The Issue of the Twenty-First Century is the Issue of the Color-Line

            In 1903, W.E.B Du Bois wrote: “It is usually possible to draw in nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on the map, on the one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes.” Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, two sociologists and the authors of American Apartheid, found that this seemed to literally be the case. Using a Segregation Index test, they found that around 80% of Blacks in places like Detroit, New York, and Chicago would have to move from their neighborhoods to be living like Whites. This study was done in 1993. In Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece, Du Bois argues that economic segregation continued long after the Emancipation of slaves. His words ring just as true now as ever.

Du Bois explains the viscous cycle of impoverishment. A slave is freed but has nothing in his possession. Yet, one is naturally compelled by the most urgently natural of needs. A freedman needs food and shelter, and in some cases, he needs enough to support whatever shambles of a family enslavement has not yet robbed from him. He is forced to rent land, borrow clothes, and buy seed with loans. He is subjugated to the inescapable cycle of working dawn to dusk to pay off what he has borrowed to work to pay off what he has borrowed to work to pay off what he has borrowed. Du Bois says that “…the majority of tenants end the year even, or in debt, which means that they work for board and clothes.”

This continued indebtedness to the white man creates a system of economic segregation. The moneyed whites get wealthier on the interest and the zero-sum black men work to live. Without civil equality, there are no outs from the cycle. This is the color-line that Du Bois speaks of throughout his persuasive essay. Despite the end of formal slavery, freed blacks were still compelled to work to survive. Whether by whip or by economic need, blacks were still subjugated to miserable and largely inescapable working conditions.

This makes a strong argument for many of our contemporary affirmative action-type programs. Yet, this has not even been enough. Today, the working class works paycheck to paycheck, suffering the plight of need-based labor. And the working class (as well as the unemployed class) consists of a disproportionate amount of blacks. Unless one is too suggest that blacks have a biological disability to work as well as whites, it must be accepted that the effects of slavery still linger today. Blacks have not yet been able to dig themselves out of the generations’ of indebtedness and despair. Today, the average white household is worth over $113,000. The average black family, $8650

The color-line is still alive and well in the twenty-first century. The notion that Du Bois’ critiques have so far outlived his lifetime is what makes this book my most enjoyed read of the semester thus far. And not to be mistaken, the burden is as much on the whites as anybody to right this wrong, yet with decades we have failed to make sufficient strides towards true equality. In fact, it is fearful that with the advent of visible color-line crossing (like the election of Barack Obama) that we may convince ourselves that this exists no longer. Yet, as Du Bois so persuasively argues, the South was fatally mistaken to believe that blacks’ position was adequate because of the end of slavery. In the same spirit, we must not deceive ourselves to believe that the problem of the twenty-first century is anything but that of obliterating the color-line.