{"id":238,"date":"2020-06-04T10:40:33","date_gmt":"2020-06-04T09:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/?p=238"},"modified":"2020-06-04T10:44:44","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T09:44:44","slug":"international-thought-and-the-talented-tenth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/2020\/06\/04\/international-thought-and-the-talented-tenth\/","title":{"rendered":"International Thought and the Talented Tenth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Katharina Rietzler.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is pedagogical thought a form of international thought? If the study of international relations emerged from the study of race relations, as Robert Vitalis has suggested, education is central to international thought, even in the absence of educational mobility<\/a>. In the United States, questions around education went to the heart of the American racial order in the era of Jim Crow segregation. Black women educators were the first to critically analyse the formation of attitudes in childhood as a problem in international-relations-as-race-relations. In this blog post, I will focus on two African American women and their international educational thought, Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) and Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961).[1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nannie Helen Burroughs, Image courtesy of wikimedia. (Common Domain).<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In their thought, they recognised education as intrinsically\nconnected to challenging American racism in a world of empires, and before W.E.B.\nDu Bois popularized the idea of the \u2018talented tenth\u2019<\/a>, a small group of educated leaders\nwho would uplift the race. Amidst the resulting fierce debates<\/a>\nthat pitted proponents of industrial education against those who criticized the\nlatter as entrenching African Americans\u2019 socio-economic subordination, Cooper\nand Burroughs occupied a middle ground<\/a>,\nwith both insisting on the importance of classical education and<\/em> economic self-sufficiency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history of African American club women forms another\nimportant context for Cooper\u2019s and Burroughs\u2019 international thinking, as does\nthe structural discrimination that left teaching as one of the few viable professional\navenues for African American women intellectuals. Black women\u2019s clubs grew in prominence\nin the Progressive Era, forming the National Association of Colored Women\u2019s\nClubs (NACW) in 1896. Education\nbecame a fundamental concern of the movement \u2013 the NACW\u2019s motto was\n\u2018Lifting as We Climb\u2019 \u2013 and many of its leaders were educators themselves. Mary\nChurch Terrell, the first NACW president, studied at Oberlin College as a\ncontemporary of Anna Julia Cooper. Terrell was also the first African American woman to be appointed to a\nschool board in the District of Columbia. Cooper and Terrell both taught\nat the prestigious M Street High School in Washington D.C., the first African\nAmerican public school \u2013 and the alma mater of Nannie Burroughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a wide-ranging international thinker, Anna Julia Cooper analyzed \u2018the international politics of racialisation, and its significance within international political economy, empire and state-making long before today\u2019s scholars returned to this theme\u2019, as discussed in a previous post by Kim Hutchings<\/a>. Born into slavery in North Carolina, Cooper became the fourth African American woman to gain a doctoral degree, at the Sorbonne in Paris. In her thesis, Cooper developed a methodology for recovering the voices of marginalised people of colour in the French Empire.[2]<\/a> For most of her life, though, she was a teacher, first in the segregated school system of North Carolina and then Washington DC. Her best-known book, published to wide acclaim in 1892, became A Voice from the South<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Anna Julia Cooper, Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In a chapter on \u2018The Higher Education of Women\u2019, she speaks\nto key themes in women\u2019s history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth\ncentury: women\u2019s greater public and political role, the supporters and\ndetractors of women\u2019s education, and the beneficial impact of women as\neducators. But Cooper connects these concerns to core themes in international thought:\nrace and civilization, war, hierarchy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cooper embraces the idea that maternal influence might\ntemper chauvinism and racism, and couches the history of war and empire in\nterms of pedagogical failure:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Since the idea of order and subordination succumbed to\nbarbarian brawn and brutality in the fifth century, the civilized world has\nbeen like a child brought up by his father. (\u2026) Whence came this apotheosis of\ngreed and cruelty? Whence this sneaking admiration we all have for bullies and\nprize-fighters? Whence the self-congratulation of \u201cdominant\u201d races, as if\n\u201cdominant\u201d meant \u201crighteous\u201d and carried with it a title to inherit the earth?