'The souls of black folk,' a century hence

New Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2003 by Lewis, David Levering

To Du Bois, the problem of the century, therefore, was the manipulation of race in the service of wealth, and a clairvoyant Du Bois, who greatly feared that the odds increasingly favored the manipulations by the rich, must look upon the success of the current regime in Washington as the dismal triumph of kleptocracy. No doubt he was precipitous in totally writing off the market economy. But he would insist that leaving the market exclusively to solve systemic social problems is an agenda guaranteeing obscene economic inequality in the short run and social warfare in the long run. A belief system in which government is the root of all evil, the rich are excused from taxes and liberals are agents of decadence must surely lead to a social contract best described by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Indeed, in his preface to the 50th anniversary edition of Souls, Du Bois leaves his final word on the subject:

"I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellow men; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race."

A very good thing it is for Du Bois that he was never given to tears.

David Levering Lewis is Martin Luther King Jr. University Professor in the department of history at Rutgers University. He won Pulitzer prizes for both volumes of his landmark biography of W.E.B. Du Bois.