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The Shadow of Hunger

W. E. B. Du Bois, White Supremacy, and the Possibility of Interracial Class Politics

Cody R. Melcher

November 6, 2024

In the past decade, the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, at least in popular and mainstream academic circles, has transformed from a shallow appreciation of an early civil rights figure to an orgy of adulation for a forgotten founder of American social science. American academics, pundits, and journalists have decided to remember W. E. B. Du Bois. The problem, however, is that the version of Du Bois they’ve decided to remember is heavily distorted and circumscribed; a “radical” liberal obsessively concerned with the psychological components of racism, with a political program that begins and ends with enfranchisement of the Black population. Those of us on the Left who already knew Du Bois because his work has had a strong influence on Marxist interpretations of white supremacy since the 1930s are, though, not totally innocent in the crime of distorting Du Bois, and for similar reasons.

Recent leftist revivals of Du Bois often fall into the trap of unduly emphasizing his discussion of the psychological roots of white supremacy which, as will be illustrated, is actually quite thin, and, at best, epiphenomenal. They also ignore Du Bois’s actual political prescriptions, failing to recognize that his theory of the perpetuation of racial inequality was consistently materialist throughout his life, and his evolving political program followed straightforwardly from his materialist analysis. The problem for the Left is that, until after the Second World War, Du Bois’s political program consistently rejected the possibility of a meaningful interracial class politics in the US.

 

Rediscovering Du Bois

I, for whatever reason, have an extremely vivid memory of the first time I heard of Du Bois. It was Black History Month; I was in the seventh grade. We were given a worksheet emblazoned with black and white pictures of Booker T. Washington and Du Bois, and perhaps a paragraph of text explaining their well known exchange concerning the political rights of Black Americans. We were asked to color the pictures of Washington and Du Bois, and that was that.

Until after the Second World War, Du Bois’s political program consistently rejected the possibility of a meaningful interracial class politics in the US.

school. Du Bois, in the 2000s, had yet to be remembered by my ostensibly progressive undergraduate social science professors. I was thoroughly introduced to Du Bois by the political scientist and labor historian Michael Goldfield when pursuing my PhD. In the ensuing ten-ish years of coursework in two graduate programs in both sociology and political science—obliviously I am a slow learner—I was prompted to read Du Bois in only two other courses, both not coincidentally taught by leftists: Julia Wrigley and Charlie Post, who were each important contributors to the revolutionary socialist, anti-Stalinist journal Against the Current. Goldfield—who in an email told me he has assigned Du Bois to his courses “since day one”—was active in the civil, student, and labor movements since the 1960s; founded the revolutionary Sojourner Truth Organization along with historian and radical Noel Ignatiev; worked closely with the Black Workers Congress (a labor, union-oriented offshoot of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers); and was a left-wing agitator in the United Auto Workers.1For Goldfield’s role in the civil and labor movements, see Michael Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986 (Oakland: AK Press, 2012).

My experience with Du Bois, in this period before the mainstream decided to remember him, is not unique. Prior to 2015, and this year is significant, Du Bois was simply not assigned with any regularity in social science courses. Insofar as he was, assignments came from Marxist professors. As part of a larger project, a group of research assistants and I systematically analyzed more than seven hundred social science syllabi from a prominent public university with a “progressive” reputation.2Cody R. Melcher, “Black Lives Matter and the Changing Sociological Canon: An Analysis of Syllabi from 2012 to 2023,” Teaching Sociology, (2024), advance
online publication doi/10.1177/0092055X241262768 From 2012 to 2015, Du Bois was assigned a whopping six times in one hundred and seventy-three courses (3.5 percent). From 2016 to 2023, however, he appeared in sixty-three syllabi out of five hundred and ninety-one (10.7 percent), representing a near-tripling of the rate of assignment. It is noteworthy, too, that Du Bois, in the most recent semesters, is assigned with more frequency than “canonical” social scientists, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. The year 2015, it seems, at least in the context of this university, was the precise date Du Bois was remembered by its faculty.

