offers a series of insights upon which the methodological and historical framework of this book is built.
Announcing itself as a characteristically ambitious inquiry into race “in its larger world aspect in time and space” (95), Du Bois’s address takes his audience on a whirlwind tour of social conflicts spanning five continents and four centuries of world history, to argue that a crisis of accelerated imperial competition is generating intensified processes of racialization within imperial states, at their borders and at their centers, legitimizing both conquest and mastery in racial terms, whose ultimate horizon is global. This is the crisis he is naming in his proposition that “the world problem of the 20th century is the Problem of the Color line” (104). Crucially, he secures this claim at the end of his section on Europe, where “the question of color” arises unpredictably in a new racialization of metropolitan populations, as in the controversy over “the Jew and Socialist in France,” and in aspiring powers’ pursuit of global standing—for example, Russia’s whiteness is questioned when contrasted with Germany but enhanced in conflicts with “the yellow masses of Asia” (103). Du Bois’s color line, then, is better understood not as a binary or a bar to be lifted or crossed, but as a traveling analytical concept for examining how race is made and remade, in uneven and unpredictable ways, across a global field of imperial competition.
If this concept helps theorize the circulation and reconfiguration of race in the Philippine-American War, this is no accident. For the war, Du Bois claims, was the occasion for his address: “But most significant of all at this period is the fact that the colored population of our land is, through the new imperial policy, about to be doubled by our ownership of Porto Rico, and Hawaii, our protectorate of Cuba, and conquest of the Philippines. This is for us and for the nation the greatest event since the Civil War and demands attention and action on our part” (102, emphasis added).12 The text’s internal logic and historical context together indicate that what’s decisive in this event is the U.S. decision to conquer the Philippines. In the transition from the 1898 Spanish-American War to the Philippine-American War, African American popular opinion had largely turned against military-imperial policy, and the Philippines focalized a range of heated debates over U.S. expansion and African Americans’ place within it. While Du Bois, who opposed the war, obliquely criticizes its prosecution later in the text, here he takes conquest, if not annexation, as a fait accompli, in order to contemplate the consequences of a massive increase in the nonwhite population including eight million Filipinos.
This event, Du Bois argues, must be embraced as a problem, an opportunity, a duty, depicted in ringing patriotic terms: “What is to be our attitude toward these new lands and toward the masses of dark men and women who inhabit them? Manifestly it must be an attitude of deepest sympathy and strongest alliance. We must stand ready to guard and guide them with our vote and our earnings. Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian, all must stand united under the stars and stripes for an America that knows no color line in the freedom of its opportunities” (102). What began as a matter of demographics attains world-historical importance, as Du Bois continues, assimilating these new populations to a benevolent project of racial uplift whose privileged American Negro subject ascends to autonomy on the geopolitical stage: “We must remember that the twentieth century will find nearly twenty millions of brown and black people under the protection of the American flag, a third of the nation, and that on the success and efficiency of the nine millions of our own number depends the ultimate destiny of Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Indians and Hawaiians, and that on us too depends in a large degree the attitude of Europe toward the teeming millions of Asia and Africa” (102–3). Here, Du Bois’s attitude looks disturbingly similar to McKinley’s infamous justification for conquest as a duty “to educate … and uplift and civilize and Christianize” Filipinos deemed “unfit for self-government” (qtd. in Rusling). But Du Bois turns from this implicit mimicry of McKinley to signify explicitly on Rudyard Kipling: “No nation ever bore a heavier burden than we black men of America, and if the third millennium of Jesus Christ dawns, as we devoutly believe it will upon a brown and yellow world out of whose advancing civilization the color line has faded as mists before the sun—if this be the goal toward which every free born American Negro looks, then mind you, my hearers, its consummation depends on you, not on your neighbor but on you, not on Southern lynchers or Northern injustice, but on you” (103). In his elegant rhetorical sweep, Du Bois drives the ideology of the civilizing mission to the occidented conclusion that its manifest destiny is the end of white world supremacy, and presumes his American Negro audience’s global solidarity with the brown and yellow, while exhorting them to assume self-determining moral agency in achieving it.
This autonomy, a liberating burden, arises as racial uplift shifts from a national struggle for equal opportunities to a transimperial crusade. The global phenomenon of “groups of undeveloped peoples brought into contact with advanced races under the same government, language and system of culture” establishes the world-historical significance of American Negro striving: “German Negroes, Portuguese Negroes, Spanish Negroes, English East Indian[s], Russian Chinese, American Filipinos—such are the groups which following the example of the American Negroes will in the 20th century strive, not by war and rapine but by the mightier weapons of peace and culture to gain a place and a name in the civilized world” (107). Note that while the text heralds an internationalism of the darker races—a politics of correspondence and even coordination—the color line does not itself figure that politics, whether as ideology or as organized alliance, but merely its preconditions. As a concept-metaphor, the color line enables a geopolitical analysis that, typically for Du Bois, is coldly pragmatic. For example, the address admits the “rapacity and injustice” of British imperialism, yet insists it is preferable to the alternatives in much of Africa and Asia, and welcomes its triumphs over its rivals (96)—a view that he would not hesitate to reverse when circumstances changed.13 Moreover, this analysis bears in itself no guarantee of a particular political commitment. Given these caveats, what is most crucial in this passage, for theoretical purposes, is that the recognition of the unevenness of disparate sites of the production and contestation of race—here, the relatively privileged position occupied by African Americans vis-à-vis colonized populations—is the basis of potential counter-articulations along, rather than across, the global color line.
The concept’s potential for transformative politics is worth pausing over, for its conditions may be counterintuitive, and lead to several further historical and theoretical insights relevant to this inquiry. First, while disparate domains of racialization are initially linked via acts of imperial violence, this violence is inseparable from the benevolence of the civilizing mission, which promised justice through uplift. Vicente Rafael’s gloss on McKinley’s policy of “benevolent assimilation,” as the “moral imperative” for the United States to develop and care for “wayward native children” in the same way “a father is bound to guide his son,” is instructive: “Neither exploitative nor enslaving, colonization entailed the cultivation of ‘the felicity and perfection of the Philippine people’ through the ‘uninterrupted devotion’ to those ‘noble ideals which constitute the higher civilization of mankind’ ” (21). “White love” is his memorable term for this attitude, which “holds out the promise of fathering, as it were, a ‘civilized people’ capable in time of asserting its own character. But it also demands the indefinite submission to a program of discipline and reformation requiring the constant supervision of a sovereign master” (23). The difficulty, of course, comes when dark sons—not to mention daughters—presume to ascend to the patriarchal position, asserting autonomy over the operation of racial uplift. In Du Bois’s address, this claim is established first within empire, as black men anticipate the dereliction of white love toward little brown brothers, and then beyond it—for like white supremacy, racial uplift is not exclusive to any particular empire, regardless of its claims of exceptionalism. As such, American Negro uplift may forge imaginative links to nonwhite subjects of other colonial powers independently of U.S. geopolitical interests, a perquisite of the structural contradiction between racial and national identity Du Bois elsewhere called double-consciousness.
Second, Du Bois’s ideas in this address are relatively unoriginal, even commonplace, just as his play on Kipling’s phrase is a conventional trope in black
