ABSTRACT
W.E.B. Du Bois’s claim that the ‘problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line’ has become one of his most famous, and most frequently quoted, insights (Du Bois 1903). But what does it mean to read that sentence now – more than a century after Du Bois wrote it? How has ‘the colour line’ been redrawn and transformed in the century since Du Bois crafted a sentence that has become foundational to his legacy? How do scholars discern the ‘problem’ of the colour line in a new century marked by a national love affair with the rhetoric of colour blindness? And how is the ‘colour line’ complicated, re-routed, intensified, and intersected by other ‘lines’ – or structures of domination – including gender, sexuality and class?
