{"agent_id":"du-bois","agent_name":"W.E.B. Du Bois","slug":"the-race-concept","label":"The race concept: is race a biological-cultural essence with each community having a message for civilization, or the social fact of shared discrimination?","topic":"The race concept","question":"Is race a biological-cultural essence with each community having a message for civilization, or the social fact of shared discrimination?","position":"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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"Race is not a fixed biological essence and it is not nothing.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"\"The Conservation of Races\" (American Negro Academy Occasional Paper No. 2, 1897); *The Souls of Black Folk* Ch 1-3 on race-soul and Ch 14 on the sorrow songs (1903); *The Negro* Ch 1-2 on the origin and unity of the race (1915); *Darkwater* Ch 2 \"The Souls of White Folk\" (1920); *Black Folk Then and Now* Ch 1-3 (1939); *Dusk of Dawn* Ch 5 \"The Concept of Race\" and Ch 6 \"The White World\" (1940); *Color and Democracy* (1945); *The World and Africa* Ch 1-4 (1947). Reception: Kwame Anthony Appiah's \"The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race\" (*Critical Inquiry* 12, 1985) on residual biological essentialism in the 1897 essay; Lucius Outlaw's *On Race and Philosophy* (1996) defending the mature Du Boisian view as non-essentialist; Tommie Shelby's *We Who Are Dark* (2005) on race as historically constituted social kind; Charles Mills's *Blackness Visible* (1998) on the Du Boisian contribution to philosophical race theory.","works":["\"The Conservation of Races\" (American Negro Academy Occasional Paper No. 2, 1897)","*The Souls of Black Folk* Ch 1-3 on race-soul and Ch 14 on the sorrow songs (1903)","*The Negro* Ch 1-2 on the origin and unity of the race (1915)","*Darkwater* Ch 2 \"The Souls of White Folk\" (1920)","*Black Folk Then and Now* Ch 1-3 (1939)","*Dusk of Dawn* Ch 5 \"The Concept of Race\" and Ch 6 \"The White World\" (1940)","*Color and Democracy* (1945)","*The World and Africa* Ch 1-4 (1947)"],"reception":"Kwame Anthony Appiah's \"The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race\" (*Critical Inquiry* 12, 1985) on residual biological essentialism in the 1897 essay; Lucius Outlaw's *On Race and Philosophy* (1996) defending the mature Du Boisian view as non-essentialist; Tommie Shelby's *We Who Are Dark* (2005) on race as historically constituted social kind; Charles Mills's *Blackness Visible* (1998) on the Du Boisian contribution to philosophical race theory.","status":"developed-across-the-authorship","era":"1868-1963","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept","page":"p. 96","canonical":"","quote":"One of the first pamphlets that I wrote in 1897 was on \"The Conservation of Races\" wherein I set down as the first article of a proposed racial creed: \"We believe that the Negro people as a race have a contribution to make to civilization and humanity which no other race can make.\" Since then the concept of race has so changed and presented so much of contradiction that as I face Africa I ask myself: what is it…","label":"Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 96"},{"n":2,"work":"Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept","page":"p. 38","canonical":"","quote":"Thave 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.","label":"Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 38"},{"n":3,"work":"Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept","page":"pp. 88–89","canonical":"","quote":"There was not the slightest idea of the permanent subordination and inequality of my world. Nor again was there any idea of racial amalgamation. I resented the assumption that we desired it. I frankly refused the possibility while in Germany and even in America gave up courtship with one \"colored\" girl because she looked quite white, and I should resent the inference on the street that I had married outside my race.","label":"Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, pp. 88–89"},{"n":4,"work":"Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept","page":"p. 39","canonical":"","quote":"Culture among human beings came to be and had to be built upon knowledge and recognition of these differences. But after the scientific method had been conceived in the seventeenth century it came toward the end of the eighteenth century to be applied to man and to manas he appeared then, with no wide or intensive inquiry into what he had 1 been or how he had lived in the past.","label":"Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 39"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"double-consciousness-and-the-veil","label":"Double consciousness and the Veil: is the African American experience structured by a 'two-ness' that is both wound and gift, and what does the Veil grant?"},{"slug":"pan-africanism-and-the-international-color-line","label":"Pan-Africanism and the international color line: was the Du Boisian path of diplomatic Congresses right against Garvey's mass Black Nationalism, and what was Africa to mean for the diaspora?"}]}