The Limitations of the Black-White Color Line

• In Event: 218 - Regular Session. Race/Ethnicity: Challenging Concepts and Categories

Abstract

In contemporary scholarship on race, ethnicity, immigration, stratification, and changing U.S. demographics, scholars presuppose either that: (1) the growing prevalence of non-Black non-white people is rendering the Black-white color line meaningless or that (2) non-Black non-white people are necessarily located somewhere on the Black-white color line. In this article, I argue that the ensuing debate relies on a false dichotomy in which both sides assume that Black and white were once accurate ways of understanding race in the United States. Drawing on Du Bois’s formulation of the color line, I argue for a conceptualization of U.S race relations that acknowledges multiple lines of racial conflict, including colonialism and Empire. To do so, I systematically review articles referring to the color line to determine how the concept has changed over time and how it has been used in recent scholarship. I distinguish two approaches – one that is domestic and Black-white and one which is global and emphasizes geopolitical structures. I conclude by pointing to the limitations of the domestic, Black-white approach, namely that it relies on false dichotomies, is ahistorical, and reifies the Black-white color line as creating racial inequality. Instead, I offer a revision of the concept that emphasizes lines and categories as dependent variables, not explanations of inequality, and that challenges the 1965 periodization of a change to the U.S. racial order.

Author

• Katrina Quisumbing King, University of Wisconsin, Madison