage. Information technology's a far worse abuse of the linguistic communication of dignity to expect a poorly paid, harried temp running through a warehouse — or, in the example of Washington'south earliest students, a worker who had already been a slave — to showroom Christ-like levels of cocky-sacrifice for the sake of someone else's turn a profit. This is the tragedy of seeking dignity through recognition for your work. Unless your community is already tending to recognize you, then yous may lose not only your dignity, but much more besides.
This is the tragedy of seeking nobility through recognition for your piece of work. Unless your customs is already disposed to recognize you, Christ-similar levels of cede for someone else's profit may cost you not just your dignity, but much more.
Washington'southward religion in the "universal law" that people are inclined to reward merit makes him seem optimistic to the bespeak of obtuseness, but at that place is more to the story. Washington was intellectually conflicted and politically savvy, delivering different messages to different audiences. A complete bookkeeping of his thought must include a vision that is rather less confident in the police force of merit. He shared this vision not with the American public, but with his students in speeches he delivered at Tuskegee on Sun evenings. While the theology of Upwardly from Slavery appears by and large in oblique references, Washington makes more explicit religious appeals in these speeches, quoting scripture often. 1 of Washington's favorite Bible verses is Revelation three:5, which he quotes as, "He that overcometh shall exist clothed in white raiment," placing the reward for overcoming struggles into a world beyond this 1.
Washington had an clashing and strained relationship with African American Christianity, frequently criticizing what he saw as its emphasis on otherworldly hope. If i can accomplish an eternal reward through mere conventionalities, Washington thought, then why bother working hard in this life? And yet Washington knew that earthly rewards were often deferred, and he relied on prophecies of a new heaven and a new earth to bolster his students' organized religion in the constabulary of merit. Fifty-fifty in Upward from Slavery, written for a white audience of potential benefactors, Washington qualifies this faith, proverb that merit will be rewarded "in the cease" or "in the long run," raising the inevitable question of how long a worker should wait for information technology. Should they hold out for the end times? Despite Washington'due south avowed religion in the American capitalist creed, his ambivalent eschatology reflects Marx's claim that "Religious suffering is, at i and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protestation against real suffering. Faith is the sigh of the oppressed brute, the centre of a heartless earth, and the soul of soulless weather condition. It is the opium of the people." To imagine that the reward for your merit volition be realized in a next world is, all at once, to acknowledge that it really should exist rewarded now, to mitigate the sting of it not being rewarded, and to affirm that it volition be rewarded one 24-hour interval. Looking ahead to the eschaton is both an try to convince oneself of one's ideals and a genuine expression of hope in a new reality.
In this world, doing a good job is oftentimes non enough to secure your employment or your dignity.
In this globe, doing a good job is frequently non enough to secure your employment or your dignity. Academics have rejected Washington, but how many of us, and how many of our students, believe the exact same thing he did? Scholars like me tell ourselves that the academy rewards merit; later all, we have blind peer review and systems of citation to assign each other status. But the system is, in fact, grossly unfair. Many thousands of skillful scholars and teachers labor in obscurity, if not poverty. Contingent faculty members feel stuck in a vicious cycle; they cannot win a enquiry grant or a volume contract without a prestigious tenure-track position, just they cannot get that position without a enquiry grant or a book contract.
When I teach Upward from Slavery, my (generally white) undergraduate students are drawn to Washington's vision of piece of work. Most of them are from the working form and aspire to a secure position in the professions, and they see the value they identify on hard work reflected in Washington's words. This is what worries me. I'1000 concerned that my students believe the American myth that Washington espoused and I wish were true, and that they will end upward toiling for an insufficient reward, always hoping that things will interruption their mode eventually, while their more privileged peers, whose dignity was never in question, prosper without having to crucify themselves.
No thinker should be considered totally apart from his context, especially the context of the debates he was fatigued into. And so nosotros cannot pretend that Washington was actually a James Baldwin or Martin Luther Rex Jr. But skilful thinkers from the past never only focused on the one matter their all-time critics pointed out equally a blind spot. With a century's distance, scholars should meet that Washington was, as nosotros are, thinking through questions concerning labor as a moral and fifty-fifty spiritual struggle. Like he did, we accept complex but unsatisfactory answers. If we want meliorate ones, then contending with Washington'south thought — which mirrors our own perhaps more than we would similar to admit — can only help.
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Jonathan Malesic is acquaintance professor of theology at Rex's College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He is writing a book on the ethics and spirituality of work. Discover him on Twitter at @jonmalesic .
Cover photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress and Shutterstock
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Source: https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/the-post-obama-world/reconsidering-booker-t-washington-in-the-age-of-amazon
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