There is a quiet but tenacious dispute taking place in American university reading rooms. It typically comes up during curriculum discussions, when curricula are being revised, or when someone asks, almost apologetically, why some foundational thinkers receive three weeks of lecture time while others receive a footnote. That footnote is usually W.E.B. Du Bois. And many sociologists find it extremely difficult to defend that.
In 1868, Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small town where, according to him, racial prejudice didn’t hit him right away. It began subtly, as most pivotal moments do, when a white girl in elementary school refused to give him a greeting card. It seems like an almost insignificant moment to serve as the foundation for a lifetime of work. However, Du Bois himself wrote about it in The Souls of Black Folk, and something about that specificity—the remembered classroom, the withheld gesture—makes his theoretical framework seem more like a lived experience than an academic abstraction.
Millions of people have experienced what he called “double consciousness,” which is described by this framework. According to the theory, Black Americans were compelled to view themselves not just as they were but also as they were perceived by a white society that saw them more as problems to be solved than as human beings to be comprehended. In his writings, Du Bois discussed having two identities that were incompatible with one another: being Black and American in a nation that viewed them as mutually exclusive. It’s a theory that developed from firsthand experience, which may be why it has proven to be so resilient and challenging to put away.
The fact that Du Bois was not working on the periphery of the field is what makes the current scholarly debate both fascinating and, depending on who you speak to, a little annoying. Decades before sociology had fully figured out what rigorous even meant, he was working on serious, methodologically demanding projects. More than 2,500 in-person interviews with Black households in a single Philadelphia ward were used to create The Philadelphia Negro, which was published in 1896. Census data was also included, and the results were displayed using bar graphs, a truly innovative technique at the time. He was aware that he was the first, and the field mostly continued without giving him credit.
Although race was a major factor, there is a feeling that other factors also contributed to Du Bois’s inconvenience. The reason for this was his refusal to confine his thoughts to the comfortable bounds of what the academy deemed acceptable. In Black Reconstruction, he argued that American capitalism had a particular interest in preventing Black and white workers from viewing themselves as belonging to the same class, linking economic exploitation to racial division. People were uncomfortable with that argument back then. It still has the ability to do so.
The framework’s original scope has been greatly expanded by the numerous scholars who write about double consciousness today. Du Bois’s idea has proven remarkably relevant to scholars researching immigration law, deportation policy, and undocumented communities. The feeling of having legal status but never feeling fully American was once described by a Brazilian naturalized citizen. Even though Du Bois wrote that sentence more than a century ago for a different population with different words, it still makes sense.
This probably reflects both the persistence of the same American issue and the brilliance of a single thinker. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that Du Bois appears to have traveled well through time—not because his theories were sufficiently nebulous, but rather because the circumstances he detailed never completely changed.
It’s not really a fight about the past when it comes to the theory card, who should be on the canonical reading list, which founders should have buildings named after them, and which should only be mentioned in passing. It is a dispute over sociology’s perceived purpose. According to Du Bois, social science exists to reveal the reality of power. Either he was marginalized for a long time because of this conviction, or he is clearly still here today.
