As the European-initiated World War I raged, W. E. B. DuBois reminded us about the destructive nature of the “culture of white folk.” It is a reminder sorely needed today.
Towards the end of the essay, “Of the Culture of White Folk,” W. E. B. Du Bois declares:
The cause of war is preparation for war, and of all that Europe has done in a century there is nothing that has equaled in energy, thought and time her preparation for wholesale murder.
DuBois had already located the causes of global conflict in the intra-European, intra-imperial fight over the spoils of the African continent, a point he made in his 1915 essay “The African Roots of War.” But “Of the Culture of White Folk,”published in 1917, at the time World War I raged in Europe, takes a different tack, interrogating the origins of European violence in the exaltation of European whiteness. At at time when racial science had been deployed to assert the superiority of the white race, and where European ability to attack and plunder the rest of the world was seen as a mark of the strength of its “civilization,” Du Bois instead saw a white culture that is deeply, but arrogantly, immoral. For Du Bois, while war and conflict was not new to the world, “the heaven defying audacity” of European war-mongering for the cause of white supremacy was breathtaking.
Today, as the world, drunk on the prospect of global violence, teeters on the brink of another European-initiated world war, we see, once again, white folk’s heaven defying audacity. As the crisis in Ukraine escalates, we also see the closing of ranks of the world’s white people. In the process, the “darker nations” of the world are being reminded that this is a world structured by global white supremacy, Europeans and whiteness are to be prioritized; white people are the only humans. However, like Du Bois, we know better. Du Bois reminded us that Europe and its white, settler spawns - in the US, Canada, Australia - are the most destructive forces on the planet. For centuries they have “marched proudly in the van of human hatred,” making “bonfires of human flesh [while laughing] at it hideously.” That is the culture of white folk. To save the world, to have peace on the planet, is to grapple with this terrible reality.
Excerpts from “Of the Culture of White Folk” appear below.
Of the Culture of White Folk
By. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Ph. D., Editor of the Crisis
We, of the darker peoples, are watching the white world now in mild amaze. Among some of us, I doubt not, this sudden descent of Europe into hell has brought unbounded surprise; to others, over wide area, it has brought the schaden freude of the bitterly hurt. But most of us, I judge, look on silently and sorrowfully, in sober thought, seeing sadly the prophecy of our own souls. Here is a civilization that has boasted much. Neither Roman nor Arab, Greek nor Egyptian, Persian nor Mogul ever took himself and his own perfectness with such disconcerting seriousness as the modern white man. We, whose shame, humiliation and deep insult, his aggrandizement involved, were never deceived. We looked at him clearly with world-old eyes and saw simply a human thing, weak and pitiable and cruel, even as we are and were. These super-men and world-mastering demi-gods listened, however, to no low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of clay……
War is horrible. This the dark world knows to its awful cost. But has it just become horrible in these last days, when under essentially equal conditions, equal armament and equal waste of wealth, white men are fighting white men with surgeons and nurses hovering near?
Think of the wars through which we have lived in the last little decade: In German Africa, in British Nigeria, in French and Spanish Morocco, in China, in Persia, in the Balkans, in Tripoli, and Mexico and a dozen lesser places - were these not horrible too? Mind you, there were for most of these wars no Red Cross funds!
As we see the dead dimly through rifts of battle smoke and hear faintly the cursing and accusations of blood broth? ers, we darker men say: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming terrible is the real soul of white culture - back of all culture, stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived - these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights we boasted of. Here is whither the might and energy of modern humanity has really gone.
But may not the world cry back at us and ask: What better thing have you to show? What have you done or would do better than this if you had today the world rule? Paint with all riot of hateful colors the thin skin of European culture, is it not better than any culture that arose in Africa or Asia?
Why then is Europe great? Because of the foundations which the mighty past has furnished her to build upon: The iron and trade of black Africa; the religion and empire building of yellow Asia; the art and science of the "dago" Mediterranean shore east, south and west as well as north. And where she has builded securely upon this great past and learned from it she has gone forward to greater and more splendid human triumph; but where she has ignored that past and forgotten and sneered at it she has shown the cloven hoof of poor crucified humanity; she has played, like other empires gone, the world fool.
