Black Women’s Unthought Position: A Black Feminist Examination of Du Bois’s Writings on Black Women’s Oppression at the Intersections of Gender and Race

Abstract

The recent revival of Du Boisian sociological scholarship has resituated W.E.B. Du Bois as a foundational innovator of empirically grounded sociology who theoretically and methodologically shaped the development of multiple subfields. At the same time, this emerging body of work leaves unclear how Du Boisian sociology should be understood in relation to theorizing on the intersections of race and gender. Following Black feminist and critical approaches to antiblackness, gender, and the afterlife of slavery, I analyze the insights and limitations of Du Bois’s writings at the intersections of race and gender by examining Du Bois’s theorizations on women’s suffrage and Black people’s rebellion against slavery. While Du Bois begins to identify Black women’s intersecting oppressions, he is limited in how he theorizes on womanhood, obscuring how antiblackness operates through this gendered and racialized category for Black women. Additionally, in his writings on Black emancipation, Du Bois undertheorizes how Black women’s political agency was central to dismantling the plantocracy. Considering these insights and limitations, I demonstrate how critical Black feminist approaches to antiblackness and gender can advance the emancipatory aims of Du Boisian sociological scholarship on racialized modernity.