Embryonic intersectionality: W.E.B. Du Bois and the inauguration of intersectional sociology

Introduction: Du Bois, biography, and critical sociology

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced “Due-Boyss”) was born 5 years after the Emancipation Proclamation on 23 February 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a tiny mill town in the Berkshire Mountains. The few African Americans in the area worked as domestics in homes or servants at summer resorts, while the Irish, German, and Czech Catholics worked in the town’s factories. Du Bois was raised solely by his mother, as his delinquent father went absent before his toddling son turned 2 years old. His mother was a domestic worker and washerwoman and supported her precocious son through other odd jobs and outright charity from the well-to-do White town residents (Horne, 2009: 1–7; Lewis, 1993: 11–55; Marable, 1986: 2–8; Rampersad, 1990: 1–18). Du Bois’s father’s absence greatly affected him, although perhaps not as much as his mother’s paralytic stroke, which his biographer David Levering Lewis reported, “impaired her left leg or arm, or both” (Lewis, 1993: 29).

Du Bois’s early life, Lewis lamented, was “a milieu circumscribed by immiseration, dementia, and deformity” (p. 29). As with so many Black children born within the shameful shadow of American slavery, Du Bois grew up very poor and, consequently, developed a consciousness of his lower class status before he was aware of his race and American racism, even though he was the only Black child in his all-White school. It was not long, however, before race and racism unforgivingly entered his life, and from his first unforgettable and life-altering experience of anti-Black racism he defiantly decided to “prove to the world that Negroes were just like other people” (Du Bois, 1972: 5).

After his mother’s death on 23 March 1885 when he was only 16 years old, Du Bois was determined to make something of himself, solemnly keeping a promise he made to his beloved mother (Du Bois, 1920: 12–13; Du Bois, 1968a: 102; Lewis, 1993: 53). Hence, after high school an orphaned Du Bois sought every scholarship he could find to fund his studies at Fisk University, Harvard University, and the University of Berlin (where he came into contact with a young and recently habilitated Max Weber) before returning to Harvard to become the first African American to be conferred a Ph.D. from that eminent institution of higher learning in 1895. Du Bois began his teaching career as a professor of classics, teaching Latin, Greek, German, and English, at Wilberforce University, an African Methodist Episcopal institution in Ohio. He unsuccessfully attempted to add sociology to the curriculum in 1894, and left the school in frustration for the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, where he was hired as an “Assistant Instructor” to research and write a study on the African Americans of Philadelphia. At the University of Pennsylvania, however, he was still not free from frustration, writing in his autobiography, “I ignored my pitiful stipend” and “it goes without saying that I did no instructing, save once to pilot a pack of idiots through the Negro slums” (Du Bois, 1968a: 197; Lewis, 1993: 150–192).

As was discussed in greater detail in my book, Against Epistemic Apartheid: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology, Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro, although long-overlooked in the history of sociology, was upon its publication in 1899 an utterly unprecedented and undeniably innovative work in urban sociology, industrial sociology, historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of race, and sociology of culture (Du Bois, 1899b; Rabaka, 2010: 47–106). Indeed, Elijah Anderson has recently asserted in his introduction to a reprint edition of The Philadelphia Negro: “W.E.B. Du Bois is a founding father of American sociology, but, unfortunately, neither this masterpiece nor much of Du Bois’s other work has been given proper recognition; in fact, it is possible to advance through a graduate program in sociology in this country without ever hearing about Du Bois” (Anderson, 1996: xiv).

Anderson’s weighted words here help to highlight why this article, perhaps, has an added importance. To put it plainly, what this essay seeks to offer that is distinctive is that it weaves the work of a range of Du Bois scholarship together with the express interpretive intent of creating a critical inventory and thoroughly interrogating what has been included and what has been excluded when and where we come to W.E.B. Du Bois’s contributions to sociology. At the conceptual core of this study, then, is a set of crucial questions, questions which I believe remain important for comprehending the history of sociology: why is it imperative for contemporary or, rather, 21st century sociologists to know who Du Bois was and what he contributed to sociology? And, even more methodologically speaking, why is it important to not only know what but how, in his own innovative intellectual history-making manner, Du Bois contributed what he contributed to sociology?

It ought to be stated outright here at the outset: The real answers to these questions do not lay so much in who W.E.B. Du Bois was, but more in his—however long-overlooked—social scientific legacy, which is to say the answers lie in the lasting contributions of his discursive formations and discursive praxes to posterity’s critical comprehension of the ways in which classical social inequalities and injustices are very often inextricable from, and indelibly connected to, contemporary social inequalities and injustices—and, faithfully following Du Bois’s innovative intersectional sociology, especially with regard to the ways in which race, gender, and class frequently overlap and transmute to form the interlocking systems of oppression of racism and sexism and capitalism. In other words, the distinction of Du Bois’s discourse, above all else, has to do with his extraordinary early emphasis on what we call “intersectionality” (or, rather, “intersectionalism”) in the contemporary academy (Carastathis, 2016; Collins and Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989, 2019; Grzanka, 2018; Hancock, 2016; May, 2015; Nash, 2019; Romero, 2018).

“Wanderjahre in Europe”—Du Bois’s Transdisciplinary Training at the University of Berlin, 1892-1894: History, Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, Economics, Statistics, and Labor Studies, et al.