Manifestly it is expansion over-seas - it is colonial aggrandizement which explains, and alone adequately explains the present war. How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion - of the relation of Europe, which is white, to the rest of the world, which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe's good. This Europe has largely done.
The European world is using black men and brown for all the uses which men know. Slowly but surely white culture is evolving the theory that "darkies" are born beasts of burden for white folk. It were silly to think otherwise, cries the culture world with stronger and shriller accord. The supporting arguments grow and twist themselves in the mouths of merchant, scientist, soldier, traveler, writer and missionary: Darker peoples are dark in mind as well as in body; of dark, uncertain and imperfect descent, of frailer, cheaper stuff; they are cowards in the face of mau sers and maxims; they have no feelings, aspirations and loves; they are fools, unlogical idiots, "half devil and half child."
Such as they are, civilization must naturally raise them, but soberly and in limited ways. They are not simply dark white men. They are not "men" in the sense that Europeans are men. To the very limited extent of their shallow capacities lift them to be useful to whites; to raise cotton, gather rubber, fetch ivory, dig diamonds; and let them be paid what men think they are worth?white men who know them to be well-nigh worthless.
Such degrading of men by men is old as mankind and the invention of no one race or people; ever have men strove to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left, however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal world-wide mark of meanness - color.
Such is the silent revolution that has gripped modern European culture in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its zenith came in Boxer times: White supremacy was all but world-wide: Africa was dead India conquered, Japan isolated and China prostrate, while white America whetted its sword for mongrel Mexico and mullatto South America, lynching her own Negroes the while. Temporary halt in this program was made by little Japan, and the white world immediately sensed the peril of such "yellow" presumption. What sort of a world would this be if yellow men must be treated "white?" Immediately the eventual overthrow of Japan became a subject of deep thought and intrigue from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, from the Key of Heaven to the Little Brother of the Poor!
The using of men for the benefit of masters is no new invention of modern Europe. It is quite as old as the world. But Europe is proposing to apply it on a scale and with an elaborateness of detail of which no former world ever dreamed. The imperial width of the thing - the heaven defying audacity makes its modern newness.…
Small wonder then, in the practical world of things-that be, there is jealousy and strife for the possession of the labor of dark millions - for the right to bleed and exploit the colonies of the world where this golden stream may be had, not always for the asking, but surely for the whipping and shooting. It is this competition for the labor of yellow, brown and black folk that is the cause of the present world war.
Colonies we call them, these places where "niggers" are cheap and earth is rich; they are those out-lands where like a swarm of hungry locusts white masters may settle to be served as kings; may wield the lash of slave drivers, may rape girls and wives, grow rich as Croesus and send homeward a golden stream. They belt the earth, these places, but they cluster in the tropics with its darkened peoples : in Hong Kong and Anam, in Borneo and Rhodesia, in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, in Panama and Havana - these are the El Dorados toward which the world powers stretch itching palms.
Germany, at last one and united, secure on land, looked across the seas and saw England with such sources of wealth insuring a luxury and power which Germany could not hope to rival by the slower processes of exploiting her own peasants and workingmen, especially with these workers half in revolt. Immediately Germany builds her navy and enters into a desperate competition for possession of colonies of darker peoples. To South America, to China, to Africa, to Asia Minor, she turns like a hound quivering on the leash, impatient, suspicious, irritable with blood-shot eyes and dripping fangs, ready for the awful word. England and France crouch watchfully above their bones growling and wary, but gnawing industriously while the blood of the dark world whets their greedy appetites. In the back ground, shut out from the feast and from the highway to the Seven Seas, sit Russia and Austria, snarling and snap? ping at each other and at the last Mediterranean gate to El Dorado where the Sick Man enjoys bad health.
The fateful day came. It had to come. The cause of war is preparation for war, and of all that Europe has done in a century there is nothing that has equaled in energy, thought and time her preparation for wholesale murder. The only adequate cause of this preparation was conquest and conquest not in Europe, but primarily among the darker peoples of Asia and Africa; conquest not for assimilation and uplift, but for commerce and degradation. For this, and this mainly, has Europe girded herself at frightful cost for war.
