The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois's "The Conservation of Races"

I argue that, despite all the attention philosophers have given W. E. B. Du Bois's essay "The Conservation of Races," they have missed some of his distinctions between ways of thinking about what race is. Recognizing this leads us to note an ambiguity in the claim that race is a social construction: the ambiguity between a focus on politics or culture. I claim that, although there are problems with Du Bois's cultural account of race, it contains valuable insights about the nature of racism and helps us to confront the question of whether there can and ought to be race after racism.