This essay is only partially and preliminarily concerned with Du Bois’s exclusion from the history of sociology. There is only so long Du Bois-inspired sociologists can condemn Du Bois’s absence from “mainstream” sociological discourse. As a brief exercise in the critical sociology of sociology, this article ultimately is much more interested in demonstrating Du Bois’s undeniable contributions to the history, discourse, and development of American sociology in particular, and the wider world of sociology in general. This dialectical approach to Du Bois’s sociological discourse will enable objective interpreters of his work to see that when compared and contrasted with the monumental work of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, what was and what remains really and truly distinctive about Du Bois’s sociology is precisely his unpretentious preoccupation with uniquely and unequivocally American social, political, and cultural issues, such as, for example: race and anti-Black racism in the context of slavery, lynching, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression in the United States; racial capitalism and the racial colonization of social classes in the United States; the racial colonization of gender and sexuality in the United States; the racial colonization of religion in the United States; the racial colonization of education in the United States; and, finally, the racial criminalization of Blacks, among other racially colonized and poverty-stricken people, in the United States.

When compared with the work of his pioneering sociological peers, again, especially the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, the distinctiveness of Du Bois’s contributions lie not in the fact that he was African American, or that he trekked from Fisk to Harvard to the University of Berlin and, then, back to Harvard to ultimately become the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from that auspicious institution in 1895 (Du Bois, 1968a: 101–182; Lewis, 1993: 56–149; Zamir, 1995). Quite the contrary, what remains remarkable about his contributions has nothing to do with his race, gender or class, but more to do with the often-overlooked fact that unlike Marx, Weber or Durkheim, Du Bois’s primary sociological preoccupation was to develop a social science specific to the special needs of the United States of America. As I observed in Against Epistemic Apartheid, Du Bois arguably endeavored the first major studies, empirical or otherwise, in the history of American sociology. Also, he established the “first American school of sociology,” with the Atlanta University school of sociology (1895–1925) predating the University of Chicago’s school of sociology (1915–1930) by two decades (Du Bois, 1897, 1898a, 1898b, 1899a, 1899b, 1900a, 1900b, 1901a, 1901b, 1903a, 1903b, 1903c, 1904a, 1904b, 1904c, 1906, 1914, 1940, 1969; Formwalt, 2013; Lange, 1983; Morris, 2015; Rabaka, 2010; Wright, 2016).

Du Bois consistently went against the conventional currents of early sociology. For instance, when sociology seemed to be moving in a more deductive methodological direction, Du Bois’s essays “Sociology Hesitant” and “The Atlanta Conferences” offered extremely convincing arguments for extending the inductive methodological approach (Du Bois 1903b, 1904a). Moreover, in his 1898 classic, “The Study of the Negro Problems,” he inaugurated authentic African American studies by advocating for the utilization of an inductive, interdisciplinary social scientific approach in efforts to, not only identify and understand, but also offer viable solutions to African American problems (Du Bois, 1898c). Indeed, Du Bois employed the theories and methodologies emerging from a wide-range of disciplines: from sociology and political economy, to history and anthropology. Similar to Marx, Foucault and Habermas, history held a particularly special place in Du Bois’s discursive domain, where he developed the habit of undertaking interdisciplinary “archaeologies”—à la Foucault more than half a century later—of the evolution of certain social problems and social institutions. However, one of the many things that distinguishes Du Bois’s early sociology from Foucault’s philosophy was Du Bois’s intense emphasis on inductive, empirical research, which several Du Bois scholars have argued can be traced back to his doctoral studies in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Berlin (see Barkin, 2000; Beck, 1996; Broderick, 1958a, 1958b; Lemke, 2000; Schafer, 2001; Schäfer, 2008).

Even before his “Wanderjahre in Europe,” the noted Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart had exposed Du Bois (1968a) to the Rankean method while he was working on his master’s degree (p. 159). Leopold von Ranke, a Professor of History at the University of Berlin from 1825 to 1871, made his most lasting contribution to the historical method with his ironclad adherence to research techniques, most importantly emphasizing the strict use and citation of primary sources (i.e., historical empiricism), the reconfiguration of collected evidence, critical analysis, and narrative history. By the time Du Bois arrived at Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität zu Berlin in the autumn of 1892 the German historical school of economics was recognized as a bona fide Gesellschaftswissenschaft—that is, social science (Balabkins, 1988; Grimmer-Solem, 2003; Shionoya, 2001). He was undoubtedly intellectually elated to be entering the University of Berlin, which he well-knew boasted august alumni and associates, such as Bismarck, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Dilthey and, most recently, Weber. Indeed, these were those wonderful “Wanderjahre in Europe!” Working primarily with Gustav von Schmoller, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Adolf Wagner, according to Edwards (2006), “Du Bois’s association with Schmoller, Treitschke, and Wagner steered him in a direction that allowed him to ‘unite. . .economics and politics’ for his research” (p. 405; see also Du Bois, 1968a: 154–182; Lewis, 1993: 117–149).

At the University of Berlin, Du Bois (1968a) recollected, “I came in contact with several of the great leaders of the developing social sciences: in economic sociology and in social history” (p. 162). Berlin presented an extremely different intellectual environment when compared with Harvard’s academic world. For instance, Du Bois’s two main graduate studies mentors, Hart and Schmoller, at Harvard and Berlin respectively, offered him comparably different methodological approaches: on the one hand, empirical historical research at Harvard; while, on the other hand, empirical social research at Berlin. Having studied at Harvard, Paris, Berlin and Freiburg, Hart was intellectually grounded in the Rankean tradition, therefore, he advanced historical-empirical inquiry independent of speculative philosophy, preferring a commitment to the method of observation, experimentation, and induction. Noticeably, then, the Rankean methodological orientation did not allow Du Bois the possibility of emphasizing the moral or ethical implications of certain social problems (e.g. the political economy of anti-Black racism within the context of American capitalism and European imperialism). ¹

The German historical school of economics’ method, however, enabled Du Bois to use empirical social research in the interest of inductively informing social policy and social reform—that is, social ethics was at the heart of, and a logical element in, the overall enterprise. According to Edwards (2006), “[i]t was Schmoller, especially, who led Du Bois toward the empirical social research that linked, rather amorphously, economics, statistics, sociology, and history” (p. 405). Perhaps the pioneering Du Bois scholar Francis Broderick (1958b) put it best when he opened his classic essay “German Influence on the Scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois” by asserting that Du Bois “went to Europe in 1892 a historian; he returned two year later a sociologist” (p. 367). During his Berlin years (circa 1892–1894), therefore, Du Bois’s transdisciplinary training decidedly transcended the Rankean method, and arguably much of Hart’s wholly historical method, and eventually came to encompass coursework in statistics, economics, politics, sociology, history, philosophy, and labor studies (see Du Bois, 1997: 20–21, 26). What is more, Edwards (2006) argued, after his graduate studies at Berlin Du Bois went on to shift and shape, challenge and change the methods of the German historical school of economics to speak to the special needs of African Americans in particular, and the United States in general:

Du Bois remained committed to empirical social research and refounded affinities to Schmoller’s vision of science, he was in search of his own voice as a credible social scientist within the American context. Over time, he carved out his ‘own sociology’ – to quote him – in an effort to change the field’s methodological approach to social questions. Neither endeavor was an easy feat. Although this was not always clear from his early writings, Du Bois held on to a persistent faith that scientific research could aid in the moral quest to bring about racial uplift. With regard to executing his research, Du Bois was at key moments wedged between two extremes: his craft (science) and his race (the Negro Problem). As an African American social scientist, his double-consciousness – his intellectual dubiety – caused him to vacillate between his two roles as scientist and race man. Few American sociologists recognized Du Bois as a colleague during his time. This is ironic considering that sociology in the United States did not have a strict disciplinary focus, but was amorphous. (p. 409)

Admittedly, then, Du Bois innovatively modified the methods of the German historical school of economics in his pursuit of solutions to African American social problems. ² Building on, and going beyond, what he learned under the tutelage of William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, Charles Francis Dunbar, Frank William Taussig, and Albert Bushnell Hart at Harvard, and Gustav von Schmoller, Heinrich von Treitschke, Adolf Wagner, Wilhelm Dilthey, Rudolf von Gneist, Max Lenz, Karl Oldenberg, and Max Sering at Berlin, Du Bois (1997) singularly synthesized history with economics, and philosophy with politics (pp. 20–21, 26). Taking into critical consideration the fact that Du Bois earned his undergraduate degrees in classics and philosophy, and his graduate degrees in history and political economy, African American economist Boston (1991) asserted that it is important not to overlook the fact that Du Bois actually earned his doctorate in both “history and political economy” (p. 303). The W.E.B. Du Bois Papers at the University of Massachusetts reveal that Du Bois himself characterized his transdisciplinary graduate training as being, first and foremost, in the field of political science and secondarily in history. His 1891 letter to U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, which listed James, Hart, Taussig and Peabody along with half a dozen other Harvard professors as well as the then President of Harvard, Charles William Eliot, as references, read in part: “I have no money or property myself and am an orphan. My particular field in Political Science is the History of African Slavery from the economic and social standpoint” (Du Bois, 1997: 11).

Although often overlooked, it is extremely important to emphasize Du Bois’s graduate studies in history and political science prior to his doctoral coursework in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Berlin. Which is to say, based on his own weighted words, Du Bois’s doctoral studies under the tutelage of Schmoller, Treitschke, Wagner, Dilthey and the other members of the German historical school of economics extended and greatly expanded his prior graduate work in history and political science at Harvard. In other words, Du Bois had every intention of earning his doctorate in political economy from the University of Berlin, and his award of a doctorate in history and political science from Harvard ultimately and ironically boiled down to the simple fact that, in his own woeful words, “I have no money or property myself and am an orphan.” Lewis (1993) helps to corroborate this claim by observing that the only reason Du Bois was not granted his doctorate in political economy from the University of Berlin was because the Slater Fund refused to renew his scholarship (pp. 143–149). “Du Bois’s failure to win the German doctorate resulted from a combination of the adventitious and the sinister,” Lewis lamented (p. 145). He went on to say, “[d]espite Schmoller’s and Wagner’s support and the dean’s assurances, spirited objections from the senior professor of chemistry. . .precluded Du Bois’s exemption from the requirement of four completed semesters before a student was permitted to stand for the doctoral examination” (p. 145). The matter stubbornly did not stop there. Apparently Du Bois’s German professors felt strongly enough about his candidacy for the Doktor der Philosophie in political economy from the University of Berlin that, “Wagner wrote a strong letter of support to the trustees, as did Schmoller, who pointed out that German universities required six semesters’ work for the Ph.D., and that one semester was occasionally trimmed or, in Du Bois’s case, even two (‘because we were able to express so favorable an opinion’), but due to the chemistry-professor complication, unfortunately not three” (pp. 145–146).

