Black Women’s Unthought Position: A Black Feminist Examination of Du Bois’s Writings on Black Women’s Oppression at the Intersections of Gender and Race

A Burgeoning Du Boisian Sociology

The re-emergence of Du Boisian thought within U.S. sociology examines his scholarship on racialized modernity, labor, power, transnationalism, and knowledge production, among other areas (e.g., de Leon and Rodríguez-Muñiz 2024; Itzigsohn 2023; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Morris 2015; Wright 2002). Alongside Morris’s (2015) project of placing Du Bois as the founder of empirical American sociology, some earlier and more contemporary sociologists have pushed back against the racist marginalization of Du Bois and aimed to recover the enduring significance of his sociological agenda (e.g., Green and Driver 1978; Green and Wortham 2018; Lemert 2000; Wright 2002, 2016a, 2016b; Wright and Calhoun 2006). For example, Wright (2002, 2016a, 2016b) uncovers how Du Bois and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, from the 1890s into the early twentieth century, developed the first school of sociology in the United States. Some of the school’s numerous innovations included the first sociological school in the nation to regularly publish research limitations, employ the triangulation of methods, and develop an urban sociological research agenda (Green and Wortham 2018; Wright 2016b).

Following these pathbreaking works that focus mainly on Du Bois’s early sociology, Itzigsohn and Brown (2020) provide a systematic account of Du Bois’s contributions to sociology by synthesizing his theorizations on racialized modernity and the global color line throughout his lifetime. Other recent scholarship has continued to expand Du Boisian theorizing, including by focusing on Du Bois’s Marxist theory and histories of slavery (Jung 2019), his political sociology (de Leon and Rodríguez-Muñiz 2024), his environmental sociology (Bhardwaj 2023), and the impacts of slavery and racial capitalism on the Black psyche (Blume Oeur 2021). While these emerging projects critically inhabit and build upon Du Bois’s sociology, in expanding this critical work, it is essential to identify Du Bois’s limits regarding gender. As Collins (2016) informs us, we should continue to engage not only with Du Bois but also with the rich tradition of Black feminism to critically build on this scholarship and push beyond Du Bois’s own limits.

From Silencing to Dialoguing: Du Bois’s Vexed Feminism

Numerous scholars (e.g., Gilkes 1996; Lemons 2009; Morris 2015; Rabaka 2003; Yellin 2013) understand Du Bois to be one of the first Black male intellectuals to dedicate activism and scholarship to fighting and understanding Black women’s oppression, pointing to how he addressed and analyzed Black women’s suffering. For example, Lemons (2009, xiv) maintains that Du Bois was a “long-standing activist for women’s suffrage and equality.” However, even Lemons (2009), who foregrounds Du Bois’s activism for women’s rights, identifying him as a forefather of womanism and contributor to Black feminism, “acknowledge[s] his limits” (p. 63) and maintains that Du Bois did not challenge “the gender norms associated with heterosexual privilege” (p. 123).

Some of Du Bois’s twentieth-century writings grappling with racism and sexism were an advancement from Du Bois’s ([1899] 1996) foundational and inaugural sociological work, The Philadelphia Negro, in which he attributed partial blame to Black women’s and girls’ purported promiscuity for Black people’s precarious social and economic conditions (Hartman 2019). Nonetheless, Du Bois’s contradictory gender politics and scholarship still persisted throughout his lifetime (Carby 1998; Hartman 2019; James 1997). In that regard, critical Black feminist scholarship has analyzed how Du Bois often struggled to understand the racialized and gendered constructions of womanhood that structure Black women’s oppression (Carby 1998; James 1997; Weinbaum 2013). This body of work also documents how Du Bois marginalized Black women’s scholarship in his own writings on race and gender even as he publicly advocated for racial and gender equality (Carby 1998, 12; James 1997; Moody-Turner 2015).

Guy-Sheftall (1990, 161) describes how Du Bois romanticized Black women, often creating an “idealized image of Black women, much in the same way that southern white men paid homage to the shrine of womanhood.” Analyzing Du Bois’s vexed profeminist politics and writings on Black women, James (1997, 35) maintains that “a masculinist worldview influences his writing to diminish his gender progressivism.” Moreover, while Du Bois advocated for women’s rights, he “veiled the individual achievements of women such as Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells from the political landscape” (James 1997, 37). For example, Anna Julia Cooper, a pioneering Black feminist and a fierce advocate for Black women’s rights, was ignored by Du Bois even though they were contemporaries. In “The Damnation of Women,” a text often cited as evidence of his intersectional analysis, Du Bois ([1920] 1995c) references Cooper’s political philosophy on Black women’s liberation as central to Black emancipation; but rather than directly citing her, refers to her as “one of our women” (quoted in Itzigsohn and Brown 2020, 87). The citation in question came from Cooper’s (1892, 31) discussion of the centrality of Black women’s emancipation to Black liberation:

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say, “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”

By not properly citing Cooper, Du Bois practices what Cooper had described as muffling, the active silencing or obscuring of Black women’s voices (Cooper 1892, i; May 2021, 259, 263). This muffling was not anomalous but sustained by resisting publishing Cooper’s own scholarship in Du Bois’s capacity as The Crisis magazine’s editor (Moody-Turner 2015).

