Political theory is catching up to Du Bois. More than a century after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1997), political theorists have begun to realize that “the problem of the color-line” (pp. 45, 61) is constitutive of modernity. That it has taken this long for political theorists to recognize what Du Bois saw so clearly more than a century ago reflects the field's all-too-frequent parochialism. At the same time, the field is home to dissenting voices which insist that we cannot understand modern politics without confronting the White supremacist character of the modern West.
