Though many of the most recognized classical theorists of sociology came from European White cultural backgrounds during the nineteenth century, plenty of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color were creating social theory and adding to our understanding of social problems. Unlike the so-called founding fathers of sociology, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, their voices were silenced.

Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.

-W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the first sociologists to publish scholarly work that discussed race and racism. In this way, he provided a critical intervention into sociological theory and his writings critiqued the absence of racial analysis from previous social theory. Du Bois was the first Black American to earn a PhD at Harvard, which he did in 1895. He studied economics, history, sociology, and political theory. Du Bois is an influential sociologist because he takes a systemic sociological approach to the experience of race, he describes how the experience of White people and Black people are qualitatively different, and he collects and displays data that support his theories.

First, Du Bois argues that the economic and social inequality experienced by formerly enslaved people was caused by systemic issues rather than by individual character traits. This is a sociological approach to explaining a social problem. He debates Booker T. Washington, who believes that formerly enslaved people need education and training to fix any issues in their lives. Du Bois writes:

[Washington’s] doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend our energies to righting these great wrongs. (Du Bois 1903: Section III)

Du Bois says that the nation, the United States, is responsible to make changes that will create equality for formerly enslaved people.

Second, Du Bois describes how Black people experience themselves differently than White people. One of his most influential contributions to sociological theory came from his discussion of the veil and double consciousness. He writes that the Black American is ​​“born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (1903:3). He points out that Black Americans have a double consciousness. They see themselves, and they see how White Americans see them.

Finally, Du Bois established the first school of American sociology at Atlanta University. With his team, he also created some of the first data visualizations in American sociology to illustrate the conditions of life for Black Americans. The infographic in Figure 3.14 shows the percent of Black slaves and freemen between 1790 and 1870, when slavery became illegal. These studies and infographics were part of his groundbreaking sociological analysis of poverty among Black Americans. His words are still quoted today among advocates of racial justice.

Du Bois analysis continues to inform our experiences and conversations around race even today. CNN recorded interviews with Black people and shared them on Twitter. To learn more about Du Bois, read this Smithsonian article. If this experience of race consciousness is new to you, please watch, “When I Realized I Was Black [Streaming Video].”

Licenses and Attributions for Moving to Modern

Open Content, Original

“Moving to Modern” by Kelly Szott and Kimberly Puttman is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Open Content, Shared Previously

Figure 3.13. “W. E. B Du Bois at the Office of The Crisis, a magazine of the NAACP” is in the Public Domain. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 3.14. “Proportion of freemen and slaves among American Negroes” by Atlanta University students is in the Public Domain. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Real William & Mary, dir. 2017. When I Realized I Was Black.