Conservation Of Races Research Articles

What Counts as a Collective Gift? Culture and Value in Du Bois’ The Gift of Black Folk

AbstractIn The Conservation of Races, Du Bois advocates that African Americans hold on to their distinctiveness as members of the black race because this enables them to participate in a cosmopolitan process of cultural exchange in which different races collectively advance human civilization by means of different contributions. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Tommie Shelby have criticized the position that Du Bois expresses in that essay as a problematic form of racial essentialism. This article investigates how Du Bois’ 1924 book The Gift of Black Folk escapes or fails to escape that criticism. It is easy to worry that the diversity of what Du Bois in this book is willing to treat as a black contribution to the development of America pushes us from the problem of essentialism to the other extreme: a lack of any conceptual constraints whatsoever on what can count as a black gift. I will argue that recognizing the cultivation of historical memory as a form of cultural activity is key to understanding the concept's unity.

Du Bois and Hegelian Idealism

In a crossed-out section in his Fisk University commencement address on Otto von Bismarck, W. E. B. Du Bois mentions that Hegel was one of the figures that influenced him early on in his intellectual development. I argue that although Du Bois uses Hegelian language and employs a Hegelian conception of history in his address “The Conservation of Races,” he abandons both in his essay “Sociology Hesitant.” He became critical of the teleological conception of history because it rests on determinism, which in his view denies the possibility for social change. With what I call his “mystical holism,” Du Bois is at odds with Hegel’s methodological holism, a distinguishing characteristic of absolute idealism. Du Bois’s dynamic idealism, which grows out of opposition to Hegelian idealism, leaves us with hope for a world without racism or at the very least in a better position to develop idealism as an anti-racist system of philosophical thought.

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Conservation of Races: A Piece of Ecological Ancestry

This essay examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for the “conservation of races” as an instance of an ecological legacy in African American thought that challenged traditional divisions between humans and nonhumans. Evoking contemporary models of rhetoric, I show that Du Bois implicitly figured blackness as an inventive rhetorical ecology that was distributed through material things and environments. Promoting the conservation of that ecology, his sociological work gestured toward a worldly, more-than-human ideal of justice. I explore how his ecological articulation of conservation resonated with Progressive Era environmental conservation in its rejection of ideals of purity but pressed beyond its economic materialism and human essentialism. Ultimately, I argue, Du Bois leaves us with a unique picture of conservation as a cooperative practice of identification in which both human and nonhuman participants come to articulate as interdependent parts of a larger ecology, a process that involves memory at a lived, material level.

"Du Bois" / "Race"

Contemporary philosophers have devoted considerable attention to W. E. B. Du Bois's definition of race in "The Conservation of Races" (1897). Indeed, they have given more attention to Du Bois's definition of race in that essay than to his treatment of any other philosophical issue elsewhere in his writings. Nearly all that attention can be traced to Kwame Anthony Appiah's controversial, early engagement with Du Bois in "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race" (1985), an expanded version of which Appiah published as the second chapter of In My Father's House (1992). "Du Bois" and "race" belong together in the lexicon of Appiah's evolving philosophical thought because beginning with that early engagement, Du Bois has consistently served Appiah as a touchstone for measuring the significance of his own important contributions to the philosophy of race.

Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity

Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity

On Paragraph Four of "The Conservation of Races"

On Paragraph Four of "The Conservation of Races"

On Paragraph Four of “The Conservation of Races”

Research Article| November 01 2014 On Paragraph Four of “The Conservation of Races” Nahum Dimitri Chandler Nahum Dimitri Chandler University of California, Irvine Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2014) 14 (3): 255–288. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.14.3.0255 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nahum Dimitri Chandler; On Paragraph Four of “The Conservation of Races”. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 November 2014; 14 (3): 255–288. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.14.3.0255 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Racial Norms: A Reinterpretation ofDuBois' “The Conservation of Races”

AbstractIargue that standard explanations ofDuBois' theory of race inappropriately characterize his view as attempting to provide descriptive criteria for races. Such an interpretation makes it both susceptible to Appiah's circularity objection and alienates it fromDuBois' central project of solidarity—which is the central point of “Conservation.”Ipropose that we should understand his theory as providing a normative account of race: an attempt to characterize what some races should be in terms of what other races are. In providing such an accountIwill also show how my interpretation ofDuBois' criteria avoids the circularity objection by making the criteria central to the project of solidarity. Thus, this interpretation avoids whatItake to be the two main problems with standard descriptive explanations ofDuBois' criteria.

The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races”

I argue that, despite all the attention philosophers have given W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “The Conservation of Races,” they have missed some of his distinctions between ways of thinking about what race is. Recognizing this leads us to note an ambiguity in the claim that race is a social construction: the ambiguity between a focus on politics or culture. I claim that, although there are problems with Du Bois’s cultural account of race, it contains valuable insights about the nature of racism and helps us to confront the question of whether there can and ought to be race after racism.

