ABSTRACT
In this final chapter of his 1939 work Black Folk: Then and Now , Du Bois challenges the West’s “hegemony of the world” and the assumption that the Negro race will be content to either serve the interests of white culture or become extinct. He goes on to examine in detail the inherent failure of democracies such as Great Britain to be truly meritocratic, as well as of other countries such as France and Germany to be truly equitable. He concludes the piece by invoking his famous dictum of nearly half a century earlier “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
