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[Expositions 13.1 (2019) 112–120] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Tracking Failures, Imagining Alternatives:  

Du Bois and the Myth of Guaranteed Progress 

 

THEODRA BANE 

Villanova University 

 

 

Much of what surrounds contemporary controversies along the color line—the central problem of 

the twentieth century according to W.E.B. Du Bois—in the popular rhetoric and imaginary is the 

inexplicability of the problem’s resurgence today after over 50 years of Civil Rights “victories” 

and demonstrative “social progress.” There is a cultural narrative of inevitable, collective 

betterment that appears an inevitable result of the wider acknowledgement and recognition of 

difference within the culture at large. In this light, our contemporary moment—with its rise in 

white supremacist violence, xenophobic rhetoric, and entrenched, facile identitarianism—has the 

illusion of rupture rather than the spirit of continuity. The academy’s promise of liberal education 

in the face of a “crisis of the humanities” also offers up this narrative of progress as programmatic. 

On this view, dismissing the power of the liberal arts means undermining an accounting of our 

guaranteed progress as a society. After all, without the spaces to study and analyze the past, how 

can we track how far we have come in the present? I turn to this practice within the humanities to 

think about what such assumptions conceal. What promises of new worlds or future liberations are 

obscured when we take progress as a given? Counter to the an account of ongoing betterment, 

perhaps a new way forward in the face of present tensions is the tracking of all the failures of 

human striving that have created the present moment. While this shift may not be popular—or 

labeled as unduly pessimistic—it is not an unprecedented shift in perspective. Both within and 

without the academy, the thoughts of W.E.B. Du Bois prove fruitful in combatting the myth of 

guaranteed progress, or the promise of social evolutionary advancement through understanding 

alone.1  

In this brief analysis, I argue that one of the most important legacies left to us by Du Bois is his 

practice of shifting the litmus of understanding from a reliance on a progressive guarantee to the 

necessity of ongoing struggle. Through this new frame, an analysis of power and the recognition 

of our responsibilities towards others beyond the given horizons of conceptual possibility are 



113 Bane 

illuminated by explicitly acknowledging and analyzing our moments of failure. In this way, Du 

Bois insisted that a liberal education must contribute towards developing the toolkit of 

participation and praxis to maintain and advance the work of justice. 

Du Bois’s work presents us with a powerful interdisciplinary vision. This interdisciplinarity 

also offers creative and fruitful engagements that highlight the responsibility of critically re-

examining one’s thoughts over a lifetime of work. The development of Du Bois’s corpus tracks a 

shift from Victorian moralism and “Talented Tenth” rhetoric to joining the Communist Party and 

exploring Pan-Africanism as a movement. I want to think through this ideological shift as a mark 

of this critical responsibility on the part of Du Bois. In particular, this trajectory indicates a 

willingness to encounter head on where the myth of progress fails. Du Bois realized the necessity 

of ongoing critical engagement through scholarship and activism, which lead to the vital 

recognition that inherently progressive narratives of liberal education are false. As George 

Ciccariello-Maher elaborates, the research of Du Bois “rediscovered something else in the process: 

a tragic dialectic of reversals, defeats, and missed opportunities; not a long but heroic march toward 

a brilliant future but ‘a brief moment in the sun’ before retreating, under the weight of white 

supremacist terror, ‘back again toward slavery’; the ostensible built-in progress of the dialectic of 

history folded back onto itself, beaten and bloodied” (156–157). In this spirit of rediscovery, I turn 

to the texts of John Brown, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, and Black Reconstruction to 

analyze how Du Bois uses the tools of moral imperative, immanent critique, and historical 

materialism to demonstrate instances of failed progress and promise, providing ample evidence 

where the promise of progress “fell back on itself,” re-instantiating familiar forms of violence. 

Reframing the analysis in terms of marking failures as opposed to tracking progress expands the 

horizon of the possible for Du Bois towards new ways forward. New possibilities of relation with 

one another emerge as alternatives once we have properly understood our history beyond imposed 

narrative assumptions of progress.  