The year 2015 is significant for several reasons. First, 2015 is the year Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology was published.3Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). Morris convincingly argues that Du Bois was the founder of scientific sociology in the US and that his influence in the discipline was systematically marginalized by the conventionally assumed founder, the University of Chicago’s Robert E. Park. Park, it turns out, was Booker T. Washington’s ghost writer from 1905 to 1914, adding another layer of intrigue to the Washington–Du Bois debate. Morris emphasizes that Du Bois’s race, and his professional clash with Washington and Park led to his contributions to social science being systematically forgotten, with Morris’s work serving as a catalyst to remember.

Did The Scholar Denied actually catalyze the threefold increase in Du Bois assignments we found, though? Probably not. Books like Morris’s have been published repeatedly over the past several decades. Very few of Morris’s theoretical or historical claims are original, and he relies heavily on secondary material. Systematic treatments of Du Bois’s contribution to the founding of American social science are relatively widespread, and can be found in the work of Manning Marable, David Levering Lewis, Lawrence Scaff, and the early work of Adolph Reed Jr.4Manning Marable, E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1987). David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Holt, 1994); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Owl Books, 2000). Lawrence Scaff, Max Weber in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Morris borrows heavily from Scaff’s account of the exchange in ideas between Max Weber and Du Bois, and the importance of both for the development of American social sciences. Adolph Reed Jr, W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

This is not to say that The Scholar Denied is totally derivative or not worth reading. But it is to say that if all it took to revive and collectively remember Du Bois’s work was a book illustrating how important his work was and is, then it would have occurred several decades ago. Despite this, several well known scholars and reviewers have given The Scholar Denied pride of place in the resurgence of interest in Du Bois. Julian Go, a prominent post colonial sociologist who has written extensively on social science pedagogy, for instance, credits The Scholar Denied with changing his own conception of how to teach and present the history of American social science.5Julian Go, “The Case for Scholarly Reparations,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology (January 11, 2016), tinyurl.com/59zrueht. Beyond this, the book has spawned multiple conferences in Du Bois’s honor and catapulted Morris to the presidency of the American Sociological Association in 2021.

The mass remembering of Du Bois occurred primarily due to the various waves of the Black Lives Matter movement.

It is my position, however, that the mass remembering of Du Bois occurred primarily due to the various waves of the Black Lives Matter movement. As others have shown, BLM shifted public discourse in the US toward the movement’s agenda, increasing the popular salience of race and racial inequality.6Zackary Okun Dunivin, et al., “Black Lives Matter Protests Shift Public Discourse,” PNAS 119 (2022): 10, 1–11. The same thing occurred in academia and pop intellectual spheres: the perceived need to take race more seriously, made salient by the BLM movement, resulted in a disciplinary shift toward race and racism, and a greater focus on thinkers who make race central to their analysis, namely Du Bois.

I demonstrate this link between BLM and Du Bois statistically elsewhere.7Melcher, “Black Lives Matter.” In other words, Morris caught the rising winds but did not produce them. The BLM period has been a very lucrative time to publish on Du Bois, producing a veritable cottage industry. Even the most superficial, perfunctory, and unoriginal work on Du Bois can expect the highest praise.8In a recent review, Jeff Goodwin takes one of the worst contributions to this literature to task for its complete misreading of Du Bois and Marx. See Goodwin, “The Dilemma for ‘Du Boisian Sociology,’” Catalyst 7, no. 1 (2023): 140–67.

But if the increase in interest in Du Bois didn’t occur because of the publication of The Scholar Denied, the lens through which Du Bois is remembered has been heavily influenced by which Du Bois Morris decided to remember. Did Morris remember the Du Bois that visited the Soviet Union in 1926, declaring himself a Bolshevik upon his return? Did he remember the Du Bois of Black Reconstruction in America, perhaps the most incisive Marxist interpretation of race ever written? Did he remember the Du Bois who closely collaborated with the American left after the Second World War, eventually joining the Communist Party USA, dying in exile in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana? Of course not.

