The Prism of Race : W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover

relations pivoted around the white versus black axis. More than racist divisions, however, it was African American resistance to those divisions that placed black Americans-and blackness-at the center of what Du Bois called "the dark world." Between 1919 and the early 1950s, African Americans pioneered the idea of a dark or "colored" world. They gave colored solidarity power-politically, intellectually, and artistically-and used it to foster a global struggle against racism and imperialism. My first book, Colored Cosmopolitanism, traced that struggle from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s. It was not until the late 1980s, however, that unity between "people of color" reached its greatest prominence in the United States. By that time, notions of colored solidarity had largely faded on the global stage. Beginning in the 1950s, decolonization and the partial decline of white supremacy rendered color less central to the lives of many Asians and Africans. Throughout much of the decolonized world, oppression no longer took the form of white imperialists ruling over dark-skinned subjects. Some "colored" countries went to war with each other. Others were riven by internal conflicts between groups defined not by color but by region, religion, language, ethnicity, and class. The declining significance of color on the global stage complicated efforts to achieve colored solidarity within the United States. Migrants from Asia and Africa encountered in the United States a color line that had lost significance in their countries of origin. Meanwhile, disagreements over affirmative action and competition for jobs and neighborhoods further divided people of color from each other. Even as the phrase "people of color" became omnipresent in the United States, relationships among people of color alternated between solidarity, distrust, and outright conflict. A range of large-scale social changes undermined colored solidarity. The economic and educational success of many Asian Americans fueled the idea that certain "model minorities" should be distinguished from other people of color. The "war on drugs" contributed to a surge in mass incarceration that disproportionately devastated urban black communities and created, in the words of legal scholar Michelle Alexander, a "new Jim Crow." A new color line emerged that divided blacks from nonblacks. Marriage patterns reinforced this color line. The boundaries of whiteness were challenged by high rates of intermarriage between Asian Americans and white Americans, on the one hand, and Hispanic Americans and whites, on the other. Intermarriage between whites and blacks remained less common. No Preface xiii grateful for their insightful questions and for their patience. I would like to thank Joanne and Martin Proulx for hosting my family and me as I completed the final manuscript, and for the inspiration of their home and family. My mother, Karena Slate, accompanied me on one of my visits to the home of Mrs. Alexander-Sinclair. While I was in the attic looking through books, she read Dover's correspondence regarding his book American Negro Art. I could never have found a more skillful and determined researcher. An early supporter of the African Student's Association at UCLA, my mother has her own history of connections to the African Diaspora and to the beauty of dreams never achieved. My brother, Peter Slate, taught me to respect dreamers like Dover regardless of the impossibility of their dreams. Emily Mohn-Slate read this manuscript with the care and precision she brings to every day of our life together-and to her own writing as well. It is a rare and instructive joy to live with a poet. By sharing her writing process, Emily models for me the patience necessary to revise and the stubbornness necessary to revise again. Maybe someday I will learn both. I dedicate this book with love and gratitude to Emily. Born a Eurasian 'half-caste' in Calcutta in 1904, Cedric Dover died in England in 1961 a 'colored' man. One of the foremost experts on race in his generation and a leading figure in the movement toward Afro-Asian solidarity, Dover encountered in his own life the central paradox of race in the contemporary world: he knew that race did not exist in blood or bone, even as he knew that the color of a child's skin determined everything from where he could go to school to how long he would live. Dover strove to be, in his words, 'both 'racial' and antiracial at the same time.' His life and work stand at the heart of one of the most creative and politically significant redefinitions of racial identity in the twentieth century the invention of the colored world. This innovative 'biography of race' explores the concept of colored solidarity as enacted in Dover's life as well as the ideas and relationships that connected him and four of his closest African American friends and colleagues: W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson. In doing so, it illuminates a fascinating episode in the intellectual histories of race and cosmopolitanism while offering powerful insights into ongoing debates surrounding racial and ethnic identity today Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Introduction....Pages 1-8 Cedric Dover’s Colored Cosmopolitanism....Pages 9-29 W. E. B. Du Bois and Race as Autobiography....Pages 31-55 Langston Hughes and Race as Propaganda....Pages 57-84 Paul Robeson and Race as Solidarity....Pages 85-112 The Black Artist and the Colored World....Pages 113-140 Conclusion....Pages 141-165 Epilogue....Pages 167-185 Afterword....Pages 187-199 Back Matter....Pages 201-246 A scholar of race and a leader in the Afro-Asian solidarity movement, Cedric Dover embodied the 20th-century cosmopolitan redefinition of racial identity. Tracing Dover's evolution through his relationships with W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, this book tracks racial identity in the twentieth century.