This is the final version of an introduction for a new edition of Darkwater, forthcoming soon.

INTRODUCTION
   
In Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, the distinguished American scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, presents a set of provocative essays on racial matters unrivaled in perceptiveness for their time. Indeed, the insights in some essays remain unrivaled in our time. This collection was first published in 1920 by the new company of Harcourt, Brace & Howe. Like his classic book, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’s masterpiece Darkwater is not only original and probing in its brilliant ideas but also experimental in its presentation, ranging from detailed sociopolitical analyses to lyrical and poetic presentations.
   
The book has ten major chapters, beginning with an autobiographical piece and ending with a chilling science fiction story about the destruction of New York City. In between, there are eight articles of sociological, economic, and political analysis, with brief fiction and poetry bridges mixed in, mainly at the ends of chapters. Some chapters and poetic interludes had been previously published, in such places as the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis and in the  Atlantic Monthly. In the book’s Postscript Du Bois accents the significance of his positioning poetic “tributes to beauty” among his “sterner flights of logic.” The two presentation methodologies complement and extend one another, and thereby offer a lesson for contemporary authors.
   
In an opening Credo, Du Bois articulates what would now be called the philosophy of multiculturalism: “I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.” (484-485) Then he adds a statement that some have seen as racial chauvinism: “Especially do I believe in the Negro Race: in the beauty of its genius, the sweetness of its soul, and its strength in that meekness which shall yet inherit this turbulent earth.” (485) This comment can be construed as racially chauvinistic only if the reader is insensitive to the impact of racism and takes the statement out of the multicultural, multiracial context in which Du Bois offers it. For him, it is the human race that is central, and the darker peoples of the world may yet be the salvation of that human race. Indeed, a key argument throughout Darkwater, as the subtitle “Voices from Within the Veil” indicates, is that those behind the veil of racial subordination can see much better into what whites and white society are about, than whites can see into the realities of racially subordinated groups.
   
In Chapter I, “The Shadow of Years,” Du Bois revisits some biographical details of his life, details that he presented in various ways in a number of his books. Born of free African Americans in western Massachusetts, Du Bois writes eloquently of his ancestors. Noting that the Du Bois side of his family had a strong mixed-race heritage, he describes how he grew up among small farmers, with a mother who was patient and determined and a father who, he says, was a dreamer, unreliable, and a poet. Slowly, he became painfully aware that some local whites viewed his “brown skin a misfortune; once or twice I became painfully aware that some human beings even thought it a crime.” (489) Nonetheless, the racist actions that he regularly encountered did not slow him down in his life’s efforts, including his school studies, although he did shed some “secret tears” over his racial persecution. After he graduated from high school with high honors, a distinctive achievement for a young African American facing overt racism, he dreamed of attending Harvard. Because of difficult economic circumstances, however, he went to a historically Black institution, Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee. In his senior year at Fisk, he was accepted at Harvard and entered as a junior. Graduating from Harvard in 1888, he began graduate work in U.S. history. Later, he would graduate with the first Ph.D. degree given by Harvard to an African American.
  
In this autobiographical chapter Du Bois recounts briefly his first experience doing empirical research in the new field of sociology, in which he was an early pioneer. Laboring “morning, noon, and night,” he conducted the first empirical study of urban Black Americans, a mid-1890s field study published as The Philadelphia Negro. In this study he combined survey research methods and a descriptive statistical analysis with some qualitative data and historical analysis of the community studied.
   
Chapter II of Darkwater, titled “The Souls of White Folk,” is the first major analysis in Western intellectual history to probe deeply white identity and the meaning of whiteness. In this original and provocative analysis, Du Bois argues effectively that “the discovery of personal whiteness among the world's people is a very modern thing. . . . The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. . . . Today, we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!” (497-498) In a trenchant assessment he explores the arrogance of the white perspective that claims “title to the universe” and that, by emphasis or omission, tries to “make children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white man’s soul.” (498) Furthermore, whites have brought a great “descent to Hell” for the globe’s peoples of color. White actions are buttressed by a “deep and passionate hatred” of peoples of color. Rhetorically, Du Bois asks whites what they would say “if the next census were to report that half of black America was dead and the other half dying.” (499) He implies that many would be happy to be rid of African Americans. He later chides whites for failing to live up to their own moralistic rhetoric; indeed, “the number of white individuals who are practising with even reasonable approximation the democracy and unselfishness of Jesus Christ is so small and unimportant as to be fit subject for jest in Sunday supplements . . . . “ (501).
   
