Du Bois on citizenship: Revising the ‘Du Bois as sociologist’ canon

Abstract

This essay surveying W.E.B. Du Bois’ views on citizenship contends that the conventional canon in ‘Du Bois as sociologist’ studies tends to fixate on his pre-First World War years as a Social Darwinian reformer, focusing on the cultural and legal exclusion of African American and Pan-African citizens. Ignored in this focus is his turn to the left after his 1926 visit to the Soviet Union, which contributed to his gradual transformation into a Marxist-oriented world peace advocate and, during his last years, into a Communist. The Red Scare, the Cold War, the factor of race in Jim Crow America, and the anti-Marxist and anti-Communist perspectives of the third-generational sociologists who would come to define post-Second World War American sociology would assure Du Bois’ political burial in American sociology and in American intellectual thought in general until a new Black pride generation emerged in the 1960s. But even then, post-1960s sociologists have yet to come to terms with Du Bois’ post-1920s Marxist and otherwise left-of-center perspectives on the experiences of citizenship injustice among people of color and other dehumanized peoples around the world, which read so much like contemporary post-modern and restorative justice theories and parallel C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, published in the 1950s.