Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996

Contempt and Pity

Contempt and Pity

Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996

Daryl Michael Scott

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 1997 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scott, Daryl Michael. Contempt and pity: social policy and the image of the damaged Black psyche, 1880–1996 / by Daryl Michael Scott.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2325-2 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8078-4635-x (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Afro-Americans—Psychology. 2. Racism—United States—Psychological aspects. 3. United States—Race relations—Psychological aspects. 4. Social sciences—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

E185.625.S3 1997        96-30232

155.8’496073-dc20                 CIP

Portions of this work have been published previously, in somewhat different form, as The Politics of Pathology: The Ideological Concerns of the Moynihan Controversy, Journal of Policy History 8, no. I (1996): 81–105, copyright 1996 by the Pennsylvania State University Press (reproduced by permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press), and "Justifying Equality: Damage Imagery, Brown v. Board of Education, and the American Creed," Educational Foundations 10 (Summer 1996): 47-67.

01 00 99 98 97 5 4 3 2 1

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Amused Contempt and Pity: Exposing the Black Psyche in an Age of Racial Conservatism, 1880–1920

2 No Consensus, No Crisis, No Outrage: The Experts and Black Personality, 1919–1945

3 Matriarchies without Damaged Personalities: The Black Family in Social Science Imagery, 1928–1945

4 Of Pride and Scientism: Racial and Professional Ideologies and the Muted Image of the Damaged Black Psyche

5 Plumbing for Damage: The Black Psyche in Postwar Social Science

6 The Mark of Oppression: Liberal Ideology and Damage Imagery in Postwar Social Science

7 Justifying Equality: Damage Imagery, Brown v. Board of Education, and the American Creed

8 Beyond the American Creed: Damage Imagery and the Struggle for Race-Conscious Programs

9 Defining Pride and Redefining Racism: The Radical Assault on Liberal Damage Imagery, 1965–1980

10 The Resurgence of Damage Imagery: Representations of the Black Psyche in an Age of Conservative Reform, 1981–1996

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

This book was made possible by the generosity and support of a host of people and institutions. The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carter G. Woodson Institute of the University of Virginia, and Columbia University's Social Science Research Council all underwrote the project. Howard Dodson and his staff were gracious enough to allow me to serve as a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for the Study of Black Culture during my tenure as a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Beyond funding my work, the Woodson Institute provided a clerical support network and an intellectual community that enriched my work in no small way. William Jackson and Pat Sullivan went to great lengths to make my stay productive. Gail Shirley-Warren and Mary Rose facilitated my use of the institute's resources. As director and mentor, the late Armstead Robinson taught me much about this profession, and I often feel his absence. Among the fellows at the institute, Cynthia M. Blair, Mary Ellen Curtin, Bruce Nelson, Mary Osirum, Hannah Rosen, Penny Russell, Marshall Stevenson, Zoe Struthers, and Jeanne Whayne made the experience more enjoyable and memorable. The University of Virginia was a generous host. As friends of the institute, Edward L. Ayers and Nelson Lichtenstein of the history department, along with Eileen Boris of Howard University, were very supportive. The manuscript profited greatly from the advice and criticism of Brian Balogh, a fellow expert on experts. I also benefited from the friendship of and intellectual exchange with a number of graduate students in the departments of history and political science, especially Steve Camarota and Scot French.

This project had its origin as a dissertation at Stanford University. Over the years, Carl N. Degler provided unflagging support and unstinting criticism. No revisionist could find a more supportive adviser. George M. Fredrickson read my work with a critical yet affirming eye. Ever encouraging, Richard Roberts provided wise counsel and effective prodding. No less supportive and engaging were my fellow graduate students, especially Todd Benson, Conrad Hamilton, Leslie Harris, Muriel McClendon, Kevin Mumford, Jenny Solario, Michael Salman, and Bill Tobin. I owe a special debt to Penny Russell, who, both at Stanford and the University of Virginia, listened to a lot of half-baked ideas and aided me in times of professional and personal turmoil.

This work has also benefited from the advice and the intellectual exchanges I have had with a number of scholars at Columbia. My colleagues Betsy Blackmar, Eric Foner, and Curtis Stokes all read and commented on the manuscript. Winston James made a number of useful suggestions and pointed me to a few wonderful sources. Alan Brinkley always encouraged this effort to link intellectual history to the history of social policy. Erica Armstrong, Martha Jones, Anne Kornhauser, and Robyn Spencer took time from their own projects to aid me with mine.

