The worldwide mobilizations of Black Lives Matter (BLM) during the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically shifted the discourses of anti-Blackness, race, and racialization in the global public sphere. In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, risking infection to protest systemic racism and mourn the Black men and women killed by police and white vigilantism. These mobilizations insisted on a public reckoning with anti-Blackness as a foundational and structural fact of Black life. As demands for racial justice gained momentum in the United States, Confederate monuments enshrining the racist legacies of the Lost Cause were toppled. Other enduring testaments to our racial past began to fall. In Baltimore, Boston, Miami, and St. Paul, demonstrators knocked down, defaced, and beheaded statues of Christopher Columbus while protestors in California removed effigies of the now canonized Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra (Diaz; Wigglesworth and Campa). As the pandemic brought international travel to a standstill, the discourses and strategies of BLM traveled widely, accruing new political meanings in each locale. In a powerful moment of near simultaneity in early June, demonstrators in Bristol tossed a statue of a seventeenth-century slave trader into the harbor while officials in Antwerp quickly removed a statue of King Leopold II after protesters set it ablaze (King). These mass mobilizations against anti-Blackness in the United Kingdom and European Union underscore Stuart Hall's contention that they too remain societies “structured in dominance” (191). Elsewhere, in Brisbane, Adelaide, Sydney, and Melbourne, BLM rallies protested police violence and structural racism against Aboriginal Australians while coordinated marches across Nigeria demanded immediate action to combat femicide, rape, and sexual violence against women (Patrick; Orjinmo). In India, Dalit activists mobilized BLM to protest caste discrimination under Narendra Modi's conservative Hindu government (Nagaraj). In the United States, the grassroots movement that began with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in Trayvon Martin's death and grew during the protests against the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson now “belts the world,” to quote W. E. B. Du Bois (“Color Line” 33).Footnote ¹

As BLM goes global, limning possible new “streams of internationalism” in the Black world and beyond, it raises the question of relation (Kelley 31). BLM takes as its organizing principle the centrality of anti-Blackness in modern society, and it remains, rightly, an unapologetically Black movement. Yet these recent worldwide solidarity movements invite us to think comparatively about Blackness and anti-Blackness in ways that risk what Frank B. Wilderson III calls the “ruse of analogy” (37). As protestors adapted BLM to their histories and geographies, mobilizations began emphasizing anti-Blackness, imperialism, slavery, and settler colonialism, as well as gendered, sexualized, and caste violence, as linked processes of domination. What might we gain by thinking relationally and globally across these various registers without losing the specificity of anti-Blackness in the United States? As Lisa Lowe argues, these differently situated yet inextricably linked world-historic processes, or “intimacies,” that effected the “colonial division of humanity—settler seizure and native removal, slavery and racial dispossession, and racialized expropriations of many kinds—are imbricated processes, not sequential events, not temporally distinct nor as yet concluded” (Intimacies 7). The recent worldwide BLM mobilizations put into vivid relief these deep and transposable configurations of power in the twenty-first century, as global capitalism, neocolonialism, and climate change accelerate mass migration and intensify economic disparities and conflicts throughout the world (De Genova 1767–68). They underline the need to study Blackness and anti-Blackness, race and racialization on a global scale, in translation, and through conjunctural and relational approaches.

The stakes are even greater now for new approaches to critical comparative race studies, for it entails, as Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson contend, “not only articulating commonalities between communities of color but imagining alternative modes of coalition beyond prior models of racial or ethnic solidarity based on a notion of homogeneity or similarity” (1). How might we do this work without reducing lost Black lives or BLM mobilizations into ciphers for our unfulfilled desires—for global solidarity, interracial coalition, and revolution (Harney and Moten 85)? In the fields of languages and literatures, the October 2008 PMLA special issue titled Comparative Racialization helped facilitate this shift in critical conversations about race and racialization and their multiple and contradictory meanings within a global frame.Footnote ² It was the first PMLA issue organized entirely around the question of race and racialization since the 1990s, when other issues focused on related topics such as “Ethnicity” (January 1998), “Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition” (January 1995), and “African and African American Literature” (January 1990).

