W. E. B. Du Bois · Politics
Du Bois declared that the great problem of his century was the color line - and argued, against the optimism of his age, that race was not a fading relic but a global system organizing the modern world.
In 1900, addressing the Pan-African Conference in London, Du Bois made a prediction so precise that it reads today like prophecy: the problem of the twentieth century, he announced, would be the problem of the color line. He repeated the line three years later as the keynote of The Souls of Black Folk, and it has come to define how we understand the century that followed - a century of world wars fought partly over empire, of decolonization across Asia and Africa, of the American civil rights movement, of apartheid and its overthrow. Du Bois saw, when almost no one else did, that race would be a, perhaps the, organizing force of modern history.
What made the claim radical was its scope. Du Bois did not say the problem of the twentieth century would be the American race problem, or the problem of the Negro in the South. He said the color line - and he meant a single line drawn around the whole globe, separating the lighter from the darker races and structuring the relations between them everywhere: in America, in Asia, in Africa, and in the islands of the sea. This was a claim that the local injustices of Jim Crow and the global facts of empire were not separate problems but one problem, manifestations of a single worldwide system. To grasp Du Bois’s thought you must see the color line as he did: not a Southern peculiarity but a planetary structure.
Du Bois’s great move was to connect the racial subjugation he knew at home to the imperial domination of darker peoples abroad, and to see them as parts of a single system. The same era that bound African Americans under Jim Crow saw European powers carve up Africa, rule India, dominate China, and seize the Caribbean and the Pacific. Du Bois insisted these were not coincidences but expressions of one logic: a global order in which the prosperity and power of white nations rested on the labor, resources, and subordination of the world’s darker majority. The plantation and the colony, the sharecropper and the colonized peasant, were nodes in the same structure.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Du Bois saw the color line as a worldwide structure linking the subjugation of darker peoples across continents. In your own words, explain why he thought race was central to the modern world, not peripheral to it.
Leads to Karl Marx.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.