The colour line and the colour scale in the twentieth century

Abstract

Some more recent evidence supports Du Bois’ prediction that the twentieth century would prove the century of the colour line. It indicates that men have always and everywhere shown a preference for fair complexioned women as sexual partners, whereas males seeking a mate are rarely disadvantaged by a dark complexion. In the employment market in the USA, a dark complexion is a significant disadvantage for both males and females. Though there is no properly comparable evidence from other countries, there appears to be a widespread tendency for any negative valuation of darker skin colour to be incorporated into a scale of socio-economic status. In some situations a colour scale is replacing the colour line.

Du Bois’ reference to differences of colour has been largely superseded in English-speaking countries by references to differences of race. From a policy standpoint, the switch from colour to race has had both positive and negative consequences. From a sociological standpoint, it has made it more difficult to disaggregate the dimensions of social difference and to dispel the confusions engendered by ideas of racial difference.

Keywords:

• African-Americans
• Brazil
• colour line
• colour scale
• Du Bois
• race

Notes

1. For first use of the expression see Banton 2008.

2. Wade starts from the proposition that certain people are oppressed. He uses a concept of racism to account for their oppression. Such an argument cannot be validated by orthodox conceptions of social science.

3. In 1940 Du Bois founded a new journal, Phylon. On the reverse of the cover page he provided an explanation of its title:

Then thou shalt come to the far-off country

Of a Black Race that dwells by the fountains of the sun,

Whence Aethiopia's river.

The word (Phylon) designates a line of descent. It captures the vertical meaning of the word race that was dominant up to the end of the eighteenth century, but not the horizontal meaning which became dominant in the nineteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century the word was often used in newspaper headlines in ways that invoked accusations or suspicions of discrimination. Its meaning changes over time and from one context to another

4. When, in 1951, Du Bois was indicted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, one of the character witnesses standing by to testify on his behalf was his friend Cedric Dover, a Eurasian scholar who in 1950–52 advised the author on his research. Dover's training as an entomologist led him to the assertion that ‘the most fundamental cause of racism…is the use of the loaded word race’ (1959, p. 237). Since he propagated a vision of global coloured unity, Dover's stance has been summarized as ‘Against race, for color’ (Slate 2010, p. 216). This essay may reflect lessons the author learned from him.

5. The election as president in 2008 of Barack Obama, a person of two or more racial origins, may encourage more persons to classify themselves in this way. Figures indicating the number of persons who the 2010 census reported origins in ‘two or more races’ are not yet available, but the official American Community Survey estimated that in 2009 they constituting 4.7 per cent of the total population.

6. In December 1953 the ‘This England’ section of The New Statesman reproduced an advertisement in The Times: ‘Bureau supplies immediately private houses, schools, hotels with trained and untrained staff, male and female, Irish and first-class foreigners’. In the world in which the author grew up, from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, first-class foreigners were Nordics, Germans and white US Americans. He heard it said that ‘Niggers begin at Calais’. The French and East Europeans were second class foreigners. The Italians were definitely one class below. Italian men were believed to fight with knives, whereas English men fought with their fists. An anthropologist from the USA (Landes, 1952, p. 751) observed that ‘in Britain, Negroes are not frankly delineated as one racial stock within the embracing community, but as colonials…[they do not] quite grasp how they are relegated to the far nether end of that great range wherein the Briton strings the places of all the non-Britons of the world’

7. The task of explanation calls for separate discussion. As much of the identification with others that is the foundation for multidimensional relations is of an unconscious nature its analysis calls for the use of experimental research techniques to tap taken-for-granted assumptions (Banton 2011).