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 why Du Bois became, decades before the word was common, a theorist of imperialism and a founder of Pan-Africanism - the movement to unite people of African descent across the world in common struggle. If the color line was global, then resistance had to be global too. He argued, in a striking 1915 essay written as Europe tore itself apart in the First World War, that the war’s deepest cause lay in the scramble for colonial empire - that the European nations were fighting over the spoils of the darker world, and that the ‘hidden’ force behind modern war was the greed unleashed by the conquest of Africa and Asia. To understand the modern world’s violence, he insisted, you had to look at the color line.
Du Bois lived long enough - he died in 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington - to see much of his prophecy fulfilled and his framework vindicated. The twentieth century was indeed convulsed by the color line: by two world wars entangled with empire, by the long struggle to dismantle Jim Crow, by the wave of decolonization that swept European flags from Asia and Africa, by the global fight against apartheid. The man who in 1900 announced the color line as the century’s defining problem watched, across six decades, as that problem moved from the margins of respectable concern to the center of world history.
His framework endures because it refused two easy errors. It refused to treat racism as a merely psychological matter of individual prejudice - a bad attitude to be educated away - and instead located it in the material structure of a global economic and imperial order. And it refused to treat the American race problem as exceptional, insisting instead that it was one expression of a worldwide pattern. This is why Du Bois remains foundational for thinking about race and the global order: he taught that you cannot understand racial injustice in one country without seeing the worldwide system of which it is a part, and you cannot understand the modern world without seeing the color line that runs through it. Whether that line is fading at last, or merely changing shape, is a question his work still forces us to ask.
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.
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