On the other hand, Burden-Stelly (2023) documents how Du Bois began to articulate the significance of Black women’s struggles for economic independence in his latter years, as he was intellectually and politically shaped by interactions with radical Black women activists. He was moved to advocate for Black women’s struggles against white supremacy, exploitation, and sexual violence, such as by collaborating with Sojourners for Truth and Justice (STJ) and sponsoring the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, who was “raped by six white men who were never charged for their crime” (Burden-Stelly 2023, 180). Although it seemed that Du Bois more openly embraced radical Black women in his latter years, Vásquez’s (2024) historical analysis of Du Bois’s relationship with sociologist and anthropologist Irene Diggs (the closest and most significant collaborator of Du Bois, with whom he and his family had a long, personal relationship) complicates this trajectory. Du Bois insisted that Diggs work under him as she received minimal acknowledgment for her contributions, even as Digg’s analysis of the intersections of race, class, colonialism, gender, and sexual violence helped Du Bois advance his sociology of the global line and racial and colonial capitalism.

This erasure of Black women’s theoretical and political knowledge regarding the intersection of sexual violence, slavery, and gender-based oppression as central to understanding the subjugation of Black populations haunts Du Bois’s writings on Black women’s oppression, and it makes clear the need to develop a critical dialogue with Du Bois that reads alongside his theoretical innovations but also against the grain of his limits. Engaging with Black feminist critiques of Du Bois, Blume Oeur’s (2018) ethnography of two all-Black male schools analyzes how the discourse on Du Bois often draws on his early vision of the talented tenth and constrains a more progressive and emancipatory vision of Black liberation that does not marginalize Black women. In an analysis of campus rape culture at Morehouse College and how Black men perform gender, Grundy (2022) critically extends a Du Boisian phenomenology by demonstrating how double consciousness and the veil for Black men under racialized modernity requires intracommunal forms of gendered antiblackness and sexual violence against Black women to maintain the boundaries of masculinity.

Grundy’s (2022) critical engagement with Du Bois’s double consciousness, along with James’s (1997) and Carby’s (1998) intervention on the patriarchal ideological boundaries exercised by Du Bois and other race men at the turn of the century, helps to account for the ritualistic erasures within masculinist intellectualism, which has an undeveloped consideration of Black women’s experiences and intellectual contributions on dismantling systems of domination. James (1997), Carby (1998), and other Black feminist thinkers agree that not only did Du Bois not invent intersectionality, but he also performed a form of symbolic violence in the epistemic erasure of Black women’s knowledge. This erasure requires us to engage with Black feminist epistemologies to construct a more critical horizon of expanding this dialogue. Following this chorus of critical Black feminist scholars, we can illuminate additional factors that can account for how Du Bois was limited in his meditations on Black women’s oppression and in envisioning them as transformative agents central to Black liberation. It is irrefutable that Du Bois provided a wealth of careful, incisive, and foundational meditations on race—including how it is lived, how it curtails life, and what its existential implications are for those living on the other side of the racialized veil. With that said, the breadth and depth of these insights and innovations provide us with all the more reason to grapple with why and how Du Bois did not plumb the same depths for gender as he did for race in his sociological theorizing and visions of liberation, and, consequently, how Black women’s subjectivities and political vantage points remained largely undertheorized or unthought. I extend and deepen this critical engagement with Du Bois by turning to Black feminist intellectuals who foreground an understanding of the souls of Black women experiencing gendered antiblackness in the afterlife of slavery.

Black Feminist Epistemes on Gendered Antiblackness and the Afterlife of Slavery

Black feminist and critical scholarship on race, gender, the modern slave episteme, and slavery’s afterlife develops a critique of modernity by theorizing on the racial and gendered violences of racial slavery. This work builds on foundational Black feminist thinkers, such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1892, 1895), whose activist journalism exposed the intersecting logics of race, gender, sexuality, and class that left Black women and men vulnerable to extreme forms of violence in the aftermath of slavery (Collins 2019; Giddings 2001), and Anna Julia Cooper (1892), who theorized on how Black women’s intersectional oppressions and political and intellectual contributions were marginalized in struggles for women’s rights and Black liberation. Cooper (1892, 134) described how the Black woman is “confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both.” Grappling with these social dynamics of why Black women’s sufferings and perspectives continue to be reproduced as “unknown” or “unacknowledged” continues to guide contemporary Black feminist thought (May 2021, 255, 259).

