ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with W.E.B. Du Bois ’s exclusion from the history of social information. As a brief critical theory of social information, the chapter ultimately demonstrates Du Bois ’s undeniable contributions to the history, discourse, and development of American social information in particular, and the wider world of social information in general. This dialectical approach to Du Bois ’s sociological discourse will enable objective interpreters of his work to see that when compared and contrasted with the monumental work of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim what was and what remains really and truly distinctive about Du Bois ’s sociology is precisely his unpretentious preoccupation with uniquely and unequivocally American social, political, and cultural issues, such as, for example: race and anti-black racism in the context of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws, Black Codes, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression in the United States; racial capitalism and the racial colonization of social classes in the United States; the racial colonization of gender and sexuality in the United States; the racial colonization of religion in the United States; the racial colonization of education in the United States; and, finally, the racial criminalization of blacks, among other racially colonized and poverty-stricken people, in the United States.
