ABSTRACT
W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings on race remain relevant and contribute to both contemporary racial and educational discourse-especially the emerging field of critical race studies in education-for four fundamental reasons. First, his sociology of race has been often interpreted as an “ideology of race,” that is, as an inert, inflexible, fixed and fast, singular notion of what race is, and which groups constitute constituent races. This is not only a gross misinterpretation of Du Bois’s constantly evolving sociology of race, but an example of the type of intellectual disingenuousness and, let it be said, epistemic apartheid that has long plagued African American intellectuals of every political persuasion.