In the profession at large, a number of scholars have critiqued the project. Dorothy Ross, James Oakes, William Darity Jr., and Clarence Walker all gave me much to think about. At an early stage, Ellen Herman served as a sounding board for many of my ideas about E. Franklin Frazier's work. Although he failed to enlist me in the ranks of the neopathologists, Jerry Watts forced me to give more consideration to the motivations behind current damage arguments. Robin K. Magee ever urged me to be true to myself.

Outside the academy, I drew great intellectual sustenance. Greg Hyman and James Pugh first drew my attention to psychological understandings of black oppression, and prompted me to think about the role of damage imagery in the black community and society at large. David Whitfield pointed me to the damage imagery among Afrocentric scholars and let me borrow books that elite libraries had overlooked. At a late stage of the project, Rick Banks offered sound advice and insight. Over the years, Donell R. Mitchell heard most of the arguments before they were written, and he knows how biography shaped this project.

Thanks to the advice of my host of friends and colleagues, I have fortified certain points, modified others, and even dropped a few. These external influences notwithstanding, I must, in keeping with the spirit of the times and academic tradition, take personal responsibility for all errors in judgment and fact.

As great as my professional and intellectual debts may be, my personal debts are greater and must be acknowledged. I would be remiss were I to overlook the years of personal support provided by Karen Desotelle, Howard Fuller, Sharon Kerry Harlan, Laverne Jackson, Arthur Mayberry, and Sande Robinson of Marquette University's Educational Opportunity Program. Special thanks to Robert Lowe and Arnold Mitchem for teaching me to revere the scholarly tradition and for indulging my penchant for no-holds-barred debate. More generally, Marquette served me well. The Ralph Metcalf Chair series brought to Marquette a number of important scholars of the black experience who greatly enriched my education. Professors Robert Hay and Richard M. Bernard went beyond the call of duty to prepare me for graduate school and to encourage my aspiration to write history.

Over the years, my family has been most supportive. My brother Vince and his wife, Miriam, put me up whenever I needed a place of refuge. Back in the 1970s, my brother Anthony brought home all those black books from college and made me a beneficiary of the black studies movement. Besides enduring my absences, my son Brent helped me keep my focus by placing the question squarely: What was a Negro? (Brent, I still don't know quite what a Negro was, but I have learned much about what experts thought the Negro to be. You must decide for yourself whether any of this is useful.) Responding to the call of family, Kesi Shaw and Yolanda Pray traveled from Georgia to New York to lend a helping hand with little Joy Savannah, who seems to be clay in her own hands. My wife, Lelia, knew me when … and believed in me then. (And I'd still walk ten miles every night to see you smile that smile.) And my greatest debt is owed to Mary Scott, my mother. Among other things, she taught me to persevere.

Introduction

This is a history of how social scientists have depicted the personalities of black folk. Over the last generation, most experts on the black experience have assaulted the idea that blacks are and historically have been psychologically damaged. Most academics have viewed damage imagery as racist and conservative. Moreover, they have viewed it as a constant, unchanging feature in social science thought.¹ This study argues that damage imagery has been the product of liberals and conservatives, of racists and antiracists. Often playing on white contempt toward blacks, racial conservatives have sought to use findings of black pathology to justify exclusionary policies and to explain the dire conditions under which many black people live. Often seeking to manipulate white pity; racial liberals have used damage imagery primarily to justify policies of inclusion and rehabilitation. Even when relatively devoid of emotional appeals or damage, the social science image of black personality has historically been sketched by experts motivated or heavily influenced by racial ideologies and politics.

