Color-Line(s)

Dear Dr. Du Bois,

I write to you as the year 2013, one-hundred and ten years since your publishing of The Souls of Black Folk and I regret to inform you that the problem of the twenty-first century, much like that of the twentieth century, remains the color-line. I have mixed emotions to inform you that your work is not only foundational to race-studies today, but still incredibly relevant despite the passage of more than a century. There are few social issues that maintain such a resemblance to their manifestation a decade yet alone a century ago, but the salience of race on identity and in controlling the American identity is inescapable.

            The peculiarity of Americaness and Blackness still apparent in the United States permeates into the understandings of a myriad of other identity groups and intersections. The very concept of intersectionality of identity is what you seem to allude to in your discussion of “double-consciousness” though today that double has become a complex and perhaps infinitely dimensioned understanding of gender, sexuality, race, nationality and the relationships of those. We have a Black President Dr. Du Bois, which is certainly an accomplishment, but he serves in many ways as an example and testament to the very duality of which you speak, both in his politics and in the way he describes his identities. So much has changed, but theory of color-line, not color-blind still pervades.

            I urge you, in your readings of contemporary works to begin to complicate your “duality” and to expand your notion of the veil, reading works by Higginbotham specifically can illustrate that the acknowledgement of race as a major problem, does work to silence many of the other groups and individuals subjugated by our system. Erring on the side of placing race as the sole problem today, only allows those other issues and identities so important to be subsumed and lost. The complexities of being “American” cannot be fully summed by a duality or binary, but need more complicating to fully develop the historical and contemporary meanings of the word. 

            Even the histories which you importantly problematized are undergoing further review and critique in the hopes of developing what is a fuller understanding of the creations of the color-line and the multitude of “lines” or barriers in society. Once such story which I know will peak your interest revolves around the relations of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a story you make thing you are familiar with. But, in the legacy of your work as a (re)imaginative historian, today the stories assumptions about race, gender and sexuality have been put to a different lens and raised substantially more questions that answers to the certainties formerly held. Just as you delivered us a more developed and nuanced look at reconstruction, Professor Gordon-Reed has at the very least complicated a similarly important story.

            I am unsure how you will take this news Dr. Du Bois, I hope you find pride in the fact that your work has stood the test of time, although I cannot imagine that such pride will last when knowing that race has also has maintained its prominence. I cannot know what you wished for as the future of race in America when writing in 1903, but, this is where we stand today, with a spectrum of many dimensions rather than lines, but certainly with race remaining a central issue. 

Sincerely,

2013