Color Line

Abstract

A primary feature of the modern social world is the color line, the socially constructed and material separation of people based on skin color that has developed broadly within nation‐states and among nations since at least the late sixteenth century. In 1881, Frederick Douglass first introduced the idea of a national color line in the United States. Several decades later, W. E. B. Du Bois identified an international or global color line that cut across the United States and other nations, noting the large and looming problems associated with this human‐made divide, which was the product of European slavery and colonialism. The concept of the color line is still widely used among contemporary scholars of race, ethnicity, and nationalism, who demonstrate how the color line continues to operate in and shape the contemporary social world.