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The Souls of White Folk

The Souls of Black Folk made W.E.B. Du Bois worldfamous well over a century ago. The book instantly became a classic because no other publication had thoroughly probed the depth and consequences of race in America. At the opening of the twentieth century, whites viewed blacks as an inferior homogenous mass likely headed for extinction because of their own moral degeneracy. In Souls, Du Bois invited whites to face real black people, whose cultural gifts and unpaid slave labor had shaped the essence of America. Souls laid bare how blacks made America what it was despite enduring centuries of brutal oppression, rape of black girls and women, political disenfranchisement, and the denial of their very humanity. Souls offered a discomforting message that white racism portended an awful fate for America and the world: “This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of color line.” Yet there is another “Souls” Du Bois wrote, unknown to all but a few Du Boisian specialists. “The Souls of White Folk” (1920) is an article of but a few pages. However, the length disguises its powerful, compact punch, revealing the author’s analysis of the very souls of white folk seldom dissected by anyone, especially whites themselves. Written in the wake of World War I, the key claim of “The Souls of White Folk” (TSWF) was that racism, colonialism, and European empire-building caused the war. These endeavors led whites to fight each other viciously because they wanted their own nation to rule the world by acquiring colonies and resources through the naked oppression and exploitation of dark people worldwide. Well beyond analysis of World War I, TSWF provided nuggets of sociological wisdom omitted from accounts of the origins of sociology, especially race as a sociological phenomenon. In TSWF, Du Bois argued unequivocally that whiteness and therefore race itself were socially constructed: