The Ground
Feature I
W.E.B. Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois appears at the beginning of this project because he named the structure before most were willing to admit it existed.
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This feature does not treat Du Bois as a historical figure to be admired at a distance. He is placed here because the conditions he identified remain active. The vocabulary has shifted. The language has softened. The structure has not.
Du Bois understood that Black life in America could not be explained through morality alone. Nor could it be understood as a series of individual failures or successes. He insisted on analysis. On systems. On power that operated regardless of intention.
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What Du Bois gave us was not inspiration. It was a framework.
He described race as a social and political construction, enforced through law, labor, education, and cultural narrative. He rejected the idea that inequality could be resolved through accommodation or gradualism. Instead, he exposed how institutions reproduced themselves by appearing neutral while functioning unequally.
This insistence on structure is why Du Bois anchors Groundings. His work makes it impossible to treat the present as accidental.
Du Bois also named a psychological condition that remains uncannily familiar: double consciousness. He described the experience of being forced to see oneself through the eyes of a society structured to deny one’s humanity. This was not a metaphor. It was a diagnosis.
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That condition has not disappeared. It has been repackaged.
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Today, Black visibility is often celebrated while Black autonomy remains constrained. Representation expands. Surveillance intensifies. Opportunity is framed as inclusion rather than redistribution. Du Bois’s work allows us to recognize this pattern not as contradiction, but as continuity.​​​
He warned against confusing recognition with justice.
To place Du Bois at the beginning of this project is to insist that Black history be read as infrastructure. As something built, maintained, defended, and enforced. Not as a moral story with a redemptive arc, but as a material reality with consequences.
Groundings begins here because Du Bois makes the present intelligible