Interestingly, 3 months before he earned his second bachelor’s degree—cum laude, in philosophy under the auspices of William James in 1890—Du Bois petitioned the Harvard Academic Council for scholarship assistance to pursue a Ph.D. in social science. Even at the young age of 22 years-old he was already clear on how he wanted to use his Ph.D. in “the field of social science under political science,” he unapologetically announced, “with a view to the ultimate application of its principles to the social and economic advancement of the Negro people” (Du Bois, 1997: 7, all emphasis in original). In his Autobiography Du Bois detailed his quandary as follows: “Then came the question as to whether I could continue my study in the graduate school. I had no resources in wealth or friends.” Yet and still, Du Bois (1968a) intoned, “I applied for a fellowship in the graduate school of Harvard and was appointed Henry Bromfield Rogers Fellow for a year and later the appointment was renewed; so that from 1890 to 1892 I was a fellow at Harvard University, studying history and political science and what would have been sociology if Harvard as yet recognized such a field” (pp. 148–149). ³

This means, then, that even before he was exposed to the Gesellschaftwissenschaft and Staatwissenschaften of the German historical school of economics, Du Bois patently had plans to use his Ph.D. in “the field of social science under political science. . .with a view to the ultimate application of its principles to the social and economic advancement of the Negro people.” He candidly concluded, “[t]hus in my quest for basic knowledge with which to help guide the American Negro I came to the study of sociology, by way of philosophy and history rather than by physics and biology” (p. 149). The most important point that should be emphasized here is that Du Bois had already undertaken interdisciplinary studies in philosophy, history, political science, economics, and “what would have been sociology if Harvard had yet recognized such a field,” prior to his doctoral studies in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Berlin. He, consequently, was not a Negro tabula rasa or, rather, a black blank slate upon arrival at the University of Berlin (see Du Bois, 1997: 15–16).

Undeniably, Du Bois’s studies at Harvard and Berlin indelibly influenced his later development of an innovative transdisciplinary methodological orientation. However, his distinctive contributions to, and the ways in which his post-doctoral work went well-beyond, the research methods and modes of analysis he was exposed to during his graduate studies should not be discursively diminished. Du Bois had a fierce sense of intellectual independence that only increased after he earned his doctorate in “history and political economy” from Harvard in 1895. He went on to become the first scholar to discursively develop an inductive, empirical social science “with a view to the ultimate application of its principles to the social and economic advancement of the Negro people.” Without hyperbole or high-sounding words, then, it should be sincerely said that this intellectual history-making honor belongs to Du Bois, and Du Bois alone. Which is also to say, no matter what he may have giddily gathered from Hart, Schmoller, Treitschke, Wagner or Dilthey, among others, Du Bois’s distinction continues to revolve around the ways in which his work helped to inaugurate both American sociology and African American studies. On the one hand, it could be said that above all else this is precisely why Du Bois should be recognized, along with Marx, Weber and Durkheim, as one of the founders of sociology. On the other hand, as I argued in Against Epistemic Apartheid, ironically it may very well be because of his intense focus on American social problems in general, and African American social problems in particular, that Du Bois’s discourse has suffered from sociology’s ongoing historical amnesia, disciplinary decadence, and epistemic apartheid.

No matter what Du Bois appropriated from his professors and peers at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin it is extremely intellectually disingenuous to interpret his contributions to social science as somehow, always and everywhere, derivative of, or consequent to, his having studied with European (e.g. Gustav von Schmoller, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Adolf Wagner) and European American (e.g. William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and Albert Bushnell Hart) professors (Lewis, 1993: 179–210; see also Edwards, 2001; Schafer, 2001; Weger, 2009). None of the aforementioned professors dared to do what Du Bois did: which is to say, he inaugurated a tradition or “school” of empirical social scientific research primarily preoccupied with the most pressing problems confronting the citizens of the United States of America (Bay, 1998; Du Bois, 1978; Morris, 2015; Schrager, 1996; Wright, 2016; Zuberi, 1998, 2004). What is even more impressive is the wide-range and wide-reach of Du Bois’s contributions to sociology, which, includes undeniable offerings to urban sociology, rural sociology, sociology of race, sociology of class, sociology of culture, sociology of religion, sociology of education, sociology of crime, sociology of family, and seminal male-feminist contributions to sociology of gender and intersectional sociology (Balfour, 2011; Gillman and Weinbaum, 2007; Green and Wortham 2015, 2018; Hancock, 2005; Hattery and Smith, 2005; Lemons, 2009; Lucal, 1996; Rabaka, 2008, 2010, 2013, 2017, 2021; Zerai, 2000). Let us now turn our attention to Du Bois’s contributions to the sociology of race, gender, and class, where we can clearly see his “embryonic intersectionality.” Meaning, an inchoate, not fully formed variant of intersectionality that, because of its prefigurative nature, is at times conceptually connected, and at other times is intellectually awkward and discursively disjointed. In keeping with Du Bois’s intellectual evolution, we begin by examining his sociology of class. Next, we will explore his sociology of race. Then, finally, we engage his sociology of gender before concluding with reflections on the continued relevance of Du Bois’s distinct intersectional sociology.