One of the most important dimensions of this challenging book is its recurring global sensitivity and perspective. Chapter II and the other essays often go beyond U.S. racism to its global context. For example, Du Bois notes that, while the U.S. government protests against brutality on the part of European governments, it ignores racial atrocities at home. Du Bois also makes important connections between the unjust enrichment of white Europeans over recent centuries and the unjust impoverishment of people of African ancestry. The greatness of Europe, which Du Bois fully acknowledges, comes from the strength of its foundation, a foundation built upon the ideas, sciences, economic developments, and mineral resources of many parts of the globe, but especially those of Africa and Asia. Du Bois worked from a conceptual perspective critically assessing the global racial order, perhaps the first social theorist to do so. Writing about the years around 1900, he contends that, “White supremacy was all but world-wide, Africa was dead, India conquered, Japan isolated, and China prostrate, while white America whetted her sword for mongrel Mexico and mulatto South America. . . . The using of men for the benefit of masters is no new invention of modern Europe. . . . But Europe proposed to apply it on a scale and with an elaborateness of detail of which no former world ever dreamed. The imperial width of the thing,--the heaven-defying audacity--makes its modern newness” (504) The brutal exploitation of African labor and land had long been omitted from most historical accounts of European affluence, as it often is today.
  
In other writings Du Bois documented the point that the enslavement of Africans in the Americas was more extreme than slavery in ancient societies such as the Roman empire. An essential feature of North American slavery was the denial of almost all human liberties. Slaves “could own nothing; they could make no contracts; they could hold no property; nor traffic in property; they could not hire out; they could not legally marry. . . they could not appeal from their master; they could be punished at will."

Chapter III, “The Hands of Ethiopia,” further expands Du Bois’s global perspective. Much of this chapter appeared in a 1915 article for the Atlantic Monthly under the title, “The African Roots of the War.” Here Du Bois further develops his argument that modern capitalism has generated much wealth off the backs of African peoples. For four centuries Europe was the “chief support of that trade in human beings which first and last robbed black Africa of a hundred million human beings.” (512) In addition to building the Atlantic slave trade, Europeans went to Africa to build their industry “on a new slavery” depriving Africans of their land and mineral resources. Moreover, he suggests that white elites discovered that the white working classes, who were starting to rebel against class domination in Europe and America, could be held in check by convincing the latter that they were racially superior to workers of color across the globe. Here Du Bois anticipates the idea of the “psychological wage of whiteness,” a view that would develop later in his historical book, Black Reconstruction. He pursues this idea again in Chapter 4 here.
  
In Chapter III, Du Bois, who is often considered the “father of Pan-Africanism,” offers one of the first post-colonial analyses, and with it some post-colonial visions. He is very concerned with freeing Africa from European colonialism and with restoring control over African resources to Africans. He was a major organizer of, and key participant in, the four Pan-African conferences in 1919-1927, and again in the fifth conference at the end of World War II. Held in Manchester, England, that powerful 1945 conference hosted many of the leaders who were then working for, and in, a post-colonial Africa. There they celebrated the distinguished Du Bois for his anti-colonial writings and activism.

Du Bois begins Chapter IV, “Of Work and Wealth,” with reflections on teaching history, economy, and sociology while he was at Atlanta University. He articulates well the dilemma of the Black teacher who is often asked by his students, “Do you trust white people?” As Du Bois poignantly recounts it, the Black teacher usually feels that he must dissimulate in reply: “Yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world’s; you repeat that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are lying . . . .” (524) The chapter proceeds to deal with how white workers have driven black workers out of the new industrial unions, to the detriment of both groups. He notes the recent anti-black rioting by whites in East St. Louis, where many Blacks were killed and injured by white workers fearful of losing jobs to black workers. Here Du Bois develops the beginnings of a critique of modern capitalism, a critique that shows how a small capitalist elite gains wealth at the expense of the working class--with the whites in that working class coming to view black workers as competitors rather than allies. Why do they do this? Because white workers have come to support the society's racial hierarchy, with its privileges, opportunities, and resources for whites. They have adopted as well the rationalizing ideology of white superiority. Again, Du Bois notes that white workers have accepted the psychological wage of whiteness. He then adds yet another the astute insight that “the freeing of the black slaves freed America,” by which he means that full U.S. social and economic development would not have been possible without the abolition of slavery. (533) He carries this insight further 778and argues that white elites’ abandonment of ownership of human beings must of necessity be followed by abandonment of elite ownership of the means of capitalistic production (such as factories), which are produced by workers working collectively.