Like the bulk of recently published mainstream accounts of Du Bois, the Du Bois who is remembered is the pre-Black Reconstruction version: a “radical” liberal obsessively concerned with the psychological founts of racial discrimination. What is denied, by this selective reading, is that Du Bois’s theory of the perpetuation of racial inequality remained astoundingly consistent throughout his life—not changing before and after his embrace of Marxism in the 1930s. Marxism doesn’t change Du Bois’s commitment to materialist analysis: it gave him a language and a set of social categories to describe dynamics he identified in his earliest works.

 

Du Bois the Materialist

If the white workingman…felt sure that the Negro workers would not and could not take the bread and cake from their mouths, their race hatred would never have been translated into murder. If the black workingmen of the South could earn a decent living under decent circumstances at home, they would not be compelled to underbid their white fellows. Thus, the shadow of hunger, in a world which never needs to be hungry, drives us to war and murder and hate.

–Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” 1920, emphasis added.

For Du Bois, capitalism is defined by the presence of the “shadow of hunger”: avoiding economic hardship is predicated on successfully engaging the labor market, either directly or indirectly.9W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920; repr, Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 1999), 47–59. In other words, Du Bois makes the commodification of labor central to his social analysis.10For a fuller discussion, see Cody R. Melcher, “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: WEB Du Bois, Left-Wing Radicalism, and the Problem of Interracial Unionism,” Critical Sociology 46 (2019): 7–8, 1041–55. However, and this is his most important insight, Du Bois argues that workers do not confront each other in the market as atomized individuals, nor as an undifferentiated proletariat with identical propensities to collectively challenge the boss’s rule.

Rather, workers confront each other in the market as racialized entities, whose individual interests are furthered along with their socially constructed race. A white worker, according to this formulation, is more likely to have access to coveted (and limited) employment, education, housing, and political opportunities if those opportunities are exclusively given to white workers. If Black workers make headway into those monopolized sectors, white workers lose exclusive access to them. As Du Bois put it “the bread and cake [is taken] from their mouths.”

Conversely, “bread and cake” is taken from the mouth of the Black worker excluded from those desirable opportunities. Thus, the conflict between white workers—attempting to monopolize access to social, economic, and political opportunity through racial exclusion—and Black workers—attempting to gain access to social, economic, and political opportunity through racial inclusion—is a, if not the, primary antagonism of American capitalism.

While most fully articulated in his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, this materialist theory of race is present in all Du Bois’s major works, even his earliest. As he wrote in The Philadelphia Negro, his first major work, published in 1899:

To repeat, then, the real motives back (sic) of this [racial] exclusion are plain: a large part is simple race prejudice, always strong in working classes and intensified by the peculiar history of the Negro in this country. Another part, however, and possibly a more potent part, is the natural spirit of monopoly and the desire to keep up wages…So, today the [white] workmen plainly see that a large amount of competition can be shut off by taking advantage of public opinion and drawing a color line.11W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; repr., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 129.

Thus, long before Du Bois meaningfully engaged Marx, he grounded the perpetuation of racial inequality in a fundamental feature of capitalism: the commodification of labor and attempts to resist that commodification. For white workers, embracing white supremacy means assuaging the negative consequences of the commodification of labor.

Du Bois grounded the perpetuation of racial inequality in a fundamental feature of capitalism: the commodification of labor and attempts to resist that commodification.

For Marx, the primary means of resisting the commodification of labor is class-based organizing, particularly through the labor movement. But Du Bois argued that a labor movement has never existed in the US. Instead, the American working class has, since its inception, been composed of two labor movements.12W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; repr., New York: Free Press, 1998), 20. Du Bois put it similarly in a 1931 Crisis editorial, “The Negro’s Industrial Plight”: The American “working class [is] divided into two sections, of which the darker third has been disfranchised by the white workers, both in politics and industry, works for the lowest wages, is largely unskilled, and yet furnishes an enormous potential supply of industrial workers.”

One labor movement, composed of white workers, devotes its activism primarily to limiting competition through racial exclusion; the other labor movement, composed of Black workers, devotes its activism to achieving social, economic, and political parity with whites.

