Silence and Sympathy: Dewey’s Whiteness

Abstract

JOHN DEWEY INTRODUCES AN EDITION of Claude McKay's Selected Poems by saying, more or less, that there is nothing he can say.1 He begins with a lament about how commentary and praise seem "impertinent" and "idle," and he ends, a few paragraphs later, by confessing that the poet's depiction of life under white supremacy leaves white men able to express only "humiliated sympathy." My first encounter-my first several, actually-with this text left me thinking of it as an expression of a familiar aspect of whiteness, as we have been led to understand it by the critical race theorists who explore such things. And this led me to think of it as a straightforwardly problematic moment in Dewey's corpus, deeply in need of illumination and correction. But now I wonder whether the lines of illumination might run in the opposite direction as well.