W.E.B. DuBois and the Concepts of Race and Class

Abstract

W ,TILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT DuBoIs was born on February 23, 1868, five days after the Emancipation Proclamation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He was laid to his final rest in Accra, Ghana on August 27, 1963. His life span of ninety-five years is a beautiful and rich story of intellectual and scholarly accomplishment. As a propagandist dedicated to advancing the position of black Americans, he has few peers. By almost any standard, DuBois was one of the foremost scholars of the late nineteenth and twentieth century black experience in America. After a lengthy period of neglect, his work and cultural contributions are just now becoming recognized.' Less well known are DuBois' abilities as a theoretician, especially as his theories encompass problems with politics, economics, and racial and class oppression. This paper examines DuBois' use of the latter two concepts race and class. As a social theorist, DuBois was carefully and knowledgeably following the empirical tradition, although this was not done solely at the level of empiricism.2 His methodological scheme was built upon the method of deductive analysis, thus allowing him to bring into a closer union theory and empirical observation, a procedure that is only recently being revived in Western social science. Also, his writings indicate a distaste of grand and ungrounded theoretical generalizations that are so common in Western social science.3 From approximately 1890 until his death, some seven decades later, DuBois was the Dean of black scholarship. By virtue of his superior education and the intense devotion he nurtured for race uplift, DuBois was ahead of his time with regard to his conceptualization of the race/class dichotomy. For most of his life this dichotomy was central to mainstream sociological theory.4