Du Bois uses this “two labor movements” formulation to describe grand sweeps of US history; from white working-class opposition to abolition; to the proliferation of race riots in the 1910s; to the lack of a unified working-class political party in the US.13Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 18, 22–25, 103; and Du Bois, Darkwater, 47–59. See also Cody R. Melcher and Michael Goldfield, “The Failure of Labor Unionism in the US South,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (2019), doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/013.777. Again, it is the shadow of hunger, or the commodification of labor and attempts to avoid it, that are the social mainspring for racial conflict.

This materialist conceptualization of racial inequality became widespread among Black intellectuals in the early to mid-twentieth century, embraced with differing emphases and applied to huge variety of cases, by thinkers as ideologically diverse as Abram Harris, Carter Woodson, Charles S. Johnson, and Oliver C. Cox.14Sterling D. Spero and Abram Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (1931; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). Lorenzo J. Greene and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner (Washington DC: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1930). Charles S. Johnson, “The Conflict of Caste and Class in American Industry,” American Journal of Sociology 42, no. 1 (1936): 55–65. Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study of Social Dynamics (1948; repr., New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959). However, Du Bois’s original theory retains a nuance which his followers failed to grasp. For Harris, Woodson, Johnson, and Cox, the focus of racial conflict is almost entirely on the labor market. Black workers represent an “industrial reserve army,” who depress the wages of white workers, hence racialized labor market conflict.

But for Du Bois, every aspect of society necessary for a flourishing life, from education to political access, to housing, to cultural approbation is commodified in a capitalist society, and thus subject to competition. White supremacy, as a social system, gives white Americans advantage in all these spheres of life.15Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 700–01. Thus, white workers are highly incentivized to protect this advantage against the incursions of Black workers.

 

Du Bois against Interracial Class Solidarity

If the mainstream interpreters of Du Bois have failed to grasp the materialist contours of his work, then Du Bois’s devotees on the Left have failed to come to terms with the politics that followed from his analysis. For Du Bois, the incentive white workers have to pursue the various “wages of whiteness” are simply too strong a force in the face of the shadow of hunger to countenance an interracial, class-based politics.

The wages of whiteness are too beneficial in a capitalist society to forsake and make common cause with Black workers against the ruling class. Given this reality, Du Bois consistently made political prescriptions for Black workers to similarly forsake white workers. Du Bois’s actual political program, at least prior to the Second World War, consistently encouraged Black workers to act as strikebreakers.16After he was drawn into the orbit of the Communist Party following the Second World War, Du Bois’s politics shifted sharply to the left. And throughout the 1930s, the most frequent victim of his acerbic criticism were left-wing radicals attempting to unify the interracial American working class.

While often professing an almost superficial advocacy of organized labor, Du Bois invariably noted the improbability of interracial cooperation under the aegis of labor unionism;17For instance, “The Crisis [that is, Du Bois] believes in organized labor,” (The Crisis, July 1912); “I am among the few colored men who have tried conscientiously to bring about understanding co-operation between American Negroes and the Labor Unions,” (The Crisis, March 1918). and he emphasized his contention that white supremacy is given “its greatest impulse” by white workers in pursuit of relative economic advantage.18See, for example, The Crisis editorial from May 1933, “Marxism and the Negro Problem”: “And while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers.” Some commenters (see for example, Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908–1921 [Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2001], 3–9) ascribe to Du Bois a “top-down” causal account of white supremacy, that is, white supremacy is sown by the capitalist class to “drive a wedge between…black and white workers.” While traces of this argument can be found in Du Bois’s pre-Second World War writings (see “Dives, Mob and Scab, Limited,” The Crisis March 1920; “The Negro and Labor,” The Crisis April 1923), it is definitively underemphasized and totally disconnected from his concrete political prescriptions. In sum, as Du Bois wrote to Black labor organizer and supporter of the dissident Communist group led by Jay Lovestone and George Streator in 1935: “Your plan, as it seems to me, involves cooperation with organized labor. I have no faith in this…I see no salvation in that direction.”19Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois: Volume II, Selections, 1934–1944(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 88.

