Who Is to Judge? Mudrooroo, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Dance of Identities

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is widely regarded as the most important Black American intellectual. Editor of ‘The Crisis’, author of thirty books on Blackness in America, he was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a dogged challenger of White supremacy over seven decades. His writings inspired generations of Black activists and intellectuals. Yet Du Bois grew up with a less than clear-cut racial identity and had relatives who were White. It was only in college that he took on the unambiguously Black identity that lasted throughout his career. Mudrooroo (also known as Colin Johnson) was the most prominent Aboriginal novelist, poet, playwright, and critic from the end of the Beat era into the 1990s. Yet in the mid-1990s, he was charged with racial fraud and drummed out of the Aboriginal movement; he subsequently chose to live in self-imposed exile in Nepal. Much later, in the 2010s, he returned to Australia and ultimately reclaimed his Aboriginal identity. This article is a meditation on racial plasticity, invention, and assertion in the lives of these two iconic figures in the racial struggles of their respective countries.