Chapter V, “ ‘The Servant in the House,’ ” deals forcefully with the ways in which many African Americans, including Du Bois’s mother and Du Bois himself, have labored for centuries in various forms of menial service for whites, for very low wages and suffering recurring insults to human dignity. This servile condition Du Bois views as an anachronism and “medieval barbarism” that survives into the modern period. No one wants to be a servant, he suggests, but many want to have servants. Why does this oppressive phenomenon of low-wage, menial service persist? Du Bois suggests, in an aphoristic phrase, that U.S. society still holds, consciously or unconsciously, to a “manure theory of civilization.” This is the view that there is a subterranean area of work which no civilized person should want to do, but which must be done for the larger society by “derelicts” and “half-men,” such as oppressed African Americans who have degraded into such servile positions by white Americans. U.S. “democracy,” he adds with acerbity, is built upon the foundation of menial labor.

In Chapter VI, “Of the Ruling of Men,” Du Bois develops additional ideas in political sociology, particularly ideas on how the “ruling of men” develops in societies. Over the course of history, he notes, we have seen the expansion of human knowledge and political suffrage, with growing numbers of the workers at the bottom of the society rebelling against oppressed conditions. Thus, it was not the white philanthropists who “freed the slaves.” Instead, enslaved African Americans brought their own liberation “by armed rebellion, by sullen refusal to work, by poison and murder, by running away to the North and Canada, by giving point and powerful example to the agitation of the abolitionists and by furnishing 200,000 soldiers and many times as many civilian helpers in the Civil War.” (551) Once again, Du Bois anticipates later historical scholarship that has made it clear how African Americans have played a central role in their own social and political liberation. They have been much more than the “victims” of history.
  
Du Bois then develops a very strong argument for the importance of a vital and vibrant multiracial democracy, one where multiculturalism is prized and fostered. He argues that by leaving out some of the people--as has been done in the partial democracy that is the United States--we leave out “vast stores of wisdom.” Only by bringing in the “whole experience” of the human race can societies adequately meet the hard challenges of the unknown future. The expansion of political democracy not only meets the democratic ideals often professed in Western countries, but also makes it likely that much more knowledge and essential wisdom will become available for the longterm development and sustained growth of societies like the United States. The larger the knowledge pool, the more sustainable is the society. Du Bois adds that the expansion of political democracy should be accompanied by the expansion of economic democracy, which he believes workers will increasingly seek. There is much wisdom in the minds of workers and the general public that remains to be tapped.
   
In Chapter VII, “The Damnation of Women,” Du Bois yet again shows how much his thinking was ahead of its time. This chapter is one of the first analyses ever by a male intellectual that pressed for greatly expanded women’s economic, political, and procreation rights. Du Bois was perhaps the leading male thinker of his day on this subject. He begins this chapter with a highly original analysis of the system of gendered oppression in Western societies like the United States. As he saw the treatment of women in society, they were not really “beings, they were relations.” Today as then, women are usually described and positioned by their relationships to men--as wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters. Whatever their color, they exist “not for themselves, but for men.” Du Bois continues with a brief but insightful analysis of childbearing and child rearing, one that parallels arguments of leading white feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “Only at the sacrifice of intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of modern women bear children. This is the damnation of women.” (565) He then adds, forcefully and forthrightly, that a woman must have control of her own body, the “right of motherhood at her own discretion.” Such a view was revolutionary for his time. At an early point in U.S. feminism, this Black male intellectual and activist insisted not only on voting rights for women, a central cause of the period, but also on their economic and procreation rights.
   