Contemporary Black feminist scholarship on the specificity of Black women’s suffering examines how slavery’s violences produce Black women’s bodies as flesh and how this process forms the foundations of modern property relations and racial and gender hierarchies during both chattel slavery and post-Emancipation (e.g., Hartman 2008; Jackson 2020; Spillers 1987). Jackson (2020) posits that Blackness undergoes a process of plasticization through the European Enlightenment’s metaphysical construction of the natural world and its attendant projects of whiteness and the human. Through this plasticization, blackness is made to function as the foundation that allows other categories of being to cohere and become legible. For example, the category of gender is produced and made legible through antiblack technologies of violence and the exclusion of blackness, as well as through sexual violence against Black women. Along these lines, Spillers (1987, 72) theorizes on how the transatlantic slave trade transformed African bodies into fungible flesh, producing an ungendering of enslaved African women in the process: “Under these conditions, one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into ‘account’ as quantities.” That is, while Black women, marked with the “hieroglyphics” of slavery (Spillers 1987, 67), were excluded from consensually entering social relations and being recognized under the universal category of womanhood, white women’s access to gender affords them human integrity that is contingent upon a separation between human and slave (Spillers 1987; Wilderson 2010). The commodification and denigration of Black women lies at the foundation of modern racialized, colonial, and gendered constructions of the human. Drawing on Jackson’s (2020) and other critical Black feminists’ insights on slavery and Black women that understand Black women’s oppression as central to modern hierarchies of race, gender, and class (e.g., Hartman 1997; Spillers 1987), I examine how Du Bois draws on and grapples with the mythical icon of the Black woman and how this shapes his theorizations on gender and its relation to the color line.

Du Bois, Gender, and the Problem of the Color Line

In the oft-cited essay represented as emblematic of his profeminism, “Damnation of Women” ([1920] 1995c, 309), Du Bois writes that “the uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause.” In this essay, Du Bois critiques the racism and sexism Black women experienced and offers progressive understandings of Black women’s reproductive rights and how central their voices are to a democratic political horizon. Despite this example of clarity, a closer look at Du Bois’s political writings on gender and race reveals a more complicated picture, where, on one hand, Du Bois begins to identify Black women’s intersecting oppressions, but, on the other hand, his analysis is constrained by a reliance on heteronormative constructions of womanhood and obscuring white women’s violence against Black women.

Du Bois’s 1912 essay, “The Black Mother,” is a fictional story exploring white women’s racist and gendered investments in womanhood and motherhood placed into crisis in the wake of Emancipation. Du Bois ([1912] 1995b, 294) voices a white mother’s anxieties directed toward emancipated Black women:

. . . as the colored mother has retreated to her own home, the master class has cried out against her. “She is thriftless and stupid” the white mother says, “when she refuses to nurse my baby and stays with her own. She is bringing her daughter up beyond her station where she trains her to be a teacher instead of sending her into my home to act as nursemaid to my little boy and girl . . . she no longer deserves my approval when she refuses to leave her home and enter mine.”

This scenario explores how Black women’s labor formed the bedrock of white women’s households and their lifeworlds, both materially and existentially. Historian Thavolia Glymph (2008) describes how white women’s domestic spaces constituted workplaces where enslaved Black women toiled for white women and their slave owners. Despite assumptions that their participation in violence against the enslaved was innocent or anomalous, white women wielded the power of slave ownership alongside white men and played active roles in plantation economies in the U.S. South and Caribbean (Beckles 1993; Glymph 2008; Jones-Rogers 2019; Weiner 1998). Moreover, Glymph (2008) documents how white women’s use of physical violence against enslaved Black women was a common occurrence and foundational to maintaining the hierarchies of the plantation household. In “The Black Mother,” Du Bois illustrates how Black women’s emancipation produced an existential anxiety for white women regarding the domestic space as well as their access to the category of “womanhood.” Du Bois ([1912] 1995b, 309) intuits that white women felt threatened by Black women “bringing their children up beyond their station where she trains her to be a teacher” rather than a domestic to labor for white families. This short story serves to illuminate white suffragettes’ tremendously flawed politics regarding race and Black women, demonstrating white women’s unwillingness to relinquish ownership of Black women’s lives and families in the wake of Emancipation and Reconstruction. A couple of decades earlier, Cooper (1892, 83) keenly observed this dynamic, describing how white women activists were too often sympathetic to southern white women’s anti-Black ideologies that emerged from “their grandfathers’ plantations.” Using Black feminist thought that focuses on the modern episteme of slavery and its afterlives, we can understand Du Bois’s illustration as a description of the gendered antiblackness that animates white supremacy and, more specifically, white womanhood and motherhood.

