W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in Souls of Black Folk in 1903 that: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Today, in the 21st Century, we are still confronted with this color line, which is exacerbated by a symbiotic relationship with the drive to secure material wealth at rates that often rival the height of the age of imperialism, where the total control of Africa as well as other resource-rich lands were/are the dominant behavioral expressions in geopolitics. Prophetically, in his later writings, as Du Bois delivers, expands or situates his conceptualization of the color line into being intimately linked with class formations. Often ignored in the sympathetic democratic rhetoric of liberals are the racialized consequences of massive poverty and cultural displacement, integral to the globalizing project of democratization (a euphemism for the unbridled proliferation of capitalism). In our experiences, powerful forces seek to reconfigure how race is lived on a daily basis. As old forms of accumulation by dispossession emerge and have increasingly impoverished much of the world’s population, it has equally created new forms of political, economic, and social stratification.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 10:40:11 +0000
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