Perhaps most importantly, Du Bois accents in this essay the central role of Black women in Black history and culture, both in African societies and in the United States. He reviews the devastating impact of slavery on these women. The “crushing weight of slavery” mean “no legal marriage, no legal family, no legal control over children.”(567) He writes provocatively and eloquently on the consequences of slavery: “I shall forgive the white South much in its final judgement day: I shall forgive its slavery, for slavery is a world-old habit; I shall forgive its fighting for a well-lost cause . . . but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world nor the world to come: its wanton and continued and persistent insulting of the black womanhood which it sought and seeks to prostitute to its lust.” (569) After reviewing the lives and contributions of women such as Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Shadd, Louise De Mortie, and Kate Ferguson, Du Bois concludes with a review of the current scene, where Black women are key pillars in the churches and schools that are often the backbone of Black communities. Moreover, anticipating contemporary analyses of the degradation of the “black body” and of the white beauty myth, Du Bois celebrates the beauty of Black women: “Their beauty,–their dark and mysterious beauty of midnight eyes, crumpled hair, and soft, full-featured faces . . . . No other women on earth could have merged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfed and still surrounds black women in America with half the modesty and womanliness that they retain.” (576)

In Chapter VIII, Du Bois continues with ever more high-level insights into contemporary societies. In this chapter, titled “The Immortal Child,” the focus is on children and education. Du Bois begins with a discussion of the contributions of Europeans and Americans who had mixed white and African ancestry, then moves to a discussion of how Black parents raise their children to prepare them for dealing with racism. This is followed by a probing assessment of the general importance of education. Here he underscores the importance of extended educations for all people, once again making the point that a society cannot afford to ignore the knowledge and wisdom developed by ordinary people. Central to this essay is an insight that others have articulated but few have put so eloquently: “If we realized that children are the future, that immortality is the present child, that no education which educates can possibly be too costly, then we know that the menace of Kaiserism [Germany in World War I] which called for the expenditure of more than 332 thousand millions of dollars was not a whit more pressing than the menace of ignorance, and that no nation tomorrow can call itself civilized which does not give every single human being college and vocational training free and under the best teaching force procurable for love or money.” (591) Thinking “outside the box” once again, Du Bois not only recognizes the importance of education for all Americans, including those who are victims of racial oppression, but also accents the importance of a multicultural education that teaches children that racial hatreds not only degrade and kill others, but also “crucify souls like their own.” Here, as in Chapter II, Du Bois accents the costs of racism for white Americans. He views comprehensive education across all social lines as one major solution for racial hatreds and oppression. He notes that nowhere in the Western world is education seen this way, an evaluation that still holds true today.

In Chapter IX, titled “Of Beauty and Death,” Du Bois contrasts the ugliness of racial oppression with the beauty of the physical landscape, using lyrical sentences to describe that landscape. Du Bois raises the question of why those burdened by racism cannot flee to the areas of great natural beauty, and returns with the answer given by Black acquaintances–Jim Crow segregation makes travel too difficult and dangerous. White-generated ugliness can be seen in the blatant Jim Crow segregation of the U.S. army during the World War I period and in the many racial riots by white Americans against African Americans in that same period. This pain and ugliness is contrasted with the beauty of such physical phenomena as the sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay and with the laughter and loving of African Americans enjoying a Harlem night. “And then–the Veil. It drops as drops the night on southern seas–vast, sudden, unanswering. There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears. . . . And yet it hangs there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored and Black and White–between You and Me.” (607). Once again, he returns to the metaphor of the veil. African Americans are enshrouded by the veil of white racism.

In Chapter X, titled “The Comet,” Du Bois concludes Darkwater with a change of pace--a science fiction parable of chilling relevance to the present day. The tale is set in New York City, whose population is almost entirely wiped out as a comet hits the city. A working-class Black man named Jim is not killed. He is a bank messenger who was saved because he was sent below ground to look at bank records. He comes out into the streets to discover that everyone in sight is dead. As he traverses the city, he rescues a wealthy young white women, Julia, from an upper floor of her building, where she had been saved because she was in a photographic darkroom when the comet hit. Crossing the city in her luxury car, they find no survivors. Returning to her father’s office tower, Jim and Julia go up to the roof to look out over the city. In the face of what appears to be the end of the world, they interact more as human beings than in terms of the social positions they have long inhabited. Commenting on the meaninglessness of categorizing rich and poor, Julia says, “how foolish our human distinctions seem--now.” He replies, “Yes–I was not– human, yesterday.” She adds, “And your people were not my people . . . but today–“ He adds, “Death, the leveler!” Du Bois then adds the comment that Jim “was no longer a thing apart, a creature below . . . but her Brother Humanity incarnate . . . .” (619).
   