While Du Bois locates these dynamics of white women’s anxieties, this analysis is obscured when he describes white women’s structural relation to white men within gendered racial hierarchies. In “Hail Columbia!” (Du Bois [1913] 1995a), white women suffragists demonstrating for their rights are attacked by white men. The short story seeks to demonstrate an inherent contradiction of white men asserting themselves as leaders of a so-called advanced race and civilization but enacting violence to deny women’s rights and maintain patriarchal domination. The story explosively ends by critiquing white men’s brutish behaviors:

White men are on the firing line, and if they don’t want white women for wives they will at least keep them for prostitutes. Beat them back, keep them down; Flatten them, call them “visions of loveliness” and tell them that the place for women is in the home, even if she hasn’t got a home. (Du Bois [1913] 1995a, 295)

Du Bois’s description of white men’s propertization and commodification of white women erases white men’s and women’s violence against enslaved Black women via forced commodification and propertization through slavery. This erasure in Du Bois’s writings persisted. For instance, in an August 1914 Crisis editorial, “Therefore: Votes For Women,” Du Bois (1914, 179), noting the hypocrisy of the (white) women’s movement refusal to welcome Black men’s support of women’s suffrage, positions white women within the same structural oppression as Black women, describing white women as enslaved: “The southern white women who form one of the most repressed and enslaved groups of modern civilized women . . . ”

In both “Therefore: Votes for Women” and “Hail Columbia,” Du Bois examines the economic and social control that white men wield over white women. However, he misses an opportunity to examine further how gender intersects with race for Black women and how this intersection structures white men’s and white women’s racialized and gendered social positions through the violence they enact on Black women. While in his earlier essay, “The Black Mother,” Du Bois begins to identify white women’s antagonism toward Black women, in these latter works describing white women as “enslaved” under gendered oppression, white women’s violence against Black women is obscured. Here, Du Bois has an opportunity to correctly place white women at the scenes of Black women’s subjugation. According to historians of white women’s roles in plantation societies, white mistresses acquired wealth more through slave ownership than through forms of land-based property, were as physically violent as white male slaveowners, and actively participated in the trading and brutalizing of Black women (Beckles 1993; Fuentes 2016; Jones-Rogers 2019). Following these counterhistories, we can see how Du Bois’s analysis of gender oppression obscures how antiblackness structures gender and organizes patriarchal violence, thus collapsing violence experienced by white women and Black women into a shared victimhood of gender oppression under patriarchy that does not address white women’s violence toward Black women.

Returning to “The Black Mother,” Du Bois’s ([1912] 1995b) representation of white women’s racist anxieties focuses on Black women’s labor as essential to the racial order; but even in this piece, he does not tease out how gender, womanhood, and motherhood cannot protect Black women from gender oppression, as white women after Emancipation sought to maintain sole social and legal status of the categories of “woman” and “mother” through the exclusion of Black women. The universalizing assumptions underpinning the categories of “woman” and “motherhood” require an onto-epistemological violence to subjugate black people into an abject position to allow normative categories of gender to cohere (Hartman 1997; Wilderson 2010). As Black feminist activists and theorists have historically demonstrated, gender cannot be possessed by Black women as it can for white women vis-à-vis European imperial programs of domination and the violence required to separate human from nonhuman. In that regard, Hartman (1997, 99) describes how “The enslaved female existed outside the gendered universe because she was not privy to the entitlements of bourgeois women within the white patriarchal family.” The colonial and classed logic that tethers “woman” to whiteness and therefore to freedom and citizenship requires a segregation and surveillance of blackness from normative categories. For example, the iconic figure of the mammy loomed large in white women’s and men’s post-Emancipation anxieties. They feared losing the figure of the mammy as a key fixture in the reproduction, health, and accumulation of the white family and its logics of gender, sexuality, womanhood, and kin (McElya 2007). In “The Black Mother,” Du Bois ([1912] 1995b) highlights whites’ obsession with the possession of Black women’s reproductive labor as exemplified in efforts to build a mammy statue in the nation’s capital. In response to this perverse nostalgia, Du Bois yearns for Black women’s equality with white women by envisioning a future where they obtain safety and protection through the categories of womanhood and motherhood:

Let the present-day mammies suckle their own children. . . . As their girls grow to womanhood, let them see to it that, if possible, they do not enter domestic service in those homes where they are unprotected, and where their womanhood is not treated with respect. (p. 294)

In Du Bois’s imaginings of Black women’s futures as “women,” “mothers,” and ultimately as subjects with protections, he does not address the full extent of the gratuitous violence that society exacts on them inside and outside the white household. Black womanhood is an impossible category in which honor and integrity are unthought of and cannot be reciprocated to Black women (Hartman 1997; Wilderson 2010).

