"The Future of Global Sociology and the Du Boisian Critique of the Latin American Color Line"

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This presentation focuses on W. E. B. Du Bois's and Irene Diggs's theoretical development of a critique of the Latin American color line. Between 1930 and 1953, Du Bois and Diggs studied the color line doing generative work re-framing sociology as a powerful tool for analyzing white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. Their project included discussions with Latin American intellectuals and activists, especially from Cuba. Based on primary sources collected in the United States and Cuba, this presentation addresses two critical aspects of Du Bois’s and Diggs’s analysis of the Latin American Color Line. The first concerns the politics of knowledge underlying the sociology of race in Cuba and the United States and how the analysis of structural racism faced tensions and paradoxes in this trans-American space. The second part shows how W.E.B. Du Bois's and Irene Diggs's global sociology of the Latin American Color Line progressively became critical of Latin American raceless discourses, emphasizing their criticism of US imperialism and connecting the struggle for racial justice in the Americas to national political struggles for economic equality. Finally, this presentation highlights how Du Bois’s and Diggs’s contributions are relevant today to the sociological critique of the global color line.

Jorge Daniel Vásquez is a Changemaker Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC. His research integrates global and transnational sociology, comparative-historical sociology, social theory, and sociology of race and ethnicity. His work has been published in Gender & Society, Du Bois Review, Critical Sociology, Journal of Historical Sociology, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative-Historical Sociology, and the Brazilian journal Sociologias. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and is working on the book manuscript The Sociology of the Global Color Line. W. E. B. Du Bois, Irene Diggs, and the Critique of Race in the Americas.

Location: W. E. B. Du Bois Library, Floor 22, Room 2220, W. E. B. Du Bois Center