ABSTRACT
The prescience of W.E.B. Du Bois’s declaring the problem of the twentieth century to be that of the “color-line” overshadows the fact that the century should also be remembered for something equally apposite; during these years physical and social scientists concluded that race was not “real,” at least for purposes of understanding individual and group capabilities and behavior. Academia provided a systematic and emphatic debunking of the underlying arguments for “scientific racism,” concluding that race is nothing more than an artificial marker with no relevance for determining the possibilities of individual behavior (Hall 2000). Race’s “reality”—its deep-seated importance in American society in structuring inequality and difference-is the product of political, economic, and social forces, not biology or genetics.