Du Bois’s understanding of gender—while cognizant of the denials of “motherhood,” “womanhood,” or “innocence”—does not grasp how the category of gender itself functions as a site of terror for Black women. Consequently, Du Bois continues to imagine gender as a horizon of protection for Black women. Identifying this contradiction in his writings can help us explain how Du Bois obscures white women’s violence through his attempts to position womanhood as a tool that Black women can use against white supremacist violation.

This obfuscation ultimately hinders a deeper analysis of how race and gender intersect for Black women. For example, in “Woman Suffrage,” Du Bois ([1915] 1995d, 297–98) attempts to address Black voters’ concerns regarding women’s right to vote:

The statement that women are weaker than men is sheer rot: it is the same sort of thing that we hear about “darker races” and “lower classes” . . . That the average woman is spiritually different from the average man is undoubtedly just as true as the fact that the average white man differs from the average Negro, but this is no reason for disenfranchising the Negro or lynching him.

Du Bois links the patriarchal ideology of women being weaker than men to the scientific ideologies of people of “darker races” being suited for death because of genetic inferiority. Within this comparison, Black women’s intersecting racial and gender oppressions within this spectrum of disenfranchisement and oppression is obscured. In the essay’s concluding remarks, Du Bois directs his sympathies toward white women’s gender oppression under patriarchal domination and thus elides white women’s complicity with white men’s colonial projects of dominating African peoples. These projects sought to turn Black women into commodified flesh and an endless source of reproductive labor by family separation, psychological torture, sexual violence, and placement into an antisocial relationality under racial slavery. In another essay on women’s rights, “The Freedom of Womanhood” (Du Bois [1924] 2004, 159), when describing the need to center Black women’s struggles for economic independence in the women’s movement across the color line, Du Bois elides histories of sexual violation and torture on plantations by white men and women in a description of Black women’s political and cultural knowledge uniting the nation:

Whatever judgment we may pass upon all this and however we may like or dislike it, the fact remains that the colored slave women became the medium through which two great races were united in America . . . we must remember it was just as surely infiltration of black blood into white America and not even an extraordinary drawing of the color line against all visible Negro blood has ever been able to trace its true limits.

In this instance, to garner white support for the Black women’s movement, Du Bois understands Black women to function as what Spillers (1987) identifies as a vestibule of culture, ultimately providing the gift of racial mixture and Black culture and knowledge for American society. In another instance, when Du Bois ([1915] 1995d, 298) seeks to broaden support for women’s suffrage, he turns away from meditating on Black women’s intersecting oppressions. Instead, he describes the gender oppression of “womanhood,” in which white women are subjected to a form of domination that not only bears a similarity to the structure of slavery, but also is enmeshed within the new primary form of slavery itself:

The meaning of the twentieth century is the freeing of the individual soul: the soul longest in slavery and still in the most disgusting and indefensible slavery is the soul of womanhood.

A meditation on how Black women sit at the nexus of formations of gendered and racialized subjectivities due to slavery is absent in this formulation; therefore, the default of what falls under normative womanhood can be assumed to be white women.

Throughout these essays on women’s rights, Du Bois acknowledges violences targeting Black women, but in other instances, his conceptualizations of womanhood, motherhood, and white women as enslaved to broaden support for women’s suffrage obscures how Black women are terrorized under the sign of gender by both white men and white women due to slavery’s afterlife within racialized modernity. By engaging with Du Bois’s meditations on gender, womanhood, and Black women through Black feminist scholarship that centers the afterlife of slavery, we can produce a more critical Du Boisian sociology that understands the intersections of racialized modernity, antiblackness, and gender, as well as the insurrectionary potential of Black women’s labor for the ongoing project of Black emancipation. To elaborate on this last point, I analyze how Du Bois addressed Black women’s suffering and political agency within his history of Black people’s revolution against the plantation system in the U.S. South.