From the aftermath of Reconstruction to the present, the image of black personality as damaged has waxed and waned with the political seasons. Between 1880 and 1920, the period in which conservatives instituted de jure segregation and disfranchisement, the experts who dominated the image of black people depicted African Americans as incapable and undeserving of participation in a modern society. Consistent with their politics, the first generation of professional experts held that the innate inability of the ex-slaves to compete with whites frequently resulted in physical and ultimately psychological degeneration. As the South codified segregation, the experts believed that the separation of the races, far from damaging blacks, was healthful. During the interwar years, liberals replaced conservatives as the hegemonic group of experts on African American life, history, and personality. Many liberals shared the view that blacks were psychologically damaged, including the assumption that in race relations proximity rather than distance was more damaging to blacks. Their conclusions, however, were derived from different premises. In the thinking of racial liberals, black personality damage was an outgrowth of being the subordinate group, not of the inability of blacks to compete with whites. Moreover, in accordance with their professional and political ideologies, liberals downplayed the damage they discovered. In the postwar era, liberals continued to dominate the image of African Americans, but they changed their interpretation of black personality. Now damage imagery loomed large. To secure victory in Brown v. Board of Education, racial liberals were more than willing to stress the damaging effects of racial discrimination on black personality As the Great Society progressed, liberals also invoked damage imagery to justify compensatory, preferential programs for blacks. The liberal embrace of damage imagery would end in the political fallout over the Johnson administration's effort. During the early 1960s, control over the policy implications of black pathology was up for grabs. By the late 1960s, conservatives had control, and most experts associated damage imagery with the effort to maintain white privilege.

Besides challenging the view that the image of the damaged black psyche has always been conservative and racist, this work also serves as a corrective to studies that have located the intellectual origins of postwar racial change in the defeat of scientific racism and in Gunnar Myrdal's evocation of the American creed, which promised democracy and equal opportunity to its citizenry.² The American creed and the biological equality of all races became the rallying cry of postwar liberal activists and policymakers, but they were not the foundation of either Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation, or President Lyndon Johnson's initiative to create preferential, compensatory programs for African Americans. Instead liberals used damage imagery to play upon the sympathies of the white middle class. Oppression was wrong, liberals suggested, because it damaged personalities, and changes had to be made to protect and promote the well-being of African Americans. Rather than standing on the ideals of the American creed and making reparations for the nation's failure to live up to the separate-but-equal doctrine set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson, liberals capitulated to the historic tendency of posing blacks as objects of pity. Liberals proceeded as if most white Americans would have been willing to grant black people equal rights and services only if they were made to appear psychologically damaged and granted a special status as victims. In so doing, then militated against their efforts to eliminate white supremacy. As they assaulted its manifestations in the law, they reinforced the belief system that made whites feel superior in the first place.

The ideals invoked by liberals were those of the therapeutic ethos. In the late nineteenth century, as America shifted from a religious to a secular culture, as industrialization and urbanization took their toll on the psyche, as personality replaced moral character as the key to success, the white middle class became increasingly concerned about its health, particularly its psychological well-being. During the course of the twentieth century, the middle class began to desire not simply wellbeing but also self-fulfillment. Further, it began to believe that the state had a duty to protect and promote the psychic health and well-being of its citizenry. In the post-World War II era, psychology became a vital part of the language of political protest, particularly for liberals. The liberal use of damage imagery to make a psychiatric appeal for black equality tapped into the humanitarian impulse of a culture devoted to psychological well-being and self-fulfillment.³

Along with a number of other scholars, I have found it useful to differentiate among racial conservatives, neoconservatives, liberals, and radicals.⁴ I have used the term racial conservative to describe those who believed that people of African descent should be prevented from entering into the mainstream of society. Toward this end, they supported segregation, the exclusion of blacks from political participation, and, on occasion, the exportation of blacks from America. In contrast, racial liberals believed that blacks should be allowed to assimilate. As part of their opposition to conservative arguments, they insisted upon the ability and desire of blacks to assimilate European culture. Until the postwar era, racial liberals, having witnessed the construction of de jure segregation, viewed state intervention in race relations as conservative. They sought to have government removed from the relations between groups and to make the state color-blind. On economic issues, they tended to believe that social programs aimed at helping labor and the poor would serve the economic needs of blacks. Beginning in 1954, racial liberals increasingly used the state to dismantle segregation and to facilitate the entry of blacks into the mainstream of public life, especially in education, voting, and employment. To achieve integration and equal participation in American institutional life, most postwar liberals were willing to endorse a temporary period of color consciousness by the state and private institutions. Presently racial liberals defend race-conscious programs such as affirmative action as still being necessary because of the continued presence of racism. Going a step further, racial radicals, politically influential since the late 1960s, have rejected the idea of assimilation and have enthusiastically embraced a race-conscious state that promotes equality and fights racism.