Du Bois, rural sociology, urban sociology, and sociology of class

Undoubtedly, Du Bois was one of the earliest innovators of, and critical contributors to, empirical social science research at the dawn of the discipline of sociology in the United States, especially during its formative phase spanning the years 1895 to 1915 (Du Bois, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2017; Gooding-Williams, 2009; Lemert, 2000; Morris, 2015; Rabaka, 2010; Williams, 2006; Wortham, 2005b, 2009c; Zuckerman, 2004). However, where most sociologists, in essence, start and stop with The Philadelphia Negro, which was published in 1899, Du Bois made several seminal sociological contributions that predate and prefigure his watershed Philadelphia work (Bulmer, 1991; Hunter, 2013; Katz and Sugrue, 1998; Saint-Arnaud, 2009). For instance, in “The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: A Social Study” (Du Bois, 1898a), Du Bois turned to a “small, well-defined group [. . .] of Negroes” that he believed would provide him with an almost ideal environment to examine, “with as near an approach to scientific accuracy as possible, the real condition of the Negro” (p. 7). While working on The Philadelphia Negro the intellectually indefatigable Du Bois went to Farmville and copiously collected the data that would ultimately be published as what can now be properly considered the prelude to his larger body of sociological research. He assertively intoned, “The investigator spent the months of July and August [of 1897] in the town; he lived with the colored people, joined in their social life, and visited their homes” (p. 12). As was quickly becoming his custom, with regard to both his urban and rural sociological research, Du Bois “plunged into the backwater community with gusto,” Lewis (1993) noted, “determined to explore the place from the bottom up” (p. 195).

In exploring Farmville “from the bottom up” Du Bois employed an amazingly wide-range of research methods, such as participant observation, survey research, archival research, ethnographic research, and statistical analysis, tellingly writing in a footnote: “Letters of introduction and some personal acquaintances among the people rendered intercourse easy. The information gathered in the schedules was supplemented by conversations with townspeople and school teachers, by general observation, and by the records in the County Clerk’s Office” (Du Bois, 1898a: 7; see also Jakubek and Wood, 2018). He, literally, studied Farmville “from the bottom up,” although he seems to have consistently favored the “highest” or “better” class of “country colored people” (Du Bois, 1898a: 37–38). From Du Bois’s early sociological optic the “highest” or “better” class of “country colored people” was usually those Black folk who were not only middle-class but, beyond their bourgeois status, further along in their assimilation of White middle-class culture and values. His work hints at the myriad ways in which Farmville’s Black folk at the turn of the 20th century were situated at the “geographic center of an historic slave State,” and how most of their parents experienced first-hand the “rise and fall of the plantation slave system. . .and the moral and economic revolution of emancipation in a county where the slave property was worth at least $2,500,000” (p. 4). However, his early work here does not engage the pitfalls of pandering to the Eurocentrism and elitism of White middle-class culture and Victorian values; that kind of critique, which Du Bois did eventually develop, would be registered later, a lot later by many accounts (Gaines, 1996: 152–178; Lewis, 1993: 201–210: Marable, 1986: 25–51; Rabaka, 2021: 121–156).

Years before, and for more than a decade after The Philadelphia Negro was published, Du Bois resoundingly rejected the anti-Black racist grand theorizing commonplace in the sociological circles of his day. He, hinting at his own hard-nosed historical sociology, arraigned several of the leading sociological lights of his epoch—sociological theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Charles Ellwood, and Lester Ward—for confusing their own racial hierarchal and racial colonial (mis)understandings of society with empirical observation of human behavior, especially African and African American cultures and practices (Bay, 1998; Lemert, 2000; Morris, 2015; Rabaka, 2010; Saari, 2009; Wright, 2016). Although long-overlooked, “The Negroes of Farmville” is something of a Rosetta Stone in terms of deciphering, not simply Du Bois’s contributions to rural sociology, but also his innovative offerings to urban sociology. Undertaken during the era when Spencerian sociology dominated sociological discourse, the Farmville study was refreshingly free from the ungrounded grand theorizing that seemed to always and everywhere privilege conjectural commentary over the kind of empirical sociological inquiry that Du Bois had been trained in and was willfully determined to develop in the United States, especially with regard to the “Negro Problem” (Du Bois, 1978, 2004, 2009, 2014; Edwards, 2006; Morris, 2015; 15–54; Saari, 2009; Saint-Arnaud, 2009, 121–156.

Building on, and decidedly going beyond, the methodological outline and orientation of “The Negroes of Farmville,” Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro confirms the rural study’s Rosetta Stone status in his sociological discourse. Discursively mirroring his discussion of the distinct history and heritage, racialization and criminalization, family life and conjugal conditions, education and illiteracy, and work and wages of the “country Negro” in the Farmville publication, The Philadelphia Negro added in-depth investigations of the disease and death rate, alcoholism and pauperism, electoral politics and religious practices of the “city Negro” as well. Much more methodical and meticulous than the rural study, over the century since its publication The Philadelphia Negro has garnered a unique place for itself in the annals of American social science (Anderson, 1996; Boston, 2017; Burbridge, 1999; Hunter, 2013; Rudwick, 1960; 28–38; Saari, 2009; Wortham, 2008, 2009b).

Undoubtedly, one of the major breakthroughs of The Philadelphia Negro was its detailed discussion of class formation among African Americans a mere three decades after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which was a presidential proclamation and executive order that freed enslaved African Americans. Even more meticulously than in “The Negroes of Farmville,” Du Bois ventured into the uncharted regions of African American social classes and innovatively determined that class formation and class conflict on the part of African Americans was a consequence of, of course, economics, employment, education, property ownership, morals and manners, but also, and even more tellingly, racialization and assimilation—what he termed “color prejudice,” the “color-line,” “discrimination against Negroes,” the “tangible form of Negro prejudice,” “a silent policy against Negroes,” “veiled discrimination,” and “social ostracism” (Du Bois, 1899b: 322–367). Seeming to simultaneously draw from and commit a conceptual coup d’état in the midst of Weber and Marx’s conceptions of class, Du Bois’s concept of class, even in this early instance, is distinguished because of its critical attention to the ways in which the political economy of race and anti-Black racism in a White supremacist capitalist society such as the United States dictated and determined that social classes amongst African Americans could be more properly interpreted as racial classes (Anderson, 2000; Gaines, 1996; 152–178; Reed, 1997: 27–41; Trotter, 2001).

