WEEK 12 INTRODUCTION TO READINGS W.E.B. DuBois, “The Concept of Race” (1940) and “TheDamnation of Women” (1920). William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born in 1868 inGreat Barrington, Massachusetts. He attended FiskUniversity in Nashville, Tennessee, then HarvardUniversity. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on the impact of theHaitian Revolution on the antislavery movement in theUnited States, and in 1895 became the first African-American to take a doctorate there. As a public figureearly in the twentieth century, DuBois advocated full andimmediate racial equality. He therefore opposed the ideasof Booker T. Washington (the founding director of theTuskegee Institute), who argued that African-Americansshould not seek political and social equality until after“improving” their own condition and gaining economicindependence. In 1909, DuBois co-founded the NationalAssociation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).DuBois edited the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, until 1932.DuBois’s best-known work is probably The Souls of BlackFolk (1903), a collection of essays which eloquentlyrecords both the cruelties of white racism and the resistance of African-Americans to it. DuBois died in Ghana in 1963. WEEK 12 QUESTIONS W.E.B. DuBois, excerpt from “The Concept of Race” in Duskof Dawn (1940) 1. Why does DuBois reject scientific accounts of theexistence of distinct races? 2. What understanding of racial categories does DuBois drawfrom recounting his family history?W.E.B. DuBois, “The Damnation of Women,” in Darkwater(1920) 3. What does DuBois mean by “damnation of women”? 4. How has this “damnation” affected African-American women in particular? 5. How have African-American women responded to this,according to
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