In the mid-1960s, a number of racial liberals became disillusioned with the direction of racial liberalism and its response to the social upheavals of the time. These neoconservatives, as they became known, believed that most liberals were too apologetic for what they viewed as the riotous behavior of urban blacks, and emphasized the need for law and order. More important here, they also tended to have serious reservations about preferential programs such as affirmative action and efforts to promote integration such as school busing. They reasserted the traditional racial liberal call for a color-blind state, which would protect only the civil rights of individuals. Alienated from the mainstream of the Democratic Party, which embraced the use of the state to achieve the new goals of racial liberalism, the disaffected racial liberals began to support the Republican Party, which eventually rejected the use of the state to promote economic equality and assimilation. Increasingly, racial neoconservatives have called for a color-blind society as well.

In cataloguing damage, a label that came into fashion in the postwar era, I have sought to apply the term to contemporary understandings of what constituted a mental health or a personality problem. Over the course of the period under study, the threshold for what experts considered a mental health problem continuously shifted, ever lowering. Prior to the late nineteenth century, damage, or a mental health problem, was limited to psychosis and insanity.⁵ Beginning in the late nineteenth century and especially with the rise of psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century, neuroses were discovered and treated as mental health problems.⁶ More generally, however, mental conflicts and mental complexes were discussed as mental problems and understood to be conditions for which individuals should receive treatment.⁷ Among behaviorists, who denied the psyche's existence, personality problems were real enough. They thought in terms of warped behavior patterns or undesirable personality traits.⁸ By the postwar era, experts considered almost any adverse psychological condition or personality trait as damage. Moreover, the pervasiveness of the language of experts in postwar society meant that much about American behavior was discussed with a medicalized vocabulary.

Along with shifting definitions of mental health or personality problems, the last century has also witnessed shifting understandings of the relationship among social, cultural, and individual pathology. During the Progressive Era, some experts, particularly those who believed civilization was a product of biology, held that social pathology was a disease of the social organism caused by damaged or defective individuals or social groups.⁹ On the other hand, other scholars, particularly since the 1930s, have held that social pathology damaged individuals.¹⁰ Some others still emphasized that personal pathology did not necessarily arise among those living in a pathological social environment.¹¹ During the interwar years, the idea that culture shapes personality came to dominate the social sciences. In the hands of some social critics, culture-and-personality theory became a basis for critiquing American culture for its adverse effects on personality.¹² Yet the idea that there were pathological subcultures that damaged their members emerged only during World War II and became important in the works of social scientists in the postwar era.¹³ Much of the controversy surrounding the history of damage imagery arises from the tendency of scholars to read assumptions and theories originating in the 1950s into the writings of earlier experts.

I have treated social science knowledge as imagery. For over four decades, ever since the advent of television, historians have been concerned about imagery. Some scholars have been concerned with the relationship between imagery and truth. In The Image, Daniel Boorstin, for instance, was concerned about a rising tendency among Americans to value outward appearances over reality.¹⁴ Other historians have been less concerned about accuracy than with what the images reveal about American culture and character. This was the approach of the myth and symbol school of the 1950s and early 1960s. Merrill Peterson, in his preface to The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, expressed their approach succinctly: ’’My concern is not primarily with the truth or falsity of the image either as a whole or in its parts, but rather with its illuminations of the evolving culture and its shaping power."¹⁵

Within the history of Africans and peoples of African descent, imagery has been important ever since the renaissance of black history in the 1960s. Few if any scholars have treated the popular and scientific images of African Americans without addressing the question of their accuracy. Most studies of imagery have forthrightly sought to debunk negative stereotypes of black people.¹⁶ The debate over slave personality resulted in numerous studies that challenged what many took to be stereotypes of black people. Deborah Gray White, for instance, has called into question the images of black women as hypersexual.¹⁷ Despite his concern with using the evolving images that whites had of blacks as a means of illuminating white character, George Fredrickson was not neutral in The Black Image in the White Mind. Though he did not write to quarrel with the popular and scientific images that whites had of blacks, Fredrickson wrote as a racial liberal who rejected notions of black inferiority as inaccurate.¹⁸

Like the myth and symbol school, I am not concerned about affirming or refuting the images of blacks put forth by experts. I have sought instead to understand the dominant images of black personality, created by experts and the reasons why those images were dominant. My definition of imagery has been shaped most by a little-known work published four decades ago by the economist Kenneth Boulding. In The Image, Boulding referred to social science imagery as subjective knowledge structures. To his mind, the images springing forth from social science reflected the subjective assessments of the expert, regardless of his or her intentions. The sequence of experiences, as well as ideological and social biases, affects how experts create their own images of the world. With Boulding, I find it useful to think of images as subjective knowledge structures, as the creations of individuals whose own understandings of the world are shaped by subjective factors.¹⁹