The Black Female Slave as an Unthought Position in Black Reconstruction

Du Bois’s ([1935] 1962) Black Reconstruction in America responded to white hegemonic historical accounts of the Civil War and Reconstruction that erased Black people as political agents in toppling slavery. In this monumental work, Du Bois provides a political-economic analysis that centers chattel slavery as the economic history of this era and Black people’s revolution to overthrow this system as the engine of progressive political transformation. Although Du Bois focuses on Black people’s agency in crushing chattel slavery, an emphasis on Black women and their emancipatory actions disappears from the vast majority of the text (Weinbaum 2013). Interrogating the following chapters of Black Reconstruction—“The Planter” and “The General Strike”—I find that Du Bois does not grant adequate focus to the brutality of the sexual violence that Black women were subjected to nor to the magnitude and impact of their insurrection on plantations alongside revolutionary politics throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction. That is, Du Bois’s ability to carefully and thoroughly challenge the antiblack narratives of Reconstruction by analyzing the revolutionary force of the enslaved makes even more clear the limits of his gender analysis, as Black women’s political agency remains largely an unthought position in his account.

“The Planter” analyzes the political, economic, and cultural dynamics of the planter class’s acquisition of power. In this chapter, Du Bois occludes Black women’s resistance to sexual violence and forecloses an analysis of the nature of their suffering. Through his examination of the white planter class and their mechanisms of controlling the enslaved, Du Bois seems able to imagine Black women’s suffering only through the psychological taxation of this brutal system on white planter men (Weinbaum 2013). With that said, Du Bois ([1935] 1962, 35) does demonstrate an understanding of the centrality of white planters’ sexual domination of Black enslaved women:

Sexual chaos was . . . not always realized but always possible: polygamy through the concubinage of black women to white men; polyandry through black women and selected men on plantations . . . to improve the human stock of strong and able workers. The census of 1860 counted 588,352 persons obviously of mixed blood—a figure admittedly below the truth.

For Du Bois ([1935] 1962), this forced sexual reproduction produced two outcomes: the “commercial breeding and sale of human labor for profit” and “the intermingling of black and white blood” which white slave owners openly knew but publicly denied (p. 11). Although Du Bois never openly identifies Black enslaved women’s mistreatment as rape, Black feminist scholarship maintains that rape and sexual violation functioned as technologies of domination against Black enslaved women. Darlene C. Hine (1979) demonstrates how African women’s perceived sexual lasciviousness was used as a justification for sexual violation. Due to their status as property, Black enslaved women were legally regarded as lacking the social integrity or legal protections to consent to or resist sexual encounters (Hartman 1997).

Du Bois ([1935] 1962, 44) is aware of this repression and lack of white culpability in observing that white planters increased their profits not only through the production of crops via physical violence but also through sexual violence and the system of forced reproduction against enslaved Black women. Du Bois ([1935] 1962, 43) argues that white planters “could not face the fact of Negro women as brood mares and of Black children as puppies” and that it “so affronted the moral sense of the planters. . . . They tried to hide from it.” Instead of focusing on Black women’s sorrows of being sexually violated and forcibly bred as commodities, as well as their forms of resistance in response, Du Bois focuses on the secrecy and shame white planters experienced due to their breeding techniques. Du Bois does acknowledge Black women’s forced sexual reproduction as foundational to the plantation economy; but by focusing more on the subjectivity of the white planter, he misses an opportunity to reckon with enslaved Black women’s radical resistance that catalyzed their revolutionary struggles against the slave system.

Ultimately, this undertheorization leads to the erasure of Black women’s struggles as a central protagonism that engendered the general strike, or the Black enslaved insurrection against the plantation system. In fact, after “The Planter” chapter, the centrality of sexual violence enacted against Black women and Black women’s acts of resistance against the slave system disappear for the next 700 pages (Weinbaum 2013). Even in the chapter that focuses most on the enslaved political rebellion against the plantation system, “The General Strike,” the figure of the Black enslaved women is seldom seen; the bulk of Du Bois’s descriptions focuses on Black men joining the Union Army ranks, even while Black women—both in exodus and behind Confederate enemy lines—participated in the war effort by feeding Black Union troops, building communities out of refugee camps, developing networks of knowledge and care, refusing orders from Confederate troops and sabotaging their strategies, and advocating politically such as fighting for Black women’s rights for widow permissions (Glymph 2020). Instead, Du Bois’s analysis of the Black-led revolution against the plantation system—while pathbreaking within histories of the Civil War—relies on a framework that assumes Black men’s actions as most fundamental while erasing Black women’s emancipatory struggles within Black political horizons.