Du Bois saved his most caustic denunciation for the US Communist Party (CP), by far the most important impetus for interracial labor unionism in the 1930s and ’40s. In 1931, Du Bois wrote what he considered—until the end of the Second World War, at least—to be his definitive assessment of the CP: a long Crisiseditorial entitled “The Negro and Communism.” Besides ad hominin attacks—“American Communists are neither wise nor intelligent”—Du Bois’s substantive critique was limited mostly to the Party’s handling of the Scottsboro trial, accusing the CP of exploiting “the boys” to further the Party’s alien cause.

No mention is made of the fact that his NAACP initially refused the case because Walter White assumed that the defendants were actually guilty.20Lewis,W.E.B Du Bois, 257, 333. Du Bois reiterates his core assumption that white and Black workers could not possibly organize together on a class basis, and he concludes by claiming that “radical reformers,” like the CP, only “share their gains with Negroes when they have to.”21W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro and Communism.”

His criticism of interracial unionism, just like his materialist theory of white supremacy, was consistent throughout his early work. In 1912, for instance, New York City experienced a mass strike of waiters, cooks, and hotel staff. The strike was led by the militantly interracial Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). After a “spontaneous” walkout of tens of thousands of workers, the IWW, fresh on the heels of their monumental victory leading a massive strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, filled the leadership vacuum. Christening a new organizational aegis, the International Union of Hotel Workers, they set out to organize the rest of the city’s hotel and restaurant workers.22For the New York waiters strike of 1912, see Melvyn Dubofsky, When Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), 120–22.

Almost immediately, hotel management began hiring strikebreakers, a substantial proportion of whom were either Black workers “imported” from the South, or college students from Columbia University. The IWW did not respond to the influx of Black strikebreakers as the employers had hoped: instead of allowing the class struggle to descend into anti-Black violence, the union “promptly…opened a special bureau for the enrollment of negro (sic) waiters and cooks.”23“Waiters Out in 17 More Places,” New York Times, June 1, 1912. The IWW also sought, and achieved, an alliance with the Colored Waiters’ Association, who assured the union that “the aims of the two organizations are entirely sympathetic, and that if an army of negroes (sic) should be drafted to meet the occasion, they would be converted to union men in no time and drawn out into the growing ranks of strikers.”24“Waiters Out in 17 More Places.”

Despite the IWW’s infamous ideological and substantive commitment to inter-racialism—in 1919 even Du Bois wrote that he “respect[s] [the IWW] as one of the social and political movements in modern times that draws no color line”—during the strike, Du Bois encouraged Black workers to act as strikebreakers.25For an analysis of and primary documents concerning the IWW’s interracialism, see Paul Heideman, Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2018), 139–66. W. E. B. Du Bois, “I.W.W.,” Crisis, June 1919; W. E. B. Du Bois “Organized Labor,” Crisis, July 1912. Apparently completely unaware of the actual unionization attempt and uninformed as to the actors involved, Du Bois asked his readership: “What then must be the attitude of the black man in the event of a strike like that of the white waiters of New York?” He answered for them: “The mass of them must most naturally regard the union white man as their enemy…when they [Black workers] take back the jobs out of which the white waiters have driven them, they do the natural and sensible thing.” The strikers “deserve themselves the starvation which they plan for their darker and poorer fellows.”26Du Bois, “Organized Labor.”

Du Bois assumed that white workers could not possibly organize with Black workers on a class basis: unions are always exclusionary, so when unions strike, Black workers must always act as strikebreakers.

The shadow of hunger strikes again. Because Du Bois assumed that white workers could not possibly organize with Black workers on a class basis, his response was determined a priori: unions are always exclusionary, so when unions strike, Black workers must always act as strikebreakers. The 1912 NYC waiters strike was eventually broken: not by Black strikebreaking, but by the struck hotels accepting all the strikers’ demands, except union recognition.

Du Bois’s prolific writings during the 1930s are conspicuous by their lack of reference to the explosion of the industrial labor movement led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and especially, the increase of meaningful interracialism in the labor movement.27For the increase in interracialism in the labor movement during the 1930s, see Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Insofar as the contemporary class struggle is mentioned in his work, it is done to excoriate its leaders.

