Student Question
How does Du Bois refine a key metaphor in "The Souls of Black Folk"?
Quick answer:
In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois uses the metaphor of the "color line" to describe racism. He expands it beyond US racism to include the divide between all darker skinned people in the world and white people. He refines it by showing how it damages not only Blacks people, but also white people.
An important metaphor in the text is that of the "color line." This metaphor, which did not originate with Du Bois, likens racism to a line that divides Black people and white people in the United States. It works more effectively than an abstract term like racism, because we can visualize a line drawn down the middle of a room or a town, with Black people kept on one side and white people on the other.
One can easily say, for example, "I am not a racist." But the "color line" faces the realities of how racism expresses itself: will a white person cross the invisible color line and move into a Black neighborhood? How comfortable will a white person feel if a Black male teenager crosses the color line and walks around a white neighborhood? How comfortable will a Black person feel crossing the line to enter a white...
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neighborhood, church, or country club? This spatial metaphor captures how racism is enforced spatially.
Though primarily speaking about the United States's color line, which was strictly enforced through legalized segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal," Du Bois expands this metaphor to include all people of color, both Black and Asian, who are on the nonwhite side of the line.
While Du Bois understands the color line as chiefly harmful to Blacks people, he refines the metaphor to include white people. He sees racism as the problem harming the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century. He recognizes that until it is solved, white people too will suffer. First, they will suffer from the uneasy awareness—one that they try to shut away by shutting away the sight of Black people—that until the problem of racism is solved, the United States is betraying its founding ideal of equality for all. Second, racism, in which white people, especially in the South, hold preponderant power
tamper[s] with the moral fibre of a naturally honest and straightforward people until the whites threaten to become ungovernable tyrants and the blacks criminals and hypocrites.
The color line metaphor helps us to visualize the divide between Black and white people and the damaging effects of this divide on everyone.