“Our Duty to Conserve”: W. E. B. Du Bois's Philosophy of History in Context

When restored to its historical context, W. E. B. Du Bois's “The Conservation of Races” emerges less as a contribution to the debate about the legitimacy of the concept of race, which is how it tends to be read today, and more as an intervention in the debate about the impact of so-called miscegenation on the African American population. Du Bois's contribution is situated in relation to the positions held by Frederick Douglass, Edward Blyden, and Alexander Crummell. Particular attention is paid to the way Du Bois and Kelly Miller used the inaugural meeting of the American Negro Academy to respond to Frederick Hoffman's racist study, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, which in the context of social Darwinism had a dramatic impact on how mixed-race people were seen. Du Bois argued that African Americans should not divide on the basis of degrees of racial purity but unite around their common ideals and a hope for the future in the midst of continuing oppression.

Notes on race, diaspora, and humanism

The essay discusses, in chronological order, three important black texts on race: DuBois’s 1897 speech “The Conservation of Races,” Charles Johnson’s collection of essays Being and Race (1988) and, finally, Paul Gilroy’s critical assessment of postcolonial identity politics in Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000). Though in ways significantly differing, all of these texts struggle to undo the limitations of racialized discourse and, in its stead, introduce new forms of theorizing racial differences. Rather than being grounded in biological or even cultural differences, here race appears to be geared to variations of behavior that need to be conceptualized with respect to highly ideological structures of perception. Since postcolonial texts on race usually respond to longstanding assumptions about the nature and role of racial differences in human society, I begin by briefly delineating the history of the race concept as it evolves from late eighteenth through the nineteenth-century seems appropriate.

Identity or Roots, Idol or Icon?

What does race add to class, as both are secular social categories? The difficulties of invidious nationalism and the conservation of races that would not foment holy wars of terror persist for both secular or postsecular theorists. Postsecular thinkers are in a stronger position than a secular theorist to challenge religiously inflected social integrations, invidious nationalism, and fundamentalism. Unmasking them as social formation proffers an external criticism, to speak of them as sacralizations of identity exposes them at the root. Secular theorists ignore postsecular sensibility at the peril of failing to challenge the invidious claim to roots that secular nationalism and religious fundamentalism profess.

Racial Discourse and Black-Japanese Dynamics in Ishmael Reed's "Japanese by Spring"

Ishmael Reed's work usually elicits strong responses, both positive and negative. As someone who for years has aired dirty laundry of black, white, yellow and brown community, Reed feels free to critique ethnic US with impunity (Airing t79). Despite controversy, he creates an innovative way of exploring US ethnic literature by focusing on dynamic among US ethnic groups. By placing Blacks and various Asian and Asian American groups in conversation with one another, he joins such African American writers as Octavia Butler and Paul Beatty and Chinese American writers as Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, and Gish Jen in exploring elements of racial discourse that go beyond black-white continuum. Such interchanges sometimes result in harmony and consensus, other times in disagreement and dispute. Both scenarios demand a mode of examination that can make sense of multiple ethnic experiences. In focusing on his exploration of an African American/Japanese dynamic in Japanese by Spring, this article will examine Reed's transference of black-white racial dynamic onto Japanese. Within an American context, he uses Japanese as a metaphor for white supremacy and allies them with American Blacks in struggle for racial equality in America. In doing so, he simultaneously privileges a multiethnic perspective and undermines that perspective by reinforcing black-white racial paradigm. Reed's interrogations of multiple ethnic groups demonstrate that all multiculturalisms are not created equal. Uncritical multiculturalist literary approaches, or approaches mostly concerned with acknowledging existence of various ethnic groups, fail to address fiction like Reed's that interrogates relationships between ethnic groups. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield note how many efforts at multiculturalism protect status quo that erases ethnic difference and fails to engender change: you thought there were mainly two races, multiculturalism insisted there are at least five.... If you were led to assume that American would be better if color-blind, then multiculturalism shocked you by showing that color is American culture (3). This brand of multiculturalism draws attention to diversity, but does little to explain how those ethnic groups interact with each other. literary criticism that it spawns often uncritically lumps such groups under label of minority and assumes that their experience is shaped wholly by dominant culture. By doing so, it overlooks dynamic between ethnicities. Conversely, David Palumbo-Liu speaks of a multiculturalism that reveals dynamics between ethnic groups. Palumbo-Liu asserts that critical multiculturalism explores fissures, tensions, and sometimes contradictory demands of multiple cultures, rather than (only) celebrating plurality of cultures by passing through them appreciatively (Introduction 5). Instead of glossing over complex relationships between ethnic groups, this brand of multiculturalism seeks to understand clashes. Reed clearly practices this form of multiculturalism, for Sharon Jessee lauds his fictional vision of the multiculture as a sort of collective to be created through cultural exchanges between individuals and groups which will revitalize not only their individual experiences but their as well (5). Critical cultural discourse produced by scholars of color recognizes context created by other cultural realities. Around time W.E.B. Du Bois formulated his notion of double consciousness as it related to Blacks at turn of century in Souls of Black Folk, he also placed African Americans in a global context in his 1897 essay, The Conservation of Races: The American Negro has always felt an intense personal interest in discussions as to origins and destinies of races (38). Du Bois's use of plural implies that Blackness must be situated among different cultural realities. …

