Du Bois's "On Being Crazy": Satire, Race, and Intellect
This essay analyzes W.E.B. Du Bois's short satirical piece "On Being Crazy," examining how Du Bois deploys wit, humor, and reasoned replies to expose the absurdity of white racial prejudice. Through close reading of several key encounters—at a restaurant, a theatre, a hotel, and on a road—the essay demonstrates how Du Bois's calm, rational responses juxtapose sharply against white irrationality, revealing racism as a form of social madness. The essay also considers the literary devices Du Bois employs, including metaphor and allegory, and argues that his sophisticated intelligence appeals to the humanist conscience in all readers, challenging the moral foundations of racial hierarchy.
- Introduction: Du Bois's Satirical Strategy: Du Bois uses humor and reason to critique racism
- Wit and Reason Against White Irrationality: Restaurant and theatre encounters expose racial absurdity
- Escalating Satire: Metaphor and Allegory: Hotel and road incidents intensify satirical critique
- The Absurdity of Racial Fanaticism: Roadside marriage episode reveals white irrationality
- Racism as Craziness: Intellect Over Anatomy: Racism defied by moral and intellectual superiority
- Conclusion: Du Bois's Humanist Appeal: Du Bois's intellect exposes racism's fundamental craziness
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay uses well-chosen direct quotations from the primary text to ground each analytical claim, allowing Du Bois's own words to carry argumentative weight.
- The paper builds its argument progressively, moving from simpler to more complex examples of Du Bois's satirical technique, mirroring the escalating force of the original text.
- The inclusion of Robert F. Kennedy's rhetorical question about a black God effectively broadens the moral stakes of the argument beyond the literary into the philosophical.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The essay demonstrates close reading as an analytical method, unpacking the rhetorical effect of specific exchanges in Du Bois's text. By explaining not just what Du Bois says but how and why his replies work—situational appropriateness, understated humor, sharp wit—the writer shows how form and content reinforce each other in satirical writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by establishing Du Bois's satirical strategy through early textual examples, then traces a progression of incidents (restaurant, theatre, hotel, roadside encounter) to show how the satire intensifies. It concludes by stepping back to make a broader moral claim about racism as irrationality, framing Du Bois's humanist argument as universally compelling. The structure follows the narrative sequence of the source text while layering interpretive commentary throughout.
Introduction: Du Bois's Satirical Strategy
W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most influential African American intellectuals of the twentieth century, employs a distinctive satirical strategy in his short piece "On Being Crazy." Rather than confronting racial prejudice with anger or despair, Du Bois deploys calm reason, understated humor, and sharp wit to expose the fundamental absurdity of white racial intolerance. Through a series of everyday encounters, he allows the irrationality of his antagonists to speak for itself, positioning his own composed and logical responses as the voice of genuine humanity.
His uncomplicated, sensible replies bear direct significance to the real and immediate circumstances at hand. Du Bois is largely indifferent to the project of establishing social equality by argument; for him, equality must be naturally so. It is unnatural and irrational to believe that one man is inherently inferior to another. This conviction anchors his satirical voice throughout the piece.
Wit and Reason Against White Irrationality
In one early encounter, a companion makes the outrageous remark, "who do not want you?" — an unprovoked challenge — to which Du Bois offers his wittily straightforward reply: "No… I wish to eat." When the 'crazy' white suggests that his actions amount to a demand for social equality, Du Bois answers humorously: "Nothing of the sort, sir, it is hunger." The reply is perfectly rational, rooted in the most basic of human needs, and it quietly deflates the overblown racial anxiety of his interlocutor.
Later, at the theatre, when a lady frowns and informs him that he is "not wanted" there, his reason again meets white intolerance head-on: "I certainly want the music, and I like to think the music wants me to listen to it." He implies that this is the only and sufficient reason for his presence. When the lady insists that his attendance constitutes "social equality," he replies simply: "This is the second movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony" (Du Bois, 2000, p. 548). With such uncomplicated and sensible replies — tied firmly to the real and immediate situation — Du Bois shrugs off white irrationality, his humor and intellect together appealing to the reader's sense of humanism. His intellect seeks only solutions to immediate, real human problems: hunger, rest, pleasure. He is indifferent to formal declarations of social equality because such equality ought to be self-evident.
Escalating Satire: Metaphor and Allegory
As the narration proceeds, the satire in Du Bois's criticism gains force. Adopting literary devices such as metaphor and allegory, his remarks begin to assume the authority of a true reformer. When a hotel clerk tells him, "This is a white hotel," Du Bois replies allegorically: "Such a color scheme requires a great deal of cleaning" (Du Bois, 2000, p. 548) — a remark far more cutting and layered than his earlier, simpler observations. Yet his gentle humor continues to draw the reader in, as he once again insists that what he wants is not social equality but simply a bed in which to rest. His criticism reaches its most direct register when he calls the denial of a sleeper "barbarism" — a label that underscores how profoundly uncivilized white racial prejudice actually is.
The next episode Du Bois recounts is perhaps the most absurd of all: a white wayfarer chooses to walk through a muddy path rather than share the road with Du Bois — essentially treating him as a 'dirty' presence to be avoided. When the traveler attempts to humiliate Du Bois by confirming his racial identity, Du Bois replies curtly: "My grandfather was so called" (Du Bois, 2000, p. 548), subtly suggesting that racism belongs to the past and that humanism no longer traffics in racial categories. Yet he continues to assert plainly that he is a Negro, accepting the reality of the identity he belongs to with an unmistakable air of pride.
Conclusion: Du Bois's Humanist Appeal
Du Bois's sophisticated intelligence, which responds promptly with straight, sharp-witted, situationally appropriate replies to white prejudice, appeals not to black readers alone — it enlightens the humanist conscience in even the "craziest" of whites. By juxtaposing white irrationality and dull-wittedness against his well-crafted yet simple and sensible responses, Du Bois exposes the absurdity of a worldview that regards Black people as inferior, even as the Black intellect on display is demonstrably far superior to the prejudice arrayed against it. His satire ultimately serves a humanist mission: to awaken the reader's capacity for reason and to reveal racial hierarchy for what it is — an irrational, unjustifiable, and deeply human failure.
Reference
W. E. B. Du Bois, "On Being Crazy," The Conscious Reader, 8th ed. Ed. Caroline Shrodes, Harry Finestone, and Michael Shugrue. Longman, 2000.
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