W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”

Abstract

Abstract Investigations of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s public and private writings on ethnic minorities, especially African Americans, have documented her deep-seated racial prejudice and belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy.1 Those prejudices are clearly projected in her infamous essay “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem.” Appearing in the July 1908 number of the American Journal of Sociology, the essay begins with the assertion that the “superior” race must find a practical means for speeding up the “racial evolution” of that “large body of aliens, of a race widely dissimilar and in many respects inferior, whose present status is to us a social injury.”2 Her astonishing suggestion is to have each state enlist all “negroes below a certain grade of citizenship” into a quasi-military organization that would perform dignified labor for society and thereby develop the work habits and personal discipline that will make them productive members of the social body. Yet even as she portrays blacks as inferior beings who threaten the white social order, she commends those African Americans who “in this brief time [i.e., since the end of slavery] have made such great progress” (79); indeed, “more progress in a few generations than any other race has ever done in the same time, except the Japanese” (80). This class of “decent, self-supporting, progressive negroes” is not a “problem” and deserves congratulations from white Americans (80–81).