Sterling A. Brown and the Afro-Modern Moment

When Robert Penn Warren wrote his highly ironic line Nigger, your breed ain't metaphysical (321), he compressed into five deceptively economic feet nearly a half-millennium of hegemonic philosophy, both its rhetorical strategies and underlying presuppositions. Buzzard, carrier of the ostracizing power of discourse, the trope which declares the otherness of the (Nielsen 117), does not simply assert inferiority but reconstructs and reaffirms the mutually exclusive mythic realms white and black must inhabit in order to sustain five hundred years of radical inequity. As ametaphysical, (or, better yet, blackness) must exist beyond the aesthetic, beyond the redemptive possibilities central to the humanistic tradition of arts and letters. As fictive signifier of the nonwhite (Nielsen 10), blackness serves as a repository of reifying antitheses: anti-intellectual, illiterate, subhuman, and ahistorical. All in all, Warren constructs a blackness thoroughly banished to the margins of the human community, a blackness of radical absence proclaiming the final and ultimate abstraction of damning eternal sameness. Indeed Warren (and by extension what I will call hegemonic or conventional modernism) achieves much of his coherence through the assertion of objectified blackness, through a tropic vocabulary of necessarily reductive poses impervious to change over time (see Nielsen, North). Yet it is precisely the cultural force of these poses and the pervasive nature of the objectifying language which would drive James Weldon Johnson, William Pickens, Carter G. Woodson, and even W. E. B. Du Bois (in Conservation of Races) to advance a countering but often equally reductive discourse. Johnson's ragtime piano players, for example, are guided by their natural musical instinct and their extraordinary sense of rhythm; thus Johnson effectively reinscribes essentializing tropes in an attempt to assert a negro exceptionalism worthy of notice and, ultimately, of citizenship (20). The profound condensation of Warren's single line was not lost on Sterling A. Brown, whose famous retort some years later undermined entirely the conception of ahistorical blackness. His reply in a 1974 interview with Steven Jones, Cracker, your breed ain't exegetical, appropriates Warren's five-foot economy in order to parody both the sound and sense of his poetry. Through such signifying Brown points to a crucial blindness which makes possible an assertion of ametaphysicality. Signaling much more than a lack of specific exposition, Brown alludes to a profound illiteracy, a lack of attention to a broad corpus of texts and cultural idioms which assert African American complexity and change. So, too, Brown remained skeptical of these countering tropes on the part of New Negroes, tropes which could not account for the burgeoning complexities he found in Southern life. Positioning himself outside (or perhaps beyond) the two competing discourses, Brown questions the fundamental assumption (or acceptance) of ontological blackness, and so begins to formulate an Afromodernism (both a poetic vocabulary and a theory of folk culture) capable of exploring a more dynamic range in African American being. In short, Brown embarks upon an artistic and aesthetic project which fundamentally reconceives modernity. Appropriating contemporary notions concerning subjectivity and process, and applying them to a range of idiomatic expressions and rituals, Brown reworks the language and tropes he inherited in order to explore the inventive ways in which African Americans articulate their modernity; that is, express a presence, a historicity, an ongoing engagement with the contemporary moment. A reading of Odyssey of Big Boy, both within and beyond Southern Road, helps to illustrate Brown's larger concerns. Brown introduces Southern Road with an allusion to travel and experience, to independence, self-discovery, and the romantic possibilities of immortality. …

Transferrin polymorphism of some races in a live gene bank of common carp

Conservation of genetic variety of strains maintained in live gene banks is a high-priority task. Description of the genetic structure should be the first step in this work. By applying different biochemical-genetic markers such as transferrin and isoenzymes, the individuals and the populations could be well characterised genetically. Based on this, breeding programs as well as conservation of races can be carried out without disappearance of genes from the pool. The aim of this survey was to describe the polymorphism of transferrins of carp strains in the live gene bank maintained at the Fish Culture Research Institute, Szarvas, Hungary. Biochemical polymorphism was studied by standard methods of horizontal electrophoresis in starch gel as well as vertical electrophoresis in polyacrylamid gel. A total of 840 breeders of 15 carp races were sampled. Identification of transferrin genotypes was made by the traditional classification. In the 15 carp populations, 20 transferrin genotypes were described (AA, BB, DD, EE, FF, GG, AB, AD, AF, AG, BD, BE, BG, DE, DF, DG, EF, EG, FG, and FH) in the presence of 7 alleles (A, B, D, E, F, H and G). The frequency of allele D was very high (0.34–0.62) in all populations except one (koi). It was remarkable that the frequency of allele D was very low (0.0698) in this group showing the highest variability, while the frequency of allele B, being very rare in all other races, was relatively high (0.27) in the group of koi.