Du Bois’s ignoring of Black women’s resistance to sexual violence as well as their participation in the general strike points to a conundrum within Du Bois’s social theory: The racialized, gendered, and classed structural position that shapes Black women’s suffering remains opaque, even in instances where he grapples with overlapping and intersecting structures of oppression, such as slavery, capitalism, and racism, and thus seems most poised to dive deeper into an analysis of Black women’s oppression. It is this conundrum that causes him to not fully explore the possibilities of enslaved Black women as a revolutionary force against the plantation system that fundamentally challenged relations of property, race, and gender.

Discussion and Conclusion

Engaging with Du Boisian theory through Black feminist approaches to slavery, gender, and antiblackness, this article has demonstrated that across his writings on women’s suffrage and Black people’s revolution against the plantation system, Du Bois struggles to name and explain the racialized and gendered dynamics that structure Black women’s oppression. While extant scholarship has emphasized Du Bois as either a pathbreaking intersectional scholar or severely limited in his feminist politics, this paper has mapped out both the innovations and limitations of how Du Bois theorized on the intersections of race and gender, by examining how he conceptualized Black women’s suffering in his writings on women’s and Black liberation. Although Du Bois begins to identify Black women’s intersecting racial and gender oppressions, his theoretical and rhetorical approach also confounds Black women’s suffering by relying on the category of womanhood as a site of redemption. This disarticulation of race and gender obscures Black women’s oppression and, consequently, obfuscates white women’s roles in upholding the gendered antiblack violence that maintains the color line as well as larger colonial regimes of domination by their violent defense of the category of proper “womanhood.” Du Bois’s confoundment of Black women’s oppression continues in Black Reconstruction, where Du Bois begins to highlight the centrality of sexual violence enacted against Black women on the plantation system, but elides a meditation on their own experiences and political organizing during the Civil War and, thus, how their politics was informed by their intersectional experiences.

Instead of understanding blackness and gender as mutually exclusive categories, Black feminist thinkers understand race and gender as having an intersectional relationship, often with the construction of blackness forming the foundation to both categories (e.g., Hartman 1997; Jackson 2020; Spillers 1987). Black feminist thinkers use this intersection as a portal through which to identify Western colonial constructions of blackness and gender, which were solidified and experimented with through the systems of chattel slavery, forced labor, and colonial conquest, and they contend with how it structures the material, existential, and phenomenological experiences of Black women within racialized modernity.

In his writings on gender equality and Black life, Du Bois struggled to articulate Black women as political agents of social change. This is not to say that Du Bois did not make critical and monumental theoretical interventions. At the same time, these tensions and limits I have laid out highlight the need to bring Du Bois’s analytics of race and gender into conversation with Black feminist and critical approaches to slavery, gender, and antiblackness. These approaches grapple with how gender within the slave episteme is fundamentally structured through the violence of antiblackness and racial slavery, which places Black women in a position through which categories of belonging and exclusion are articulated against, but also from which Black women develop politics and epistemologies that can dismantle colonial, racial, and gendered hierarchies.

This paper intervenes in the growing sociological literature on Du Boisian social theory by demonstrating how Black feminist scholarship is needed for close dialogue with, and to push past the limits of, Du Bois’s approaches to examining the intersections of race and gender. Envisioning a contemporary Du Boisian sociology, Itzigsohn and Brown (2020, 195) stress the need to “go beyond Du Bois by fully incorporating analyses of patriarchy, gender, sexuality, ableism, and religion.” In the spirit of that vision, I have demonstrated the critical imperative to push beyond Du Bois’s analysis of patriarchy, gender, and sexuality by way of critical Black feminist interventions to fully attend to the complexities of Black women’s oppression. While a Du Boisian social theory remains indispensable for its depth and breadth of analyzing social systems of slavery and colonialism and their historical mutations, critical Black feminist insights in dialogue with Du Boisian thought can provide richer descriptions and deeper theoretical explanations of how the violence against and control of Black women is foundational to these structures. In other words, attributing intersectionality’s roots to Du Bois without grappling in more depth with the limitations of how he theorized gender constrains a complex engagement with a Black feminist analysis and its troubling of the category of gender under slavery. At the same time, it would be just as limiting to eschew the foundational frameworks Du Bois offers in studying the dynamics of Black life during slavery and post-Emancipation. As Hartman (2019, 110) describes, Du Bois’s multimethod sociological analysis tracked the “great vicissitudes of black life” and demonstrated that in the wake of the devastation of slavery “the Negro was not fixed, but a changing and variable entity.” To build on the insights of Du Boisian social theory and Black feminism, we can continue to synthesize these two bodies of work by focusing on how racism, slavery, and colonialism continue to structure modern institutions, inequalities, and subjectivities—what Itzigsohn and Brown (2020) term racialized modernity—and simultaneously on how, from the specific vantage position of Black women’s suffering, the gendered and racialized logics that uphold these modern hierarchies can be undone.

