# Black in time: defining blackness through modernity  
One of the most influential texts to successfully challenge the prevailing white view of black inferiority was written by American sociologist, activist, journalist and editor W. E. B. Du Bois. For over 100 years, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) has been and remains a canonical text that has influenced black thinkers not only in the Americas, but also in West and East Africa and Europe. In it, Du Bois famously argues that the 'problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line', thus moving what was considered a marginal problem specific only to a handful of nations onto the global stage. Above all else, Du Bois opines that the oppressive and degraded circumstances under which so-called objective white observers see blacks living in the West and in Africa are not in fact the result of an inferior biology, but of white prejudice and exploitation. In one of the most famous anecdotes from Souls, Du Bois relates how, as a little schoolboy in a majority white school in New England, he was a happy, successful and engaged participant until a white newcomer rejected his friendship, thus introducing him to a world in which a black person's comportment and ability can be overshadowed by the white obsession with skin colour. Through this recollection, Du Bois subverts a belief long held by anti-black racists that blackness is antithetical to progress and the modern world.  
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[^0]:    1 Aimé Césaire offers a cogent critique of these deeply illogical racisms and the devastating consequences they have had on Africa, Asia and Europe in his classic long essay Discourse on Colonialism.