When social science images are understood as subjective knowledge structures, the image makers become as important as the images themselves. The social science image is the product of an expert who in turn is influenced by historical, social, personal, and ideologcal factors. This approach to intellectual history, particularly to the study of social science, is certainly not new. For well over a generation, most intellectual historians have rejected the notion that ideas have a life of their own or that they have a certain logic that forces itself upon thinkers.²⁰ For a longer period, intellectual historians, influenced by the sociology of knowledge, have accepted the view that social scientists are unable to overcome bias or the social and intellectual context in which they labor. Social science imagery, most scholars believe, is influenced by factors external to social science as well as by concerns within the various disciplines and communities of inquiry.²¹

I have given less attention to the role that social science institutions and funding sources played in creating the image of the damaged black psyche. In general, the funding sources and those who controlled publishing seemed uninterested in either promoting or preventing the publication of damage imagery. As we shall see, the authors were free to downplay damage imagery even when those commissioning research desired to study black personality problems. The funding sources and the publishers seemed to exert virtually no pressure on social scientists to create or reject damage imagery. While the issue of influence by funding sources lies outside of the purview of this study, I have little doubt that the social science apparatus—the professions, the funding sources, and the publishers—had more to do with the decline than with the rise of damage imagery.

While this project had its origins in thinking about the uses of damage imagery, I have sought to make a contribution to the study of social science history by combining a study of social science ideas with the making of social policy. My focus on the relationship between the discourse of experts and its use in policy making has led me to avoid a general examination of damage imagery in American culture at large. I have not examined damage imagery in popular culture, nor have I systematically examined the thought of intellectuals outside of social science and policy-making circles. I have included the thought of nonexperts only when it has had a demonstrable effect on the thinking of experts or policymakers. Thus, the ideas of novelists such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison are dealt with because their views shaped how experts depicted the black psyche. The use of damage imagery by activists such as Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. and in the popular culture is rich and much deserving of study. Remaining true to its focus on experts and social policy, this work does not attempt to pursue the broader cultural debate.

Even within the realm of social science history relating to black Americans, this work has a limited focus. Given the centrality of people of African descent to the unfolding of American history, it should surprise no one that the study of black people has created a body of literature too enormous to be discussed adequately in a single work.²² I make no mention of many important social science works that did not deal with personality damage, and I have discussed many others only as they relate to my theme. I have not, for instance, included a discussion of St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis, for the psychological well-being of black people was not a major aspect of their project.²³ Most notably, I have not attempted to summarize, not to mention analyze, most of the important contributions of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma to the study of black people.²⁴ This book is unabashedly thesis driven.

This work, no different from any other, is a subjective knowledge structure. As a professional historian, I have sought to represent the works and motivations of the numerous experts accurately. Yet this work reflects the various influences—personal, ideological, and professional—that have shaped my thinking. In particular, my disagreement with certain integrationist assumptions looms large in my analysis. Like many other blacks who believe in pluralism, I take issue with the integrationist belief that black institutions are inherently inferior.²⁵ This idea underpins the widely held belief that black people should not create or preserve private-sphere institutions to address their group needs and aspirations. My distaste for the herd mentality among intellectuals led me to question the prevailing readings of the black family literature and how scholars have viewed damage imagery in general. So strong and so rigid was the orthodoxy that those seeking to join the profession would not dare to take the social science literature on its own terms.

Most important, the origin of this study lies in my opposition to the use of damage imagery in the process of making and justifying social policy. I believe that depicting black folk as pathological has not served the community's best interest. Again and again, contempt has proven to be the flip side of pity. And through it all, biological and cultural notions of black inferiority have lived on, worsening the plight of black people. Moreover, while conservative imagery has justified neglect and draconian policies, liberal imagery has made the black community wary of self-examination and self-criticism. This is understandable. After all, the resulting knowledge has historically been used against the perceived interests of the black community. This has been a most unfortunate development for a people in need of self-knowledge, the basis for all efforts at regeneration and empowerment. Given the history of the political use of social science, I believe experts who study social groups, particularly those who engage in policy debates, should place the inner lives of people off limits.

