Though DuBois writes about gender far less frequently than he does about class
(and always about race) this logic is not limited to discussions of women’s rights.
fact, DuBois often talks about the significance of both race and class. He explains his
intellectual development and movement toward this kind of analysis in Dusk of Dawn:
All this [the historical spread of imperialism] might have been
interpreted as history and politics. Mainly I did so interpret it; but
continually I was forced to consider the economic aspects of world
movements as they were developing at the time. Chiefly this was
because the group in which I was interested in were [sic] workers,
earners of wages, owners of small bits of land, servants. The labor
strikes interested and puzzled me. They were for the most part
strikes of workers led by organizations to which Negroes were not
admitted (DD, 53).
This tendency to analyze race and class together becomes a significant part of DuBois’
ongoing critique of both labor movements and the socialist party regarding its failure to
resist racism with equal tenacity as classism, as this passage from Darkwater indicates:
Even the broken reed on which we had rested high hopes of eternal
peace – the guild of the laborers – the front of that very important
movement for human justice on which we had builded most, even
this flew like a straw before the breath of king and Kaiser. Indeed,
the flying had been foreshadowed when in Germany and America
‘international’ socialists had all but read yellow and black men out
of the kingdom of industrial justice. Subtly had they been bribed,
but effectively! Where they not lordly whites and should they not
share in the spoils of rape? High wages in the United States and
England might be the skillfully manipulated result of slavery in
Africa and of peonage in Asia (DW, 70)
Here again, a claim of invisibility is made: “yellow” and “black” men were “all but read
out” of the “kingdom of industrial justice.” DuBois makes a particular charge of the
failure to fuse race and class struggles repeatedly in many of his works – in Black
Reconstruction (1935), Dusk of Dawn (1940), and The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois
2
This logic is also evident in the large body of intersectional research that has been produced in the last 30
years.
9
Convention