The concept’s potential for transformative politics is worth pausing over, for its conditions may be counterintuitive, and lead to several further historical and theoretical insights relevant to this inquiry. First, while disparate domains of racialization are initially linked via acts of imperial violence, this violence is inseparable from the benevolence of the civilizing mission, which promised justice through uplift. Vicente Rafael’s gloss on McKinley’s policy of “benevolent assimilation,” as the “moral imperative” for the United States to develop and care for “wayward native children” in the same way “a father is bound to guide his son,” is instructive: “Neither exploitative nor enslaving, colonization entailed the cultivation of ‘the felicity and perfection of the Philippine people’ through the ‘uninterrupted devotion’ to those ‘noble ideals which constitute the higher civilization of mankind’ ” (21). “White love” is his memorable term for this attitude, which “holds out the promise of fathering, as it were, a ‘civilized people’ capable in time of asserting its own character. But it also demands the indefinite submission to a program of discipline and reformation requiring the constant supervision of a sovereign master” (23). The difficulty, of course, comes when dark sons—not to mention daughters—presume to ascend to the patriarchal position, asserting autonomy over the operation of racial uplift. In Du Bois’s address, this claim is established first within empire, as black men anticipate the dereliction of white love toward little brown brothers, and then beyond it—for like white supremacy, racial uplift is not exclusive to any particular empire, regardless of its claims of exceptionalism. As such, American Negro uplift may forge imaginative links to nonwhite subjects of other colonial powers independently of U.S. geopolitical interests, a perquisite of the structural contradiction between racial and national identity Du Bois elsewhere called double-consciousness.
Second, Du Bois’s ideas in this address are relatively unoriginal, even commonplace, just as his play on Kipling’s phrase is a conventional trope in black writing in this moment.14 More generally, as extensive and informed as his awareness of global events and their ramifications for local race politics may seem to a present-day reader, it is hardly exceptional within African American popular intellectual life through at least the mid-twentieth century. Knowledge of international affairs had a different salience before the United States became the global superpower, when it was easier to imagine a higher foreign influence intervening within local hierarchical orders.
Similarly, when Du Bois concludes the address by sketching something of a plan of action, the program is uncontroversial boilerplate. He bemoans the “prevalence of Negro crime,” calls for a “great revolution” in “the Negro home,” invoking “the right rearing of children” and “the purity and integrity of family life,” and closes with a bland cry for a greater “spirit of sacrifice” (108–9). Even when advocating for elite cultural achievement, he is careful to cite the example of “the new book by Booker Washington” (109). If you take the text at its word, the theorization of the color line is offered in the service of an ideological consensus among the American Negro elite, whose name is uplift.
Put differently, I contend that Du Bois’s great original intellectual contribution, in this address, is poetic. This is one way to read the disarmingly modest opening to “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” his contribution to Alain Locke’s 1925 New Negro anthology: “Once upon a time in my younger years and in the dawn of this century I wrote: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.’ It was a pert and singing phrase which I then liked and which I have since often rehearsed to my soul and asked:—how far is this prophecy or speculation?” (385).15 This may also explain why Du Bois did not revise the address for The Souls of Black Folk, which abandons the thesis’s argumentative grounding, distilling it into a catchphrase, the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, repeated three times in the text.16 For the insights carefully established by the address are, for Du Bois, embedded in the phrasing itself, remaining available for activation even as its elegance encourages an almost limitless capacity for repetition and recontextualization. Later in the chapter, I will return to the suggestion that Du Bois’s radicalism emerges from his poetics.
Rather than citing or reproducing the argument of the 1899 address, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out” is effectively a remake, twenty-five years on, suggesting that the thesis’s grounding is irreducibly historical. This time, Du Bois’s virtuoso survey of geopolitical events is organized, not by continent, but by empire—reviewing the “shadow” of race problems in Portugal, Belgium, France, and England—and by the transimperial movements of labor and pan-Africanism. This leads to a third observation. If the germ of later adversarial “colored” internationalisms can be traced back to the turn of the century, as in Du Bois’s devout belief in the coming of a “brown and yellow world,” then it is necessary to account for the continuity of their emergence with the ideology of the civilizing mission.17
If this statement appears as the converse of the earlier observation that the violence by which U.S. imperialism articulated its transpacific domains was inseparable from its expression as tutelary uplift, then taken together, they reveal the structure of what I have been calling imperialism’s racial justice. Put differently, imperialism’s own self-justifications, the epistemological and aesthetic production of race that cast this overwhelming violence as the actualization of justice, dominate the discursive realm out of which antiracist and anti-imperialist movements arise to seize and recast the meanings of race and of justice. Yet to imagine this domination as total is to complete the work that any existing imperialism necessarily leaves unfinished, to surrender your faith to the promises no imperialism can ever actually keep. This is a fourth point: because imperialisms are always in competition, the realm of racialization and of justice is transimperial. As an analytic figure traversing it, the color line serves not to ground appeals to a transcendent conception of justice but to open up the fissures between the disparate sites of racialization that competing imperialisms are unable to fuse together—even as the political programs thereby made possible may only register, in retrospect, as efforts to close up or seal over what has been broken and to complete what has been promised beyond justice’s reach.
Finally, if the color-line concept identifies an intensifying crisis of imperial competition manifested in uneven and unpredictable processes of racialization, then the term itself serves as an analytical figure for the production of any number of modern subjects. That is, the color line names the site at which new, modern racial subjects are incarnated and incorporated. Pride of place in these processes goes not to Du Bois’s American Negro, whose assumption of the burden of uplift heralds the rise of a new world, nor to his American Filipinos, constituted along the tutelary paths of uplift, but to whiteness itself, in all its forms. For what drives