Even if all of the other sociological innovations of The Philadelphia Negro were to be overlooked, as they frequently have been, Du Bois’s dogged insistence on the ways in which African American social classes have been, and remain, degradingly racialized and, therefore, are always and everywhere more than mere socio-economic classes—à la the conventional sociological conception of class—should be calmly and cautiously considered for both its classical and contemporary sociological significance. Du Bois’s sociology of racial classes reaches from the 19th century, across the 20th century, and resonates with both the sociology of race and the sociology of class in the 21st century with its intense emphasis on African Americans’ particular and peculiar class formations and class cultures. His sociology of racial classes registers as an early reminder that Weberian and Marxian conceptions of class, no matter how “universal” many sociologists believe them to be, were primarily tailored to meet the needs and greeds of Europeans, and not the needs of a non-European group such as African Americans who were, truth be told, racialized, enslaved and colonized or, rather, racially colonized by Europeans from a wide-range of class backgrounds: from bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, to proletariat and lumpenproletariat (Horne, 1986; Lewis, 2000, 2009; Marable, 1986; 75–120; Mullen, 2015: 56–95; Mullen, 2016: 57–104; Rabaka, 2021: 121–156).

Du Bois and the sociology of race

Du Bois’s contributions to sociology are most readily accepted when and where we come to the sociology of race and, to a certain extent, the sociology of class. Even though he is customarily quarantined to the sociology of race—that is to say, if and/or when engagements of his work register within the world of sociology—the fact remains that very few sociologists have really and truly grasped and seriously grappled with Du Bois’s conceptions of race and critiques of racism. Moreover, even fewer sociologists have explored and extrapolated his innovative sociology of racial classes—which is to say, his critiques of the political economy of race, racism, racial violence, racial colonialism, racial capitalism, the racialization of gender, the racialization of sexuality, Blackness, Whiteness and, of course, White supremacy, and the ways in which each of the aforementioned are related, in one way or another, to a person’s perceived social, political, and economic status, or lack thereof (Du Bois, 2004, 2009; see also Morris, 2007, 2015; Porter, 2010; Rabaka, 2010, 2017, 2021).

Du Bois’s contributions to the sociology of race in his most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk, revolve around the dilemmas and dualities or, rather, the conundrums and complexities, of what it means to be Black in a White world—what was commonly called the “Negro Problem” at the turn of the 20th century. In The Souls of Black Folk, he created several seminal concepts of race and critiques of racism to complement his earlier efforts to establish the social scientific study of race in the interest of “emancipat[ing] the oppressed.” Many of the concepts of racial lived-experience that Du Bois articulated in The Souls of Black Folk are intellectually interconnected and endlessly intersect, and they ultimately offer several of his most enduring contributions to the subtleties of the sociology of race. Undoubtedly his concepts of “double-consciousness” and the “color-line” are sociologically significant. However, I would also assert that his theory of Blacks’ “Veiled” visibility and invisibility, as well as his emphasis on Blacks’ unique “second-sight” in the White world are equally relevant with regard to the sociology of race (Du Bois, 1903c, 2005, 2014, 2011; Morris, 2007, 2015; Pettigrew, 1980; Shaw, 2013; Winant, 2007; Young et al., 2006).

Du Bois’s vision of the Veil, along with its corollary concept of the color-line, was “prophetic” in the sense that it continues to capture the conundrums of the trajectory and transmutation of American apartheid: from late-19th century Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, to the 20th century rabid racial segregation which led to the Civil Rights Movement and, ultimately, to the 21st century overt and covert racism of the post-Civil Rights period. Where the color-line calls to mind the racially segregated, Jim Crowed separate and unequal (as opposed to “separate, but equal”) White and Black worlds of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Du Bois’s discourse on the Veil points to the ways in which racial colonization does not render the racially oppressed completely devoid of human agency and cultural creativity. In fact, in some ways Du Bois’s work here suggests that the Veiled quality of the color-line at best blurs, and at worst blinds Whites to Blacks’ human agency and capacity for cultural creation. Thus, the Veil’s sociological significance is dual or, rather, doubled, and although both Whites and Blacks’ life-worlds and lived-experiences revolve around the very same color-line, it is their divergent relationships to the Veil, and the ways in which the Veil racially (re)structures their psychological, social, and cultural worlds that determines their self-conceptions and, quite literally, the quality of their soul-lives (Carroll, 2003; Crouch and Benjamin, 2002; England and Warner, 2013; Fontenot, 2001; Gooding-Williams, 2009; Hubbard, 2003; Lemert, 1994).

Du Bois’s discourse on the Veil and the color-line are sociologically significant because they represent one of the first efforts by a sociologist to articulate a critical social theory of racial oppression, racial exploitation, and racial violence—that is to say, a critical social theory of the ways in which racial oppression, racial exploitation, and racial violence: first, racially divides and socially separates (the color-line); second, distorts cultural communications and human relations between those it racially divides along the color-line (the Veil); and, third, as a result of each of the aforementioned, causes Blacks to suffer from a severe inferiority complex that insidiously induces them to constantly view themselves from Whites’ supposed “superior” points of view (double-consciousness). The Veil’s processes and practices of concealment racially (re)organizes, literally, everything that crosses the color-line, every interaction between the “two worlds within and without the Veil,” thus blurring or, more frequently, blinding those who are White and who negligently and nonchalantly wish not to view non-Whites (i.e. non-Whites’ humanity, history, and culture) (Brodwin, 1972; Gooding-Williams and McBride, 2005; Mocombe, 2008; Provenzo, 2005; Shaw, 2013; Wolfenstein, 2007; Wortham, 2011).