However, as the protagonists move toward each other with outstretched arms, they hear the honking of a car horn below. Soon, two white men come up in the elevator to the roof. One is the Julia’s father, who tells her that only New York City has been destroyed. Seeing Jim, her father snarls, “It’s–a–nigger–Julia! Has he–has he dared–“ Julia looks at Jim, drops her eyes, and replies to her father that Jim only dared to rescue her. Then her father throws some money at Jim. A gathering white crowd whispers that they should “lynch the damned–“ Someone adds, “Well, what do you think of that? . . . of all New York, just a white girl and a nigger.” (621)
   
Du Bois concludes the chapter and his book with a poem called “A Hymn to The Peoples,” which ends with these words, “Save us, World-Spirit, from our lesser selves! Grant us that war and hatred cease. Reveal our souls in every race and hue! Help us, O. Human God, in this Thy Truce, To make Humanity divine!” (623)
  
Interestingly, most white reviewers of the book could not see past what they viewed as its “hateful” and anti-white stance. They criticized its “bitterness” and its “teaching of violence,” neither of which sentiments are to be found in the book. Too tied up in their racial straightjackets, most white readers missed the many astute and consequential points in the book. Moreover, a few reviewers chided Du Bois for writing in language that was above the heads of ordinary Black people, yet they were off the mark. Many ordinary African Americans sent in two dollars to get a copy, much to the amazement of these analysts.  Poor and working-class African Americans eagerly sought after a book that, it seems likely, many could barely read. The reason was obvious. Du Bois was now a respected leader of African Americans, and he articulated well the experience and views of most African Americans whatever their social class position.
   
Du Bois was an authentic American genius. He was a major sociologist and historian, a leading civil rights activist, an essayist, a poet, and a novelist of originality. Viewing his many talents and achievements, it seems that no American has ever contributed so much to his country. As a founder of, and a key innovator in the NAACP (he was founding editor of The Crisis), he worked for decades to see the Black civil rights movement rise to power from the 1940s to the 1960s. Indeed, word of his death in Africa came on the day of the most famous civil rights demonstration in US history, the March on Washington in August 1963. In addition, Du Bois pioneered in many areas of social science scholarship. He undertook the first major research study on the U.S. slave trade (his doctoral dissertation published by Harvard University press), developed the first book-length urban field study in U.S. social science (The Philadelphia Negro), wrote a major revisionist history of Reconstruction (Black Reconstruction), developed the first important whiteness study (Chapter II here), and wrote much in the way of pathbreaking Pan-Africanist and post-colonial analysis.
   
Moreover, unlike virtually all white leaders of his day, Du Bois was an active anti-racist in thought, writings, and action, and, unlike virtually all male leaders of his day, he was an early and strong feminist. What other American has such a record? Du Bois may well be the greatest American of all time. Darkwater repeatedly shows that Du Bois saw much farther and deeper than most contemporaries on matters of what are now called “race, gender, and class.” Indeed, many of his insights are ahead of our time.
   
I will conclude this introduction with one of his predictions. After assessing the great destructiveness of World War I--which he sees as substantially an avaricious struggle among European powers for colonial control over the darker peoples of the world–Du Bois boldly anticipates a global war of the races. In this passage from Chapter II, he speaks of the world’s majority watching the so-called “world war” of the Europeans:
“But what of the darker world that watches? Most men belong to this world. With Negro and Negroid, East Indian, Chinese, and Japanese they form two-thirds of the population of the world. A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men. If the uplift of mankind must be done by men, then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of darker nations.
   
What, then, is this dark world thinking? It is thinking that as wild and awful as this shameful war was, it is nothing to compare with that fight for freedom which black and brown and yellow men must and will make unless their oppression and humiliation and insult at the hands of the White World cease. The Dark World is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment later.” (507, his italics)

Joe R. Feagin
Graduate Research Professor
University of Florida