02/23/2026
The Mountain Upon Which We Fight
— In honor of W.E.B. Du Bois, born on this day in 1868
Out of the chaos of the social sciences of the early 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois sought to create science which could explain racial oppression and colonialism; what he viewed as the principal contradiction of liberal democracy and the capitalist organization of society. His book The Souls of Black Folk announces a new approach to social science, where he transgresses the West’s assumption that Black people were not human; Black people were human, he insisted, and could be studied scientifically. The assumption of early white sociology was that because Black folk were less than fully human, they should be studied using biology, but not social science. Du Bois thought that social science might be deployed to solve the crisis of U.S. democracy and transform society, producing a multi-racial democracy.
What he began and then carried out for the rest of his life, was a decisive break with the European view of humanity. Du Bois invents a new way of scientifically studying Africans and ultimately humanity. He makes a decisive break with the idea that knowledge is essentially a European thing, and that European knowledge was universal. He insists that the study of history and modernity from a European standpoint narrows the lenses of knowing and ultimately distorts knowledge. What comes out of European philosophy and human studies was Eurocentric and prejudiced in favor of humanity’s minority, white folk. ... Of the white world, he says in Dusk of Dawn that it was “thinking wrong about race, because it did not know.” It did not have either the philosophical or civilizational prerequisites to know. And what they didn’t know about race and democracy, they thought wasn’t consequential, at any rate. Du Bois passionately disagreed; what the white world didn’t know about race would turn out to be the most consequential thing about American capitalism and modernity.
One of the great discoveries of revolutionary thought is of the Black Proletariat. This historically constituted and revolutionary category builds upon, yet supersedes, the Marxian notion of the class struggle. Du Bois saw the Black Proletariat as the central revolutionary force in the anti-slavery struggle. He saw it under slavery as an enslaved proletariat. The logic of this discovery leads to Du Bois’s proposing a historical logic that proceeds in threes: the Black worker, the white worker, and the white capitalist. Rather than a dialectic, as in a logic of twos, Du Bois proposes a trialectic, a logic of threes. He makes robust claims concerning the role of the Black Proletariat, including the possibility during the Reconstruction era of a dictatorship of the Black Proletariat being established in several states of the U.S. South. This dictatorship was a necessity, he reasoned, to secure a revolutionary democracy and the freedom of the former slaves.
The larger point is that the Black Proletariat is the central force in the revolutionary and democratic struggles of the United States up until now. It represents the highest levels of democratic, anti-white supremacist, and working-class consciousness. It is from a logical standpoint the working class in its becoming, which means that the Black Proletariat is the ground upon which the entire working class rises or falls. To achieve a revolutionary democratic consciousness, white people must reject whiteness; the working class must become more or less the Black Proletariat; hence the Black Proletariat is the entire working class in its becoming: a class for humanity. This expresses the revolutionary potential of the working class. This means the white worker, over time, becomes one with the Black worker; white workers start to think like and identify with Black workers. This is precisely the point that James Baldwin makes; the first step to a revolutionary consciousness is for whiteness as an identity to be rejected.
