Life & Wisdom Quote by W. E. B. Du Bois

A century aspires to be remembered for its machines, its modern art, its world wars. Du Bois insists it will be remembered for something older and uglier: a line drawn through human value. “The problem of the twentieth century” is a brilliantly audacious claim because it refuses the era’s preferred self-myth of progress. The phrasing doesn’t argue; it indicts. It turns racism from a “regional issue” or a moral failing into an organizing principle of modern life, as structural as borders or capital.

The genius is in “color line,” a metaphor that sounds almost administrative, like a zoning rule. That’s the subtext: white supremacy isn’t just hatred, it’s governance. A line can be surveyed, enforced, inherited. It cuts across housing, labor, schools, policing, empire. It also travels: Du Bois is not speaking only about the American South but about a global order in which colonial extraction abroad and segregation at home share the same logic. The line is a technology for sorting people into who is protected by modernity and who is exploited to pay for it.

Context sharpens the edge. Du Bois publishes this in 1903, when Reconstruction’s promises have been buried under Jim Crow, lynching is routine, and “scientific” racism is fashionable in elite circles. By calling it the century’s central problem at the century’s start, he’s issuing a dare to history: if the United States and Europe want to call themselves civilized, they’ll have to explain why their future depends on keeping millions on the other side of a line.