Although Whites may frequently render Blacks anonymous and invisible in the White world, Blacks are never invisible to each other. As Du Bois (1899b) pointed out in The Philadelphia Negro, Blacks are not a “homogenous mass,” and especially not within the world of the Veil (p. 73). However, one of the consequences of Whites’ socio-political hegemony and their ability to amplify their ideology of Black invisibility is that Blacks begin to internalize the diabolical dialectic of White superiority and Black inferiority, which in turn leads to what Du Bois cryptically called “double-consciousness”—that is to say, the psychological condition and social state where Blacks incessantly and uncritically engage and judge their life-worlds and life-struggles exclusively utilizing the White world’s anti-Black racist culture and conceptions of civilization (Allen, 1992; Balfour, 1998; Bell, 1996; Bruce, 1992; Dennis, 2003; Gilroy, 1993; Itzigsohn and Brown, 2015; Lyubansky and Eidelson, 2005; Mocombe, 2008; Pittman, 2016; Rabaka, 2018, 2021; Rawls, 2000; Tomisawa, 2003; Wilson, 1999).

Du Bois’s discourse on the Veil dovetails with his concept of double-consciousness insofar as it also seeks to explain that Blacks’ efforts to gain self-consciousness in a White supremacist world will be, by default, always and everywhere damaged and distorted because the most prevalent and pervasive ideas and images of Blacks and Blackness (or, rather, Africans and Africanité) in White supremacist societies are those predicated on, and prefabricated by the diabolical dialectic of White superiority and Black inferiority. In other words, where the Veil metaphorically represents the ways in which the color-line is constantly cloaked in a dark cloud of misconceptions, miscommunications, and misgivings between the “two worlds within and without the Veil,” double-consciousness conceptually captures the often-overlooked fact that Blacks not only internalize the diabolical dialectic of White superiority and Black inferiority in the White supremacist world, but also the fact that part and parcel of the White supremacist world’s “ideological hegemony” (in the Gramscian sense) is the constant blanketing of the White-dominated Black world with anti-Black racist and White supremacist (mis)conceptions of Blacks and Blackness (i.e. Africans and Africanité) (Gramsci, 1971: 206–276; Gramsci, 2000: 189–221). The concept of double-consciousness, therefore, boldly broaches the taboo topic (among both Blacks and Whites) of Blacks’ intense internalization of White supremacist anti-Black racist creations and disseminations of Blackness.

Du Bois and the sociology of gender

Although often-overlooked in favor of his more renowned writings on urban sociology and the sociology of race, Du Bois made several significant contributions to the sociology of gender, feminist sociology, Marxist feminism, and Black feminism (Balfour, 2011; Gillman and Weinbaum, 2007; Hancock, 2005; Hattery and Smith, 2005; Lemons, 2009; Lucal, 1996; Rabaka, 2007, 2010, 2017; Weinbaum 2001, 2013; Zerai, 2000). He published several dozen articles, essays, novels and poems that have come to be considered serious contributions to the sociology of gender. To put it as succinctly as possible, Du Bois developed a sociology of racially-gendered classes by simultaneously critiquing racism, sexism and capitalism as overlapping and interlocking systems of exploitation, oppression and violence. For instance, in his most widely read work in the sociology of gender, “The Damnation of Women” from Darkwater, Du Bois (1920) stated that there are three “great causes” in the modern world to which every human being should devote special concern and careful consideration: the “problem of the color-line,” the “uplift of women,” and the “peace movement” (p. 18).

Women in general, and Black women in particular, Du Bois sardonically remarked, “existed not for themselves, but for men.” He went further to assert, “[t]hey were not beings, they were relations and these relations were enfilmed [sic] with mystery and secrecy” (p. 163). Where the majority of his Black and White male contemporaries argued, “a woman’s place is in the home,” Du Bois did not sociologically associate women and femininity with fragility, domesticity, or the femme fatale. He was a staunch supporter of women’s suffrage and an increasingly consistent defender of Black womanhood, criticizing both White supremacist and Black masculinist myths and stereotypes aimed at African American women (Du Bois, 1907, 1919, 1924; Gillman and Weinbaum, 2007; Lemons, 2009; McKay, 1985, 1990; Pauley, 2000; Watkins, 2016a, 2016b; Yellin, 1973).

Because Du Bois has been most frequently viewed from monodisciplinary perspectives, his innovative intersectional and transdisciplinary contributions have been consistently downplayed and diminished. In many sociologists’ minds (if Du Bois ever even crosses their minds) he is, au mieux, perhaps a “pioneering” sociologist of race, but further than that no concession can be or has been made. Even in Du Bois studies, prior to his death and most certainly posthumously, Du Bois’s work, even when it has been acknowledged to have a wide-ranging reach and intellectual influence well-beyond the sociology of race, has been relegated or, to use the critical language of epistemic apartheid, conceptually quarantined to race- and ethnicity- focused subfields within “traditional” disciplines. However, and as I have argued in W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century (2007), many of the social and political problems of the 20th century have been carried over into the 21st century, especially the problems of racism, sexism, capitalism, and colonialism. Amazingly, particularly when compared with the work of others of his era, Du Bois’s discourse eventually evolved into an inchoate intersectional framework that, according to Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum in Next to the Color-Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W.E.B. Du Bois (Gillman and Weinbaum, 2007), “juxtaposed” race-with-gender-with-class to such an innovative extent that they audaciously announced, “there could hardly be a more opportune time than the present to reengage his writings from the widest possible conceptual and historical vantage point” (pp. 1–2).

