Race is one of the most bedeviling of social characteristics. The concept, with the barest tips of its roots in biological and the rest of the plant firmly grafted to cultural and sociological ideals, has been debated over and again, with little if any progress being made as to why it remains so central to our understanding of self. This is perhaps especially the case in those nations, like the United States, in which the already usually tangled dynamics of race have been further complicated by a history of slavery. Beginning with the critique of American society offered by W.E.B. DuBois in his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folks, this paper looks at some of the different strategies that have been used in the United States since the end of the Civil War to bring Americans of different races together and the reasons why those efforts have overall been so unsuccessful.
Du Bois, a sociologist by training and by profession, was also the most important African-American protest leader during the first half of the 20th century. It was this combination of political engagement and scholarly disengagement that gave his writing its authority - and his writing in turn made him a more powerful political and scholarly leader.
As he was beginning his career as a sociologist, he argued that social science - that a careful and objective analysis of the ways in which society was constructed would allow social, cultural and political leaders to disassemble and then reassemble society along more egalitarian lines. His assessment was in line with that of other 19th-century sociologists, who believed that their discipline offered real hope of creating a society in which men and women would indeed be judged by the content of their characters.
But his study of society, and his own experiences as a black man in a de facto and de jure segregated world, led him to believe that only political activism would change the world. While not dismissing the impor...