W. E. B. Du Bois and the Conservation of Races: A Piece of Ecological Ancestry

Abstract

This essay examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for the “conservation of races” as an instance of an ecological legacy in African American thought that challenged traditional divisions between humans and nonhumans. Evoking contemporary models of rhetoric, I show that Du Bois implicitly figured blackness as an inventive rhetorical ecology that was distributed through material things and environments. Promoting the conservation of that ecology, his sociological work gestured toward a worldly, more-than-human ideal of justice. I explore how his ecological articulation of conservation resonated with Progressive Era environmental conservation in its rejection of ideals of purity but pressed beyond its economic materialism and human essentialism. Ultimately, I argue, Du Bois leaves us with a unique picture of conservation as a cooperative practice of identification in which both human and nonhuman participants come to articulate as interdependent parts of a larger ecology, a process that involves memory at a lived, material level.