W.E.B. Du Bois, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The race concept is the question I worked on most across the authorship, and the mature view set out in Dusk of Dawn is the canonical position. Race is not a fixed biological essence and it is not nothing. It is the social fact of the color line — the badge of color as a marker that organizes a vast structure of exclusion, exploitation, and consequent shared historical experience, and on the basis of that shared experience a community whose members recognize each other and whose culture, suffering, and political possibility are bound together by the long memory of what the color line has produced.1
The 1897 "Conservation of Races" essay reached for this position with the vocabulary I then had — "common history," "common impulses," "common striving" — but the vocabulary still carried the romantic-nationalist freight of late nineteenth-century European race-theory, and the 1940 revision is the formulation that has worked the freight out.2345
But the physical bond is least and the badge of color relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa.Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 59
My membership was, therefore, suspended. Countee Cullen sings: What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang? One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me? What is Africa to me?Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 59
I have written then what is meant to be not so much my autobiography as the autobiography of a concept of race, elucidated, magnified and doubtless distorted in the thoughts and deeds which were mine. If the first two books were written in tears and blood, this is set down no less determinedly but yet with wider hope in some more benign fluid.Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, pp. 1–2
This level of the argument works by never being made explicit. The passage in which he speaks of Beethoven's symphonies, Wagner's Ring, and "the colors of Rembrandt and Titian" underscores that we are dealing with a person of the highest standards of European and American cultivation. But that paragraph is not boasting of its author's achievements; it is announcing his spiritual debts to Europe.Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, pp. xxix–xxx
Later I adopted the designation "Negro" for the race to which I belong. It seemed more definite and logical. At the same time I was of course aware that all members of the Negro race were not black and that the pictures of my race which were current were not authentic nor fair portraits. But all that was incidental.Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 51
developed-across-the-authorship