it is hardly exceptional within African American popular intellectual life through at least the mid-twentieth century. Knowledge of international affairs had a different salience before the United States became the global superpower, when it was easier to imagine a higher foreign influence intervening within local hierarchical orders.
Similarly, when Du Bois concludes the address by sketching something of a plan of action, the program is uncontroversial boilerplate. He bemoans the “prevalence of Negro crime,” calls for a “great revolution” in “the Negro home,” invoking “the right rearing of children” and “the purity and integrity of family life,” and closes with a bland cry for a greater “spirit of sacrifice” (108–9). Even when advocating for elite cultural achievement, he is careful to cite the example of “the new book by Booker Washington” (109). If you take the text at its word, the theorization of the color line is offered in the service of an ideological consensus among the American Negro elite, whose name is uplift.
Put differently, I contend that Du Bois’s great original intellectual contribution, in this address, is poetic. This is one way to read the disarmingly modest opening to “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” his contribution to Alain Locke’s 1925 New Negro anthology: “Once upon a time in my younger years and in the dawn of this century I wrote: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.’ It was a pert and singing phrase which I then liked and which I have since often rehearsed to my soul and asked:—how far is this prophecy or speculation?” (385).15 This may also explain why Du Bois did not revise the address for The Souls of Black Folk, which abandons the thesis’s argumentative grounding, distilling it into a catchphrase, the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, repeated three times in the text.16 For the insights carefully established by the address are, for Du Bois, embedded in the phrasing itself, remaining available for activation even as its elegance encourages an almost limitless capacity for repetition and recontextualization. Later in the chapter, I will return to the suggestion that Du Bois’s radicalism emerges from his poetics.
Rather than citing or reproducing the argument of the 1899 address, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out” is effectively a remake, twenty-five years on, suggesting that the thesis’s grounding is irreducibly historical. This time, Du Bois’s virtuoso survey of geopolitical events is organized, not by continent, but by empire—reviewing the “shadow” of race problems in Portugal, Belgium, France, and England—and by the transimperial movements of labor and pan-Africanism. This leads to a third observation. If the germ of later adversarial “colored” internationalisms can be traced back to the turn of the century, as in Du Bois’s devout belief in the coming of a “brown and yellow world,” then it is necessary to account for the continuity of their emergence with the ideology of the civilizing mission.17
If this statement appears as the converse of the earlier observation that the violence by which U.S. imperialism articulated its transpacific domains was inseparable from its expression as tutelary uplift, then taken together, they reveal the structure of what I have been calling imperialism’s racial justice. Put differently, imperialism’s own self-justifications, the epistemological and aesthetic production of race that cast this overwhelming violence as the actualization of justice, dominate the discursive realm out of which antiracist and anti-imperialist movements arise to seize and recast the meanings of race and of justice. Yet to imagine this domination as total is to complete the work that any existing imperialism necessarily leaves unfinished, to surrender your faith to the promises no imperialism can ever actually keep. This is a fourth point: because imperialisms are always in competition, the realm of racialization and of justice is transimperial. As an analytic figure traversing it, the color line serves not to ground appeals to a transcendent conception of justice but to open up the fissures between the disparate sites of racialization that competing imperialisms are unable to fuse together—even as the political programs thereby made possible may only register, in retrospect, as efforts to close up or seal over what has been broken and to complete what has been promised beyond justice’s reach.
Finally, if the color-line concept identifies an intensifying crisis of imperial competition manifested in uneven and unpredictable processes of racialization, then the term itself serves as an analytical figure for the production of any number of modern subjects. That is, the color line names the site at which new, modern racial subjects are incarnated and incorporated. Pride of place in these processes goes not to Du Bois’s American Negro, whose assumption of the burden of uplift heralds the rise of a new world, nor to his American Filipinos, constituted along the tutelary paths of uplift, but to whiteness itself, in all its forms. For what drives the processes identified by the color line is the imperative to define imperial mastery in racialized terms. This whiteness is not a singular type, but an expanding category of racial privilege, whose competing forms vie to assume the position of rightful heir to the progressive expansion of civilization—or, as Du Bois succinctly defined it in 1910: “whiteness is the ownership of the earth, forever and ever, Amen!”18 Yet this heterogeneous production of whiteness also generated unforeseen varieties of nonwhiteness in its wake. The theoretical intervention of the color line, finally, lies not in conceiving of movement across it, into new hierarchical forms of racial privilege masquerading as freedom, but along it, to ask: What other shades of modernity are produced, and what might happen as their disjunctures gather toward each other in its wandering course?
an Afro-Asian century and a third-conditional world
When the 1899 address lists those peoples expected to follow the American Negro example, there is one notable omission—the only other nonwhite group whose historical agency Du Bois celebrates, a counterpoint to what otherwise passes as an exceptionalism. This group’s encounter with “advanced races” had not involved direct colonization or minoritization, and pointedly, it had not disavowed struggle through military force. Identified as the “one bright spot in Asia to-day,” it is “the island empire of Japan,” whose “recent admission to the ranks of modern civilized nations by the abolition of foreign consular courts within her borders is the greatest concession to the color-line which the nineteenth century has seen” (98).
Unlike the dramatic reference to the Philippine war, the rhetorical climax to the text’s discussion of the United States, Du Bois’s comment on Japan is relatively unstressed. Because the casual ascription of world-historical significance to current events is central to the text’s method, the superlative phrasing barely delays its rapid inventory of the “congeries of race and color problems” (97) that is Asia. Further, Du Bois’s rhetorical decision to relegate this recent event to the century that is ending suggests some effort to distance the Japanese example from his model of American Negro striving. Nevertheless, the text may be justifiably described as prescient regarding the significance of Japan’s challenge to global white supremacy. In a later section on Russia’s designs in northeast Asia, Du Bois muses, “Perhaps a Russia-Japanese war is in the near future,” concluding, “At any rate a gigantic strife across the color line is impending during the next one hundred years” (104).
Within five years Russia and Japan were at war, and Du Bois was quick to see a confirmation of his arguments. At the conclusion of a 1905 lecture titled “Atlanta University,” Du Bois revisited his color line thesis, warning that a declining interest in African American concerns was ignorant of the direction of global affairs. After a succinct summary of the thesis’s geopolitical grounds, he turned to the “epoch-making” event of the moment: “To-day for the first time in a thousand years the great white nation is measuring arms with the yellow nation and is shown to be distinctly inferior in civilization and ability.” “The foolish modern magic of the word ‘white’ is already broken,” he averred, “and the color line has been crossed in modern times as it was in the great past.” If “the awakening of the yellow races,” and eventually their “brown and black” counterparts, was now inevitable, the question is whether this “awakening … be in accordance with and aided by the greater ideals of white civilization or be in spite of them and against them.” “This,” he concludes, “is the problem of the yellow peril and of the color line, and it is the problem of the American Negro.”19
Returning