Du Bois’s analysis of the life and actions of John Brown, written in 1909, provides a powerful 

analysis of failure. The raid on Harper’s Ferry and attempted insurrection to end slavery in 1859 

was a failure in its own standing, and yet was a powerful catalyst towards new liberatory futures 

beyond the limits of the law. There was a moral power and force to John Brown’s character that 

recognized the urgency of the moment and the necessity of breaking the law to achieve a greater 

end—that of liberty and justice for all: 



Du Bois and the Myth of Guaranteed Progress 114 

 

No casuistry of culture or of learning, of well-being or tradition moved him in the 

slightest degree: “Slavery is wrong,” he said,—“kill it.” Destroy it—uproot it, stem, 

blossom, and branch; give it no quarter, exterminate it and do it now. Was he 

wrong? No. The forcible staying of human uplift by barriers of law, and might, and 

tradition is the most wicked thing on earth. It is wrong, eternally wrong. It is wrong 

by whatever name it is called, on in whatever guise it lurks, and whenever it 

appears. But it is especially heinous, black, and cruel when it masquerades in the 

robes of the law and justice and patriotism. So was American slavery clothed in 

1859, and it had to die by revolution, not by milder means. And this men knew. 

They had known it a hundred years. Yet they shrank and trembled. (John Brown 

340–341) 

 

The mere knowledge that something is corrupt is not enough to encourage action. Here, Du Bois 

points to the importance of tracking the moral failures of the broader society in response to injustice 

as a pattern of awareness. The essential status of an eternal moral wrong can go unacknowledged 

in a moral universe that only considers individual practices as relevant for judgment and 

consideration. The unique moral fortitude and conviction of individuals taken against an expansive 

institution raises new questions of morality for Du Bois. The burden of failure does not fall on the 

actions of John Brown as a morally upstanding individual striving for a liberatory future for all. 

Rather, the burden of failure falls on a society that does not foster or encourage such higher actions. 

The moral imperative for right action is then no longer a problem of individual resilience. It is 

expanded into a political question. Society fails when the tools and actions to take on essential 

moral concerns are put aside for the sake of stability. 

The investigation of John Brown as a whole person beyond the singular effort of Harper’s Ferry 

opens a vital space to critique the locus of moral imperatives. By fleshing out the fullness of an 

individual, Du Bois paradoxically provides an opportunity to theorize against the individualistic 

limits of the social imaginary. Instead of honing in on the solitary exemplar of the man, Du Bois 

utilizes Brown’s full biography to flesh out the broader stakes of a new moral practice that would 

facilitate further revolutionary—and necessary—right action: “Freedom has come to mean not 

individual caprice or aberration, but social self-realization in an endless chain of selves; and 



115 Bane 

freedom for such development is not the denial but the central assertion of evolutionary theory” 

(John Brown 379). In other words, it is a collective striving and group relation that becomes the 

marker of moral right action or failure for Du Bois far more than the individuated exception. As 

Du Bois demonstrates through the biographical investigation of Brown, he worked with Black folk 

and not merely for them. John Brown chose an alternative mode of daily practice beyond the 

singular, focal action of Harper’s Ferry. What does this documentation then reveal about the social 

failures of American life? The moral imperative reaches beyond the Kantian rational subject to 

become a communal effort with an anchored history and immediate demand in the present political 

moment. Society thus needs a broader moral imperative beyond the reduction of morality to the 

question of singular persons and their behaviors.  

I would like to pause here on the call that Du Bois makes to the popular language of his day. 

The turn to “evolutionary theory” to bolster this new vision of an intersubjective, socially minded 

morality attempts to enter into the discourse of difference at the turn of the twentieth century 

beyond the popular model of eugenics, yet still comprehensive within a Social Darwinist 

framework. He goes further:  

 

This, then, is the truth: the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression, even 

though the cost be blood. Freedom of development and equality of opportunity is 

the demand of Darwinism and this calls for the abolition of hard and fast lines 

between races, just as it called for the breaking down of barriers between classes. 

Only in this way can the best in humanity be discovered and conserved, and only 

thus can mankind live in peace and progress. (John Brown 395) 

 

There is a turn to the guaranteed myth of evolutionary progress to support his arguments for racial 

equality at this time. This turn toward the lexicon of inclusion into a mainstream discourse is an 

attempt to fit into a wider ideological framework. While the critique of individualism stands in its 

own right, there is still an attempt to include this counter-narrative into a larger mainstream 

discourse. This intellectual move presents itself as a shift towards a diversifying framework of 

Social Darwinism to get around overtly racist eugenics. If Du Bois can make his argument in the 

language of those who monopolize the discourse towards a shared end, then perhaps the critique 



Du Bois and the Myth of Guaranteed Progress 116 

will be taken up across the field, and striving for racial equality may become a reality. However, 

this turn as a tactic did not have the power that he intended. 

