At the dawn of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois announced in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” For Du Bois, the “color line” was not confined to the United States. It stretched across Africa under colonial rule, into Asia under European domination, and throughout the Americas under slavery and segregation. It was, in his view, the defining moral and political fault line of modern civilization.

Yet Du Bois did not stop at diagnosing the existence of the color line. By the 1930s, in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), he probed more deeply into why this system endured. He posed a pressing question: why did poor whites, who often had little economic advantage, fail to join forces with enslaved or later freed Black laborers to challenge the power of elites? His answer was the concept of the “wages of whiteness.” Even when denied material prosperity, poor whites were compensated with a different kind of reward: a “public and psychological wage.” They were granted the social status of being “white,” access to public spaces and institutions denied to Black people, the right to vote and exercise civic power, and above all, the sense of superiority over a subordinated group. These wages cost the ruling elite little, yet they secured the loyalty of white laborers and prevented the formation of interracial solidarity.

Together, these two concepts form a coherent analysis of racial power. The color line describes the boundary that divides humanity into dominant and dominated groups. The wages of whiteness explain why that boundary persists, even against the economic interests of many who live just above it. For Du Bois, race was not merely a matter of prejudice or individual attitudes. It was a system of structured inequality, held in place by both tangible privileges and psychological rewards, designed to sustain white supremacy.

Du Bois’s insight remains profoundly relevant. The color line continues to shape American politics, from immigration regimes, attacks on DEI and Black history, to persistent economic disparities. The wages of whiteness still operate in the subtle and not-so-subtle privileges that attach to whiteness, sustaining divisions that prevent broader coalitions for justice. Together, these concepts illuminate not only how racial inequality has endured but also what must be dismantled to achieve genuine democracy: the belief that whiteness itself is a form of property and power worth defending.