During this period, he also adopted a form of Black nationalism, embracing what his biographer has called “Du Boisian segregation.”28Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 336–8 Since the “class conscious worker” has not brought about the liberation of the American working class, the “race-conscious black man cooperating together in his own institutions and movements” would liberate the Black race from the white man. This meant embracing segregation, while improving the quality of segregated Black institutions. As Du Bois put it, “there should never be an opposition to segregation pure and simple unless that segregation does involve discrimination.”29W.E.B Du Bois, “A Negro Nation within a Nation,” Current History XLII (1935), 265–70.

A far cry from the integrationist painted by the mainstream, indeed.

Only after the Second World War does Du Bois start to embrace the promise of interracial unionism; ironically and tragically, this is the same period when interracial unionism begins a slow death from the twin menaces of the postwar Communist witch hunt and the CP’s self-imposed ossification and denuding to maintain Stalin’s Soviet line.30Goldfield, The Southern Key. Du Bois’s political shift is due to his ever-closer relationship with the CP, especially through his second wife (whom he married in 1951), Shirley Graham Du Bois (who joined the Party in the late 1940s), and through his close friendship with Paul Robeson, perhaps the most famous American Communist, if not the most famous American of the 1930s. As early as 1948, Du Bois began to credit the labor movement, and the CIO especially, with “softening race prejudice among the masses.”31W. E. B. Du Bois, “Race Relations in the United States 1917–1947,” Phylon 9, no. 3 (1948), 234–47.

 

A Critical Reappraisal

None of the above should suggest to the reader that since Du Bois’s politics were, from the perspective of a left politics, not great, that his theoretical contributions should be discounted. Rather, it is simply to point out that an uncritical celebration of any thinker, like Du Bois has recently experienced, is ultimately unhelpful. The mainstream uncritically celebrates Du Bois by erasing his materialism and eventual Marxism; the Left uncritically celebrates Du Bois by divorcing his materialism from his politics.

Both these positions ignore how consistent his theory and politics were throughout his life—there was no “epistemic break”—and fail to appreciate how one followed from the other. If the wages of whiteness truly are as decommodifying as Du Bois argued they are, then there truly is no reason why white workers would do anything but pursue the perpetuation of white supremacy. The “race struggle” conceptually replaces the class struggle.

The problem, for such a theory, is that the US has experienced mass waves of interracial, class-based solidarity, which Du Bois was unable (and thus largely unwilling) to explain. Subsequent interpreters of Du Bois, namely Theodore Allen, have fruitfully developed modified versions of Du Bois’s materialist account of white supremacy, primarily by recasting the “wages of whiteness” as real material benefits, but pitiful in comparison to what can be won through interracial struggle.32Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression (London: Verso, 2022). As David Roediger put it, Allen’s Du Boisian theory of “white skin privilege” cannot be read as “anything but ironic and bitter, with the benefits of the crumbs from masters’ tables being pitiable and fully worth rejecting.”33David Roediger, Class, Race, and Marxism (London: Verso, 2019). In the words of Black radical Harry Haywood, white supremacy is nothing but “fool’s gold.”34Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 214.

Du Bois’s materialist theory of race is indispensable for explaining historical and contemporary iterations of white supremacy. White workers pursue white supremacy because it shields them from the shadow of hunger. But given a realistic opportunity to pursue their interests in terms of class, white workers have, and will, take advantage of that opportunity. That, as I see it, is the task of the American left today. ×

