W.E.B. Du Bois and Luke Sawyer each identify the pursuit of individual economic gain as chief among the challenges facing African Americans in their struggle for racial equality at the turn of the twentieth century. Du Bois, a political giant and literary master, disdainfully associates the hunger for profit and position with vulgarity, pretense, and ostentation—all qualities that carry with them inflections of the lower classes and poor taste—and further links these “money-getters” with political and economic suicide. Luke Sawyer, a fictional character in Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces, also identifies the relentless drive for profit that informs the American Dream with spiritual, political, and social death. Each man issues the same corrective:
…show more content…
Linking these stories genealogically allows Hopkins to interrogate the science of evolutionary inheritance, engage history on the level of the epic, and depict the socioeconomic motivation for the continuation the US system of racial classification pre- and post-abolition. In Race: The History of an Idea, Thomas Gosset makes the now familiar argument that for nineteenth-century social scientists, “heredity was considered immensely more important than environment in conditioning the development of society, and to many social theorists heredity meant mainly race” (144). Gosset goes on to explain that Darwinist biological theory “provided a new rational within which nearly all the old convictions about race superiority and inferiority could find a place…. The idea of natural selection was translated to a struggle between individual members of a society, between members of classes of a society, between different nations, and between different races” (145). By 1900, the idea that both intelligence and traits of character tend to be inherited was widely accepted, and one of the proofs of this contention was believed to be found in racial differences (Gosset 158). G. Stanley Hall, a Harvard-educated psychologist, developed social Darwinist theory in the American context to claim that character traits correlate with biological race, creating a hierarchy among the human species that privileges white people and justifies the subjugation of people of
Linking these stories genealogically allows Hopkins to interrogate the science of evolutionary inheritance, engage history on the level of the epic, and depict the socioeconomic motivation for the continuation the US system of racial classification pre- and post-abolition. In Race: The History of an Idea, Thomas Gosset makes the now familiar argument that for nineteenth-century social scientists, “heredity was considered immensely more important than environment in conditioning the development of society, and to many social theorists heredity meant mainly race” (144). Gosset goes on to explain that Darwinist biological theory “provided a new rational within which nearly all the old convictions about race superiority and inferiority could find a place…. The idea of natural selection was translated to a struggle between individual members of a society, between members of classes of a society, between different nations, and between different races” (145). By 1900, the idea that both intelligence and traits of character tend to be inherited was widely accepted, and one of the proofs of this contention was believed to be found in racial differences (Gosset 158). G. Stanley Hall, a Harvard-educated psychologist, developed social Darwinist theory in the American context to claim that character traits correlate with biological race, creating a hierarchy among the human species that privileges white people and justifies the subjugation of people of