Du Bois was an influential scholar and activist who was the first Black American to earn a PhD and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. He remains best known for his classic 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois was one of the earliest and most astute theorists of many concepts central to contemporary scholarship on race and racism, including double consciousness (which Kendi calls dueling consciousness) and racial capitalism. But Kendi notes that Du Bois’s thinking also evolved over time: for instance, he refused to believe in colorism for most of his life and tended to think that educating white people would stop racism. However, he changed his thinking in the 1930s and realized that racism is about power, not education, so most white people will not accept racial equity until it becomes in their self-interest to do so.
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W. E. B. Du Bois Character Timeline in How to Be an Antiracist
The timeline below shows where the character W. E. B. Du Bois appears in How to Be an Antiracist. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9: Color
...segregationists and invented absurd laws to exclude dark-skinned people from their clubs and political organizations. W.E.B. Du Bois initially denied that there was a color line within the Black race, until he noticed...
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Chapter 12: Class
...politics.” But Karl Marx clearly saw that capitalism and racism were like “conjoined twins,” and W.E.B. Du Bois began formulating the idea of racial capitalism while reading Marx. The generation of antiracist anti-capitalist...
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Chapter 16: Failure
W.E.B. Du Bois spent decades arguing that equality required educating white people, until he eventually realized that the...
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