Profile W. E. B. Du Bois
Theme: Shifting the Paradigm
Theme: Shifting the Paradigm
Born in 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War, W.E.B. Du Bois was to become one of the most prominent intellectual-activists and social theorists in American history. Demonstrating great intellect from an early age, Du Bois enrolled in college at Harvard University after completing a degree at Fisk University. While at Harvard, Du Bois did what many serious academics did during those years: he took time to study in Germany, where he met Max Weber. The two scholars corresponded and influenced each other’s thinking.
Du Bois eventually earned a PhD in History from Harvard in 1895, becoming the first African-American to earn a doctorate there. He spent most of his early career at Atlanta University, a historically Black university. In 1899, he published The Philadelphia Negro, which used empirical evidence to undermine stereotypes about black people and provided evidence to support racial integration. In addition to his work as a scholar, Du Bois was also an activist. He helped found and lead the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, in 1910 and worked there for much of his life. In the early 1960s, Du Bois moved to Ghana, Africa, after that country achieved independence, and eventually he became a Ghanian citizen. He died in 1963 in Ghana, the day before the U.S. civil rights movement’s famous March on Washington.
The Souls of Black Folk is probably Du Bois’s most-read book and was published in 1903, relatively early in his long career. It’s a collection of ethnographic reflections, essays, and stories on what it means to be African American. The text is considered a classic today, providing a foundation for critical race theory. Du Bois’s writing in The Souls of Black Folk is unique in sociology: he writes poetically, as you’ll notice in the excerpt.
Du Bois starts the reading by asking, “How does it feel to be a problem?” In addressing this question, he tries to help readers understand what it means to be black in the United States—to always be seen, just because of the color of your skin, as a problem for a white world.
In this essay, Du Bois presents one of his most important contributions to sociology: double-consciousness. This is the experience that members of subordinated groups have in seeing their subordinated identities through the eyes of the dominant group. Du Bois is especially concerned with the double-consciousness involved in being African American--that is, the experience of seeing one’s blackness through the eyes of a racist white society and the consequences of that perception for one’s sense of self.
Bois uses the concept the Veil as a metaphor to describe the African American experience with what he calls “the color line.” The metaphor works on three levels.
First, it’s suggestive of the way that difference in skin tone mark some people for exclusion and separation. Second, the veil represents the seeming inability of whites to see black people as true American citizens, as equals. Finally, the veil references the inability of many African Americans to see themselves outside the standards, preferences, and prejudices of white Americans.
At a time of increasing visibility and protest against violence from police officers toward African Americans, Du Bois’s concepts of double consciousness and the veil--along with the question of what it feels like to be treated as a problem by a white supremacist society--continue to be as relevant as ever. These concepts have been tremendously productive for scholars studying the experience of inequality, and Du Bois’s activism continues to inspire activist-scholars.
To learn more about Du Bois, you might start by reading Aldon Morris’s excellent biography The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. In this text, Morris shares how Du Bois’s sociological innovations were systematically erased because of his race.
You can also read more about Du Bois’s philosophical and sociological contributions on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Finally, The Souls of Black Folk is accessible and fairly short. It’s a great place to start if you’d like to read more Du Bois.