Through further engagement and scholarship, Du Bois realized that utilizing the language of 

the powerful that performs exclusion and monopolizes discourse is itself a failure—it cannot be 

co-opted for the effective work of betterment across difference. In Darkwater: Voices from within 

the Veil, Du Bois critiques the strategy of incorporation that he once utilized in his own theory. He 

does this by turning to immanent critique. This methodological pivot from moralism grants deeper 

arguments to support the claim that it is no longer the responsibility of those “within the veil” to 

strive to meet an impossible standard. Rather, the exclusion of non-white voices is a structural 

failure within the very terms of discourse: “Instead of standing as a great example of the success 

of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood America has taken her place as an awful 

example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow peoples are concerned 

[…] America, Land of Democracy, wanted to believe in the failure of democracy so far as darker 

people were concerned” (Darkwater 28). Reasoning one’s way into inclusion or recognition by 

the means set forth by the dominant discourse is now understood as a logical impossibility. The 

hegemonic modes of discourse fail by their own standards. By marking the failure of inclusion as 

an intentional practice, Du Bois shifted his own practice of writing and thinking. He no longer 

embraced the language of the current moment for the sake of incorporation, but turned to the 

practice of immanent critique to make explicit the mechanisms that kept fast the color line. This 

methodological turn provides deeper explication into the points where inclusion and incorporation 

fail. The burden of failure has a different locus of responsibility—that of the systemic structures 

of white supremacy. Therefore, any attempt at striving for recognition or inclusion in existing 

terms is already a failed project. 

Du Bois further articulates this turn towards immanent critique in his 1932 speech “Education 

and Work”:  

 

Let there be no misunderstanding about this, no easy-going optimism. We are not 

going to share modern civilization just by deserving recognition. We are going to 

force ourselves in by organized far-seeking effort—by out-thinking and out-

flanking the owner of the world today who are too drunk with their own arrogance 

and power successfully to oppose us if we think and learn and do. (71) 



117 Bane 

 

It is no longer a failure of being understood by the oppressor that continues exclusion. Rather, 

these failures of incorporation and integration point towards a systemic mode of exclusion. 

Recognizing this structure opens up for Du Bois—and for us in our own strivings—a different 

horizon for imagining a future beyond the set terms of guaranteed progress. By tracking the explicit 

modes of failure within the claim to progress, immanent critique of existing hegemony without a 

desire to succumb to its terms opens new modes of analysis. 

Although such practices continue to be of great import in combatting the myth of guaranteed 

progress, the role of immanent critique was not sufficient in capturing the extent of structural 

failures that left Black and Brown bodies in the wake of white supremacy. In his magnum opus of 

research, Du Bois investigated the complex material conditions and political forces behind the 

failures of post-Civil War racial equality in Black Reconstruction. Published in 1935, this text 

solidifies the importance of historical materialism as a mode of critiquing failure for Du Bois. 

Specifically, it is through investigating what actually happened on the ground with an eye to 

economic factors in the transition from an agrarian to industrial mode of production that the 

reasons for this failure of racial equality become apparent. Du Bois reminds us that slavery was an 

economic system that consolidated power in the hands of a few. He insists that this drive for surplus 

labor does not vanish after the Civil War:  

 

It must be remembered and never forgotten that the civil war in the South which 

overthrew Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly 

as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of 

capitalists on this foundation. The wage of the Negro worker, despite the war 

amendments, was to be reduced to the level of bare subsistence by taxation, 

peonage, caste, and every method of discrimination. This program had to be carried 

out in open defiance of the clear letter of the law. (Black Reconstruction 670) 

 

The law here comes under scrutiny as a doctrine that requires force of action. It cannot be seen as 

an ensconced object that always fulfills its promise without further labor. Beyond the failure of the 

economic sustainment, the perspective of liberalism within the Reconstruction era holds a further 

difficulty for Du Bois. The declaration of Emancipation is insufficient in itself to improve the 



Du Bois and the Myth of Guaranteed Progress 118 

situation of the Black worker. Such realizations are central to the turn to historical materialism. 