  1. For Goldfield’s role in the civil and labor movements, see Michael Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986 (Oakland: AK Press, 2012).
  2. Cody R. Melcher, “Black Lives Matter and the Changing Sociological Canon: An Analysis of Syllabi from 2012 to 2023,” Teaching Sociology, (2024), advance
    online publication doi/10.1177/
  3. Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
  4. Manning Marable, E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1987). David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Holt, 1994); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Owl Books, 2000). Lawrence Scaff, Max Weber in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Morris borrows heavily from Scaff’s account of the exchange in ideas between Max Weber and Du Bois, and the importance of both for the development of American social sciences. Adolph Reed Jr, W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
  5. Julian Go, “The Case for Scholarly Reparations,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology (January 11, 2016), tinyurl.com/59zrueht.
  6. Zackary Okun Dunivin, et al., “Black Lives Matter Protests Shift Public Discourse,” PNAS 119 (2022): 10, 1–11.
  7. Melcher, “Black Lives Matter.”
  8. In a recent review, Jeff Goodwin takes one of the worst contributions to this literature to task for its complete misreading of Du Bois and Marx. See Goodwin, “The Dilemma for ‘Du Boisian Sociology,’” Catalyst 7, no. 1 (2023): 140–67.
  9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920; repr, Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 1999), 47–59.
  10. For a fuller discussion, see Cody R. Melcher, “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: WEB Du Bois, Left-Wing Radicalism, and the Problem of Interracial Unionism,” Critical Sociology 46 (2019): 7–8, 1041–55.
  11. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; repr., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 129.
  12. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; repr., New York: Free Press, 1998), 20. Du Bois put it similarly in a 1931 Crisis editorial, “The Negro’s Industrial Plight”: The American “working class [is] divided into two sections, of which the darker third has been disfranchised by the white workers, both in politics and industry, works for the lowest wages, is largely unskilled, and yet furnishes an enormous potential supply of industrial workers.”
  13. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 18, 22–25, 103; and Du Bois, Darkwater, 47–59. See also Cody R. Melcher and Michael Goldfield, “The Failure of Labor Unionism in the US South,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (2019), doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/
    013.777.
  14. Sterling D. Spero and Abram Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (1931; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). Lorenzo J. Greene and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner (Washington DC: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1930). Charles S. Johnson, “The Conflict of Caste and Class in American Industry,” American Journal of Sociology 42, no. 1 (1936): 55–65. Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study of Social Dynamics (1948; repr., New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959).
  15. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 700–01.
  16. After he was drawn into the orbit of the Communist Party following the Second World War, Du Bois’s politics shifted sharply to the left.
  17. For instance, “The Crisis [that is, Du Bois] believes in organized labor,” (The Crisis, July 1912); “I am among the few colored men who have tried conscientiously to bring about understanding co-operation between American Negroes and the Labor Unions,” (The Crisis, March 1918).
  18. See, for example, The Crisis editorial from May 1933, “Marxism and the Negro Problem”: “And while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers.” Some commenters (see for example, Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908–1921 [Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2001], 3–9) ascribe to Du Bois a “top-down” causal account of white supremacy, that is, white supremacy is sown by the capitalist class to “drive a wedge between…black and white workers.” While traces of this argument can be found in Du Bois’s pre-Second World War writings (see “Dives, Mob and Scab, Limited,” The Crisis March 1920; “The Negro and Labor,” The Crisis April 1923), it is definitively underemphasized and totally disconnected from his concrete political prescriptions.
  19. Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois: Volume II, Selections, 1934–1944(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 88.
  20. Lewis, E.B Du Bois, 257, 333.
  21. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro and Communism.”
  22. For the New York waiters strike of 1912, see Melvyn Dubofsky, When Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), 120–22.
  23. “Waiters Out in 17 More Places,” New York Times, June 1, 1912.
  24. “Waiters Out in 17 More Places.”
  25. For an analysis of and primary documents concerning the IWW’s interracialism, see Paul Heideman, Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2018), 139–66. W. E. B. Du Bois, “I.W.W.,” Crisis, June 1919; W. E. B. Du Bois “Organized Labor,” Crisis, July 1912.
  26. Du Bois, “Organized Labor.”
  27. For the increase in interracialism in the labor movement during the 1930s, see Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
  28. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 336–8.
  29. E.B Du Bois, “A Negro Nation within a Nation,” Current History XLII (1935), 265–70.
  30. Goldfield, The Southern Key.
  31. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Race Relations in the United States 1917–1947,” Phylon 9, no. 3 (1948), 234–47.
  32. Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression (London: Verso, 2022).
  33. David Roediger, Class, Race, and Marxism (London: Verso, 2019).
  34. Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 214.
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