ABSTRACT
The Souls of Black Folkis by far the most widely known of W. E. B. Du Bois's books. It probably ranks among a handful of the most broadly recognized titles in black American literature. Despite some superficial rhetorical continuities, the political circumstances that spawned Du Bois's formulations and made them plausible have altered in ways that have important consequences for their usefulness as guides to political understanding and action. This chapter discusses those consequences after specifying the historical particularities that ground the politics laid out inSouls. In contemporary intellectual life and political discourse, the "color line" image rivals the double-consciousness formulation in popularity both as an iconic condensation of Du Bois's text and thought and as a rhetorical device adduced in support of claims that stress the continuing significance of racial hierarchy in American life.