\nWhence the scorn of so-called weak or unwarlike races and individuals, and the\nvery comfortable assurance that it is their manifest destiny to be wiped out as\nvermin before this advancing civilization?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such ideas, Cooper, argued, were those of men, and while woman\nsometimes \u2018parroted\u2019 them, \u2018her heart is aglow with sympathy and loving\nkindness, and she cannot be true to her real self without giving out these\nelements into the forces of the world.\u2019 The \u2018thinking woman\u2019 would reform the\n\u2018civilized world\u2019, emitting those feminine qualities, that, together with\nmasculine influence, would \u2018produce for the twentieth century a higher type of\ncivilization than any attained in the nineteenth\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cooper\u2019s ideas may seem essentialist today, but they are\nremarkable in the way in which they claimed an importance for women\u2019s education\nin world order and civilizational terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nannie\nHelen Burroughs\u2019 educational thought did so, too, but with greater attention to\neconomic globalization and missionary Christianity. Like Cooper, Burroughs ran\na school, the Christian National Training School for Women and Girls in the\nDistrict of Columbia. Burroughs also worked for the Foreign Mission Board of the\nNational Baptist Convention and became active in civil rights and women\u2019s\norganizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored\nPeople (NAACP) and the NACW. She left a substantial corpus of published\nwritings which has recently\nbeen collected in an anthology<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Angela\nHornsby-Gutting has shown<\/a>, Burroughs\u2019 educational work was not\nfocused on racial uplift in the United States alone. From the early 1900s,\nBurroughs became concerned with the uplift of people of color throughout the\nworld. She thought that African American women occupied a special role as\nmissionaries spreading the gospel in foreign lands, exemplifying women\u2019s\nleadership and self-sacrifice in the spirit of Christ. Burroughs regarded\ncolonial oppression in Africa and racial oppression in the United States as\nintrinsically linked, referring to Africans as \u2018our kinsmen.\u2019 Her National\nTraining School trained both African American and African women students.\nHowever, Burroughs\u2019 efforts to professionalize domestic service also furthered women\u2019s\neconomic independence as wage earners in a time of economic boom and bust, and\ncombated racist stereotypes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a 1902 speech\nentitled \u2018The Colored Woman\nand her Relation to the Domestic Problem\u2019<\/a> given at the Negro Young People’s\nChristian and Educational Congress in Atlanta, Burroughs, like Cooper, reflects on the \u2018thinking\nwoman\u2019. She admits that domestic service may not conform to the aspirations of\neducated African American women \u2018but educated women without work and the\nwherewith to support themselves \u2026 are not worth an ounce more to the race than\nignorant women.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Burroughs\nregarded the race problem as an international one, in which the forces of\ncapitalism and the legacies of slavery pitted \u2018white imported help\u2019 against\nAfrican American women seeking economic independence. The \u2018demands of the hour\u2019\nwere those brought about by the radical transformations of the Progressive\nperiod, marked by urbanization, industrialization and mass immigration.\nBurroughs\u2019 case for professionalizing domestic science is also a plea for\nracial solidarity in the face of global white supremacy which put white workers\nat an advantage in the marketplace. In Burroughs\u2019 speech, global labor\nmovements and the global color line internationalize the question of industrial\neducation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

More\npractically-orientated than Cooper, and in a less lyrical voice than her,\nBurroughs nonetheless also understood her work as a teacher to be of core\nrelevance to an international order in rapid flux.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> For a closer analysis of the category\nof \u2018education\u2019 in the context of women\u2019s international thought see Katharina\nRietzler, \u2018Public Opinion and Education\u2019, in Patricia Owens,\nKatharina Rietzler, Kimberly Hutchings, Sarah C. Dunstan (eds.), Women\u2019s International Thought: Towards a New Canon <\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress, under contract).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> For a longer discussion see Vivian M.\nMay\u2019s essay on Cooper in Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler\n(eds.), Women\u2019s\nInternational Thought: A New History <\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming\nJanuary 2021).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Katharina Rietzler. Is pedagogical thought a form of international thought? If the study of international relations emerged from the study of race relations, as Robert Vitalis has suggested, education is central to international thought, even in the absence of…<\/span><\/p>\n

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