“Something of a certain inferiority complex was possibly present: I was desperately
afraid of not being wanted; of intruding without invitation; of appearing to desire the
company of those who had no desire for me. I should have been pleased if most of my
fellow students had desired to associate with me; if I had been popular and envied. But
the absence of this made me neither unhappy nor morose. I had my ‘island within’ and it
was a fair county.”
W.E.B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn
W.E.B. DuBois, still under-recognized as a political theorist of the 20
th
century,
stood simultaneously within and outside both his respective national community as well
as his racial community, largely because of his controversial writing about the pursuit of
equality by displaced minority groups. As he himself notes above, DuBois experienced a
feeling of being someone not fully embraced by his environs as he pursued higher
education at Harvard and pursued his quest to remedy the follies of scientific racism,
imperialism, and ongoing persistent inequality in world democracies like the United
States. In this paper, DuBois’ recognition of the roles of race conjoined with class, and
race conjoined with gender are examined. Beyond debates of DuBois’ reluctant or
Victorian feminism, or his longstanding battles with socialist and communist parties
about the relevance of race, I want to examine evidence that DuBois provoked his
audience with the argument that race and class (or race and gender) mattered
simultaneously in most if not all political contexts. The examination presented herein is
part of a larger project that examines the direction in which DuBois pushed this line of
thinking - towards a theory of multiple yet mutually exclusive identities and oppressions,
or towards a theory of intersecting and mutually constitutive identities and oppressions?
The Logic of Intersectionality
The term “intersectionality” refers to both a normative theoretical argument and
an approach to conducting empirical research. While the idea of analyzing race, gender,
and class identities together has existed as one answer to this question for over a century
(Guy-Sheftall 1995), intersectionality has only emerged in the past 20 years as an
2
Convention