The first four chapters of the book cover the discussion of black personality in social science from 1880 to 1945. Chapter 1 analyzes Du Bois's pioneering efforts to disclose black people's inner sufferings to whites in hopes of gaining white sympathy and thereby obtaining equal rights. While the racial conservatives who dominated the social science image of blacks believed many of them were damaged, his appeal for ending social oppression fell on deaf ears. The Progressive Era experts were generally concerned with the health of whites, not of African Americans. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss how the social science image of blacks in the interwar years, an image promoted by racial liberals, downplayed the idea that blacks had damaged personalities and virtually never appealed to white sympathy. Contrary to the widespread belief among scholars, most experts, including E. Franklin Frazier, did not argue that the black family produced damaged people. Their concern, lost in condemnation until now, was to defend black people from the charge that African culture and biology caused black family problems. In Chapter 4, the reluctance of interwar experts to depict blacks as damaged is ascribed to the tug of scientism and the racial pride of black experts.

Chapters 5 through 8 cover the postwar period, when racial liberals, committed to black equality, produced damage imagery to illuminate the inhumanity of racial oppression and to support policy efforts to obtain racial equality. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the damage imagery put forth by experts and the motivation behind their efforts. Chapter 7 tells how the social science community; going against more than four decades of theory, argued that segregation caused significant psychological damage among blacks, and explores how Chief Justice Earl Warren used damage imagery to unify the Supreme Court and to garner support for ending segregation. Chapter 8 explores how the Johnson administration's attempt to justify race-conscious programs failed as a result of the conservatives’ successful co-optation of liberal imagery.

Chapters 9 and 10 explore the decline and rebirth of damage imagery since the mid-1960s. Chapter 9 explores how radical social scientists, mobilized by the debate generated by the Moynihan Report, assaulted the idea that blacks had been damaged by racial oppression. In the last chapter, I explore how damage imagery has recently resurfaced in public and social science debates.

Contempt and Pity

1. Amused Contempt and Pity: Exposing the Black Psyche in an Age of Racial Conservatism, 1880–1920

In the late nineteenth century, as the disciplines professionalized and university-trained experts asserted their authority over knowledge, those who opposed the entry of blacks into the mainstream of American society dominated the image of the African American. These racial conservatives operated primarily from within a biological framework and argued for the innate inferiority of people of African descent. The African's biological makeup, it was argued, limited his or her ability to create or be assimilated into an advanced civilization. Racial conservatism was limited by neither region nor discipline. In the North as well as the South, biologists, physicians, and race psychologists pointed out the physical differences that explained the alleged cultural and intellectual inferiority of black peoples.¹ Ethnologists documented the backwardness of African peoples. Historians highlighted the folly of Reconstruction, the moment in history in which people of African descent played a prominent role in the nation's political life.²

Those who used social science to argue for the inclusion of Africans in the mainstream of American life tended to accept the biological paradigm but argued for either the equality of the races or, at the very least, the ability of the African to function in an advanced civilization. Many experts who accepted the inferiority of blacks rejected the idea that the race's biology determined social destiny. Racial liberalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era rested more on the experts’ confidence in their ability to direct social evolution than on the belief in the biological equality of the races.³

While the common humanity of black people led some experts to support the cause of black inclusion, the social science debate over the place of African Americans in society generally eschewed humanitarian arguments. Yet those who engaged in the race problem would occasionally examine the human side. In The Souls of Black Folks, published during the early years of Progressive reform, W E. B. Du Bois explored the subjective aspect of oppression for a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity⁴ His collection of essays sought to elicit the sympathy of educated, middle-class whites who were concerned about their own mental well-being. Unfortunately, the experts who dominated the study of African Americans at the turn of the century were racial conservatives who rejected Du Bois's assumptions about the nature of black personality, and the causes of psychic sufferings of those of African descent. An examination of Du Bois's appeal and the response of students of the race problem reveals that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries posing blacks as damaged was more likely to elicit contempt than pity.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Damage Imagery, and the Rising Therapeutic Ethos

On February 28, 1893, William Edward Burghart Du Bois, an African American studying at the University of Berlin, put aside his work to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday. Afterwards the young scholar assessed his life and sought to divine his future. He wrote of feeling a special mission and struck the pose of a man of destiny—I am either a genius or a fool—who was willing to sacrifice his own aspirations, convinced that my own best development is now one and the same with the best development of the world. He would commit himself to his race, taking for granted that their best development means the best development of the world. He made ambitious plans "to make