But what of the darker world that watches? Most men belong to this world. With Negro and Negroid, East Indian, Chinese and Japanese they form two-thirds the population of the world. A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men. If the uplift of mankind must be done by men then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of darker nations.
What then, is this dark world thinking? It is thinking that wild and awful as this shameful war is it is nothing to compare with that fight for freedom which black and brown and yellow men must and will make unless their oppression and humiliation and insult at the hands of the White World cease. The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it has to and not one moment longer.
Let me say this again and emphasize it and leave no room for mistaken meaning: This world war is primarily the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races. As such it is and must be but pre? lude to the armed and the indignant protest of these despised and raped peoples. Today Japan is hammering on the door of Justice; China is raising her half-manacled hands to knock next; India is writhing for the freedom to knock; Egypt is sullenly muttering; the Negroes of South and West Africa, of the West Indies and the United States are just awakening to their shameful slavery. Is then this war the end of war? Can it be the end so long as its prime cause, the despising and robbery of darker peoples sits enthroned even in the souls of those who cry peace? So if Europe hugs this delusion then this is not the end of world war - it is the beginning.
We see Europe's greatest sin precisely where we find Africa's and Asia's, in human hatred?the despising of men.
It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself as a sort of natural peacemaker in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted. For two or more centuries she has marched proudly in the van of human hatred. She makes bonfires of human flesh and laughs at it hideously. She makes the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike - it becomes a great religion, a world war cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts! Instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood America has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and its failures, especially so far as black and yellow and brown people are concerned. And this too, in spite of the fact that there was no actual failure; the Indian is not dying out, the Japanese and Chinese have not menaced the land, and the experiment of Negro suffrage has resulted in the uplift of ten million people at a rate probably unparalleled in history. But what of this? America, land of democracy, wanted to believe in the failure of democracy so far as darker peoples were concerned. Absolutely without excuse she established a caste system, rushed into preparation for war and conquered tropical colonies. She stands today shoulder to shoulder with Europe in Europe's worst sins against civilization. She aspires to sit among the great nations who arbitrate the fate of "lesser breeds without the law" and she is at times heartily ashamed even of the large number of "new" white people whom her democracy has admitted to place and power. Against this surging forward of Irish and German, of Russian Jew, Slav and "dago" her social bars have not availed, but against Negroes she can and does take her unflinching and immovable stand, backed by this new public policy of Europe. She trains her immigrants to this despising of "niggers" from the day of their landing, and they carry and send the news back to the submerged classes of their fatherlands.
I shall never forget a meeting of the New York Peace Society in the Hotel Astor at the outbreak of war in the Balkans. Contempt for the weaker, lesser, blacker peoples sat enthroned. All that the society asked for was peace among the big dogs of the white world while they hunted the lesser ones. "We want peace," said a distinguished president, known in all lands as peacemaker, "for nations that deserve peace;" and the audience wildly applauded the war paean of a Servian "prince.”
It was symtomatic [sic]. Peace among the mighty and let the lesser peoples writhe. So today. To many it is not war that alarms them; but the fact that those whites who should fight blacks are fighting each other.
The cause of war is preparation for war. Preparation for war has no reason today but greed. Greed sends Europe as a thief in the night to the homes of the darker peoples. They writhe in impotent agony; but the escape of Japan, and the rise of India and the unrest of Africa and black America all give hope of real peace: of peace built on world democracy, of equality of men of all races and color, and the damnation of all industrial organizations built on theft.
Above the smoke of battle, Brothers, looms a great hope. Is it your hope? I do not know. But it is my hope and it says : "Ho ! everyone that thirsteth - come ye to the waters -" white and black, yellow and brown, rich and poor, ugly and beautiful. If you do not want living waters of life free for these, brothers, you do not want peace - you love war. Of such is the culture of white folk; the will of the world is not so.
Source: W. E. B. Burghardt Dubois, “Of the Culture of White Folk,” The Journal of Race Development, Vol. 7, No. 4 (April 1917), pp. 434-447.