Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

• Author: Ella Myers
• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Date: 01 February 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718791744
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718791744

Political Theory

2019, Vol. 47(1) 6 –31

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718791744

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Article

Beyond the Psychological

Wage: Du Bois on White

Dominion

Ella Myers1

Abstract

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage”

is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet

of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness

as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a

proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker

peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s

uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life”

endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this

“title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim

Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial

aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows

Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely,

domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation

and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with

whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon

of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not

reducible to it.

Keywords

Du Bois, racism, whiteness, slavery, property

1University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

Corresponding Author:

Ella Myers, Department of Political Science, University of Utah, Gardner Commons, Salt Lake

City, UT 84112, USA.

Email: ella.myers@utah.edu

791744PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718791744Political TheoryMyers

research-article2018

Myers 7

W.E.B. Du Bois’s account of compensatory whiteness within the US regime

of racial capitalism is one of his most important contributions to contempo-

rary political theory.1 Black Reconstruction in America (1935) famously

argues that whiteness served as a “public and psychological wage,” providing

poor whites in the nineteenth and early twentieth century a valuable social

status bound to their categorization as “not-black.” Several elements of this

thesis have proven significant: whiteness offers meaningful “compensation”

(Du Bois’s term) to citizens otherwise exploited by the workings of capital-

ism; the value of whiteness depends on the devaluation of black existence;

and the rewards enjoyed by whites are not only monetary. These insights

have shaped efforts to theorize white identity and to understand the (non)

formation of political coalitions ever since.

Yet this is only one of the ways Du Bois thinks about the gratifications of

whiteness. Alongside his well-known idea of a metaphorical payment—

which assigns to anti-black racism a legible role in capitalist social control—

he also probes what he calls the “irrational” dimensions of “race hate.”2

Beginning around 1920, his writings approach whiteness as a polyvalent for-

mation that delivers multiple benefits to those who bear its “sign”—benefits

that consistently depend on the “badge of inferiority” attached to blackness,

but not all of which are readily reducible to buy-offs that secure allegiance to

capitalism.

This essay addresses one neglected dimension of Du Bois’s thought on

this subject: his astute reading of what I call whiteness as dominion.3 In addi-

tion to the idea of a “public and psychological wage,” Du Bois locates in the

souls of white people a deep, unquestioned belief that the world—nay, the

universe—belongs to those with “pale white faces.”4 To be white in the early

twentieth century, according to Du Bois, is to inhabit a possessive, proprie-

tary orientation—toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in

particular. If whiteness is in part constituted by a beneficial and not exclu-

sively monetary transaction (bearing special significance for those lacking

material resources), Du Bois also suggests that whiteness operates on a dif-

ferent, less transactional, and less class-specific register—as something

closer to an embodied faith with racialized proprietorship at its center.

Du Bois provides a compelling analysis of a white ethos of ownership that

deserves attention, both for the way it productively complicates received

interpretations of Du Bois and for the way it speaks to enduring problems of

racism. His account of whiteness-as-dominion is valuable for several rea-

sons. First, it reveals that whiteness is often lived as a comprehensive world-

view or “religion” that casts the “darker world” as the default property of

those marked “white,” and therefore as both usable and expendable. Second,

Du Bois’s work traces this proprietary imaginary to the material practices and