In Du Bois studies there has been a long history of disrupting and disconnecting (as opposed to, à la Du Bois himself, intersecting, interconnecting, and juxtaposing) the various social variables or social problems he critiqued and sought solutions to, which in many ways erases or, at the least, renders invisible the implicit or veiled racially-gendered critical logic and language at play in, and that is part and parcel of, his renown discourse on race and racism. In other words, Gillman and Weinbaum weigh-in again, “as readers of Du Bois, we have finally arrived at a historical juncture when the daunting expansiveness of Du Bois’s grammar—not to mention his life and work, spanning two centuries and straddling the globe – requires reinvigoration and renewal by scholarly and political concerns that have, over the past three decades, become inextricable from the ‘problem of the color-line’ that Du Bois formulated and against which he fought on multiple fronts” (p. 2). Indeed, Du Bois did fight “on multiple fronts,” and one of the pitfalls of attempting to force his work to fit into Eurocentric, patriarchal, and/or bourgeois conceptions of who counts as a sociologist, or what counts as sociology, is that much of Du Bois’s sociological (and, not to mention, his intersectional and transdisciplinary) distinctiveness is lost in monodisciplinary translation (Rabaka, 2010: 337–362).

In terms of identifying and analyzing Du Bois contributions to the sociology of gender in general, and Black feminist sociology in particular, what I am most interested in here is how Du Bois maintained, as James (1997) put it, “conceptual and political linkages” between various anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonialist, and anti-capitalist theories and socio-political movements (pp. 36–37). Unlike most of his White male sociological peers, Du Bois was one of the few who did not downplay or attempt to erase gender domination and discrimination. On the contrary, over time his work placed the critique of sexism and racism right alongside or, rather, in juxtaposition to the critique of capitalism, class analysis, and class conflict theory. In tune with the thinking of many Marxist feminists and socialist feminists, Du Bois grew to be critical of both capitalism and patriarchy. He came to understand women, in a general sense, to have great potential as agents of democratic social transformation because of their simultaneous experience of capitalist exploitation and sexist oppression. However, similar in many respects to most contemporary Black feminist sociologists, Du Bois ultimately understood Black women in particular to have even greater potential as agents of radical democratic social change on account of their simultaneous experience of racism, sexism and economic exploitation, whether under capitalism or colonialism. Du Bois’s critical sociological framework, therefore, has immense import for the discussion at hand because it provides contemporary sociologists of race and gender and class with a paradigm and point of departure for developing a transdisciplinary intersectional sociology that is simultaneously critical of racism, sexism, capitalism, and colonialism (Rabaka, 2021: 95–120).

Conclusion: Du Bois, the inauguration of American Sociology, and contributions to critical sociology

W.E.B. Du Bois made several seminal contributions to the disciplinary development and ongoing discourses of sociology in general, and American sociology in particular. When and where Du Bois’s work has been acknowledged within the sociological world, his early volumes The Philadelphia Negro and The Souls of Black Folk usually have been looked at exclusively for the ways in which they contribute to the sociology of race, urban sociology, and ethnography. However, this essay has demonstrated and deconstructed the longstanding epistemic reductionism which always and everywhere relegates Du Bois to the sociology of race, urban sociology, and ethnography. Undoubtedly, as advanced above, Du Bois was one of the first sociologists of race in the history of sociology. But, as the remainder of this essay revealed, he should also be considered a peerless and pioneering sociologist in several other subdisciplinary areas, such as: research methods; social problems; community studies; population studies; historical sociology; political sociology; rural sociology; industrial sociology; sociology of culture; sociology of family; sociology of class; and sociology of gender.

After taking all of the foregoing into consideration we seem to have come full circle, returning to the critical questions with which we began: why has Du Bois’s sociological legacy suffered sociological negation? Why have his contributions to the aforementioned sociological subdisciplines been excluded, ignored, or erased in the century since the founding of the American Sociological Association? In what ways does Du Bois’s obvious absence from most classical, and very many contemporary histories of sociology’s disciplinary development and discursive formations speak in special ways about American sociology’s ongoing intellectual historical amnesia, disciplinary decadence and, even more, its participation in epistemic apartheid?

When Du Bois is interpreted in a more multidimensional manner and freed from sociology’s “colored section,” we witness the ways his work drew from, and undoubtedly contributed to, urban sociology in specific. Perhaps his greatest contribution to urban sociological discourse is the embryonic intersectionalist perspective that indefatigably offered multiply marginalized people a way to identify and interpret various forms of violence, oppression, and exploitation that are often obscured by “single-axis of oppression” postulations. For example, supposedly Black people’s single axis of oppression is racism, women’s single axis of oppression is sexism, queer and trans folks’ single axis of oppression is heterosexism, and working-class and working-poor people’s single axis of oppression is capitalism. Du Bois’s embryonic intersectionality contests one-dimensional conceptions of identity and reductive notions of oppression and instead accentuates the multiplicity of identity and the complexity and inextricability of interlocking systems of oppression. For over a century, Du Bois’s discourse has provided both campus intellectuals and community activists in urban societies with a theoretically sophisticated and politically provocative framework for understanding how cultural capital, social wealth, and political power works within, and throughout, several mutually constitutive (as opposed to mutually exclusive) forms of social difference, political identities, and economic statuses. There remains much for us to learn about, and learn from, W.E.B. Du Bois’s life and legacy, especially his embryonic intersectionality.