That is, a Black feminist analysis of the afterlife of slavery can extend and add more texture and depth to an analysis of racialized modernity. One example that can guide the direction of this work comes from Saidiya Hartman (2019), whose historical ethnography of poor Black women and girls’ lives in northern U.S. cities at the turn of the twentieth century engages in close dialogue with Du Bois’s sociological imaginary but also pushes past its limits by writing from the chorus. For Hartman (2019), the chorus is the collective standpoint of the most marginalized Black women and girls subjected to extreme forms of gendered antiblack exploitation, whom Du Bois himself too often classified as deviant rather than as revolutionary in their efforts to forge new forms of intimacy and kinship in the face of post-Emancipation forms of gendered and racialized policing. Following Hartman (2019), we can deepen the dialogue between Du Boisian and Black feminist sociologies by paying closer attention to where Du Bois’s insights on gender reach their limits, and how Black feminist scholarship on the afterlife of slavery pushes past those limits, while also staying grounded in a vision of how racialized modernity is produced by sustaining the global color line. By doing so, we can develop a sustained analysis of how gendered antiblackness structures the color line, both past and present, and the disastrous effects it has on Black populations.

We might ask: How can sociologists working within a Du Boisian tradition respond to this invitation from Black feminism when it comes to theorizing on Black women’s oppression? What analytical approaches does Du Boisian sociology have to offer that can contribute to this dialogue? Although there exists a contested terrain with regard to Du Bois’s vexed feminism and his underdevelopment of a gendered analysis, what can be argued is that Du Bois’s theorizing on race, if engaged with critically, could enhance feminist theorizing broadly—specifically, regarding understanding the colonial dimensions of racialized modernity and the global color line in structuring the racialized and gendered subjectivities of populations transnationally. For example, Matlon (2022) expands the theory of racial capitalism by analyzing the fraught and violent construction of Black manhood and masculinity under colonial domination and its aftermath in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. By centralizing the narratives of underemployed Abidjanais men, Matlon (2022) identifies the tensions between them asserting agency while simultaneously being exploited and excluded as precarious gendered and racialized subjects within a global economy. Matlon’s examination of the relationship among blackness, masculinity, and economic agency for (post)colonial Abidjanais men illuminates the breadwinning role as wage laborer as a heteronormative, gendered, and racialized category. This analysis of how racial capitalism and colonial violence structures the intersections of blackness, masculinity, and exploitation for Abidjanais men expands a sociological analysis of the Black Atlantic’s colonial experiences of survival under racial capitalism. By doing so, this work adds additional texture and depth to intersectionality as well as the burgeoning Du Boisian sociology that reckons with colonial racialized modernity and the global color line as systems of domination experienced by global racialized and gendered populations outside of the United States.

To further a critical Du Boisian sociology that bridges the insights of racialized modernity and the global color line, on the one hand, and gendered antiblackness, on the other hand, I encourage us to critically engage with what Hartman (2019, 348) terms the chorus of Black women’s and girls’ voices that functions as “a vehicle” that envisions an alternative story and thus “propels transformation.” We can also learn from and experiment with the Du Boisian approach of critical self-revision that Blume Oeur (2022, 563) terms aftershadowing, whereby new insights are developed from reflecting on how past works cast shadows on the present through their insights and limitations. Through this critical engagement, we can investigate how a Du Boisian sociological approach can respond to the chorus of Black feminist theorists analyzing the multiscalar forms of violence produced through slavery’s afterlife. Engaging with the call and response of the critical Black feminist theoretical chorus while critically revising and extending Du Boisian methods will enhance an understanding of the mechanisms of racialized modernity, antiblackness, gender oppression, and racial capitalism.

To return to Collins’s (2016) hesitation against naming Du Bois as intersectionality’s father, future Du Boisian scholarship that grapples with the intersections of race and gender can bring in deeper engagements from Black feminist scholarship on Black women’s labor history in the United States, racialized and gendered identity formations, the intersecting forms of racialized, gender, and sexual violence they face, and their political struggles for liberation. Bridging Du Boisian and Black feminist and critical approaches to slavery, gender, and antiblackness will allow us then to develop rigorous analytical frameworks to understand what Cooper (1892, i) identified as a “voiceless note” and a “muffled chord” of the chorus of Black feminist thinkers who identify the complexities of Black women’s suffering and their ongoing projects for Black emancipation.