Karl Marx himself made such an observation in the failure of another drive towards progress: “As 

ever, weakness had taken refuge in a belief in miracles, had fancied the enemy overcome when he 

was only conjured away in imagination, and lost all understanding of the present in a passive 

glorification of the future that was in store for it and of the deeds it had in petto, but merely did 

not want to carry out as yet” (598). Taking up this thread, Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction holds 

the promises of the post-Civil War progress up against the archive of material conditions for Black 

folks in the aftermath of slavery as an institution. Liberalism, often understood as a space of 

guaranteed progress, manifests as this space in petto for the newly emancipated. The aspirations 

of the Reconstruction era were seen as un-manifested guarantees rather than a relation that required 

maintenance, adjustment, and responsibility to shifting historical material conditions. 

Du Bois’s shift to historical materialism illuminates the failures of thinking of Reconstruction 

as a mere ideological leap forward. His research demonstrates that what was clearly needed in the 

moment after the Civil War was an economic shift in access, organization, and power in regards 

to land as well as the means of production. The failure of Reconstruction, then, falls on the 

fundamental misunderstanding of how power functions: “What liberalism did not understand was 

that such a revolution was economic and involved force. Those who against the public weal have 

power cannot be expected to yield save to superior power” (Black Reconstruction 519–522). The 

newfound power of liberated Black workers was short-lived because the superior powers over 

land, resources, and livelihood went unchallenged in any fundamental way after the Civil War. 

Without that dismantling of the racialized power dynamics for the service of industry in the North 

as well as the South, the effort to truly recognize Black citizens as equals had no independent force. 

Such a promise was unsustainable without the force of changed material conditions. The rhetoric 

and promise of emancipatory futures without recognizing the material conditions of the moment 

marked Reconstruction for inevitable failure. 

Du Bois does not despair this moment, however. There were upshots in participation through 

governance, education, and public works that left a legacy of Black Reconstruction that could not 

be denied even in the face of defeat:  

 

The attempt to make black men American citizens was in a certain sense all a 

failure, but a splendid failure. It did not fail where it was expected to fail. It was 



119 Bane 

Athanasius contra mundum, with back to the wall, outnumbered ten to one, with all 

the wealth and all the opportunity, and all the world against him. And only in his 

hands and heart the consciousness of a great and just cause; fighting the battle of 

all the oppressed and despised humanity of every race and color, against the massed 

hirelings of Religion, Science, Education, Law, and brute force. (Black 

Reconstruction 708) 

 

There is a history of resistance, imagination, participation, and institutional legacies left behind by 

this moment that prove a fruitful archive for future struggles. The public school system across the 

South, first Black senators, governors, congress-people, and the recognition of great strength and 

resistance of the Black workers was pivotal to the victory of the Civil War are but a few powerful 

legacies of striving that offer strategies and primes against our current adversarial moments. 

Failure only delays the striving, and demands a shift in tactics to meet the new situation.  

The work of W.E.B. Du Bois throughout his career indicates the spaces where the liberatory 

imagination is stifled through misplacing the locus of failure. In this spirit, we can ask again: is 

the “crisis of the humanities” solely an external campaign of devaluation, or are there also practices 

within the practices and disciplines that no longer serve us? As I have shown, Du Bois provides a 

powerful model of scholarship that would allow us to see both the imperative of asking such a 

question, and provide tools to make such an inquiry. With these tools of moral imperative, critique, 

and historical materialism that Du Bois grants us, we now understand the power and importance 

of analyzing moments of failure, rather than taking the narrative of progress as a given. It is 

tracking and investigating the frame of failure that we come to shift both culpability and 

expectation, and can recognize instances where further and greater action is needed against the 

status quo that proclaims structures of inclusion as over or inherently on the way out. This 

framework ensures a method and analysis of ongoing patterns and an archive of practices to 

combat the current situation. The problem of the twenty-first century continues to be the problem 

of the color line. It is only by understanding the failures of progress and the denial of such failures 

through the narrative of guaranteed progress that we can continue in earnest the fight for liberation. 

 

 

 



Du Bois and the Myth of Guaranteed Progress 120 

Note  

1. This article is developed from a paper presented at the panel “What Can W.E.B. Du Bois 
Teach Us about Contemporary Controversies?” at Villanova University on November 19, 
2018, organized by the Villanova Center for Liberal Education. 

 

 

Works Cited 

 

Ciccariello-Maher, George. Decolonizing Dialectics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 

2017. 

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880. New York: Free Press, 1992. 

_____. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. New York: Dover, 1999. 

_____. “Education and Work.” The Journal of Negro Education 1.1 (1932): 60–74. 

_____. John Brown. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Company, 1909. 

Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. 

Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1978. 594–617. 


