While Du Bois's "color line" has arguably been a social, economic, and political reality for the past several centuries, to what degree does it...

DuBois was interested in progress and progress has certainly been made since the publication of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. Voting rights and equality of citizenship have been more fully and indiscriminately extended to ethnic groups of all stripes and opportunities for quality education, health care and employment have all risen for minority groups in the United States.

The notion of "double consciousness" that DuBois articulated seems to be less distressing today than in was a few decades ago as popular culture moves into modes of increasing diversity and better representations of the American diaspora, so to speak. (Although, the #Oscarsowhite Academy Awards issues of 2016 suggest that there is still progress to be made in this area too.) The idea of "being Black in public" is not as fraught or freighted as it was during the 1930s to the 1960s, as depicted in works like The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird. 

There has been progress, yet we continue to see discrepancies between ethnic groups that echo Dubois’ proclamation that the “duty and the deed” set before contemporary America is “the problem of the color line.”

U.S. Census Bureau data shows that Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanic or Latino Americans each show poverty rates at above 20%. Each of these groups shows a rate of poverty that is roughly double that of White Americans.

As this post is being written, an presidential election is underway and voting rights have come again into question as certain states have asserted state’s rights to govern their own voter restrictions in ways that are seen by some as, in effect, disenfranchising voters that will be disproportionately associated with particular (minority) ethnicities. This creates a scenario wherein American society is again debating the amount of progress that has been made and may still need to be made in regards to equality of rights (and access to government, civic institutions, etc.).

In light of numerous headlines in the last decade depicting law enforcement violence against Black males and females, conversations have also turned to question of equal protection under the law.

With a question being posed here as to the relevance of the “color line” notion as a problematic factor in social, economic and political American life, these examples seem to strongly suggest that this notion remains relevant.

The critic DuBois presents in The Souls of Black Folks is importantly subordinated to an articulation of goals and aspirations. He paints a picture of successful American life where the color line has been erased. It has not yet been erased, and so his work remains apropos of the contemporary moment. But the ideals expressed in his work are therefore also still relevant and compelling goals.

“Work, culture, liberty -- these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal […] the ideal of human brotherhood” (7).

While the reality of the notion in question here has certainly shifted, we might say as a final work that the idea of ethnic difference and problems of race-oriented inequalities has not disappeared.