Intellectual commemoration and a changing political context converged in shaping this assessment of “the state of the study of race in literary studies” (Shih, “Comparative Racialization” 1347). Over two decades had passed since the publication of two landmark studies—“Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Racial Formation in the United States, by Michael Omi and Howard Winant—that reshaped the study of race and contributed to the intellectual formation of a new generation of literary scholars. At the time of the issue's publication, Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white woman from Kansas, raised in Hawai‘i and Indonesia, was poised to make world history by becoming the first Black president of the United States. His embrace of a neoliberal discourse of aspirational color blindness helped advance the idea that a multicultural American electorate had finally transcended race (Smith 1532). As public celebrations of a postracial America began to gather momentum, the contributors to this PMLA issue stressed the continuing salience of race analysis and antiracist politics as they sought to chart a path forward for researching, thinking about, and teaching race and racialization in a world of “racism without race” (Balibar 1631).

The issue provided a counterpoint to color-blind discourse by confronting the need to address race in its comparative and global aspects. The promise of comparative critique lay in its potential to bring “submerged or displaced relationalities into view” and reveal “these relationalities as the starting point for a fuller understanding of racialization as a comparative process” (Shih, “Comparative Racialization” 1350). Comparative approaches to race and racial formation entail not only analyzing instances of racialization in their specific historical periods and geographic locations, but also considering how these processes might be related to one another. As Hall reminds us, “it is only as the different racisms are historically specified—in their difference—that they can be properly understood” (211). Such comparative thinking also demands reflexivity, for Eurocentric comparative methodologies aided the development of hierarchized difference and the so-called racial science later institutionalized in disciplines such as anthropology and sociology (Lowe, “Insufficient Difference” 410; Loomba 501). Keith P. Feldman has even suggested that specific institutional histories and political investments have produced distinct understandings of what the term comparison names in fields such as area studies, comparative literature, and comparative ethnic studies (107–08). Increasingly, comparative race studies have turned to the relational as a critical concept to account for complexly scaled connections across histories, geographies, cultures, and the disciplinary institutionalization of difference (Feldman 110). Scholars like Yen Le Espiritu, Lisa Yoneyama, Lowe, and Shu-mei Shih (who draws from Édouard Glissant's theory of relational poetics) have now shifted to relational comparison, the analytic of relation, and comparative relational approaches (Shih, “Comparison” 79–80; Lowe and Manjapra 24; Espiritu et al. 187).

As a reactionary, conservative backlash crested during Obama's second term and #BlackLivesMatter came into being, studies of race and racialization underwent another shift. Various currents of Afropessimistic thought resisted comparative critique to center anti-Blackness in race studies and Black/non-Black as the primary axis of structural antagonism (Sexton 583–84). Some historians have begun to refer to this era, defined by the explosive rise in Black incarceration, rollbacks in protections of voters’ rights, and an upsurge of the alt-right, as the second Nadir (Connolly 96; Cha-Jua 38). The historian Rayford Logan coined the term Nadir to name the era spanning the halting end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, which saw the escalation of white mob violence against Blacks and what Ida B. Wells called “lynch law.” During this era, racially restrictive immigration and naturalization laws ensured that the continental United States remained a white man's country even as the settler nation extended its westward expansion and Indigenous expropriation overseas, annexing Hawai‘i and Samoa followed by Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines after the Spanish American and Philippine American Wars. The policies and discourses of the Trump administration have helped revitalize and renormalize the once discredited forms of nativism, white nationalism, and exceptionalism foundational to the first Nadir.Footnote ³ Such talk of a second Nadir also adds urgency to recent calls for a “Third Reconstruction” or a radical and transformative “Abolition” (Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove xiii; Gilmore x).Footnote ⁴

What other old terms might we put to new critical use? I turn to Du Bois to answer this question. Du Bois began thinking about the color line from the depths of the first Nadir, and the color line remains foundational to a genealogy of comparative relational thinking about race and racial formations. At the dawn of the so-called American Century, as the United States began its march toward becoming a world superpower, Du Bois began formulating the idea of the color line as a global problematic organized in relation to international histories, competing and overlapping imperialisms, and changing geopolitical configurations of race and racialization. Countering the racial biologism popular at the time, Du Bois's color line remains key to the “histories of diasporic and racial formations and globalizations across a variety of fields” (Raphael-Hernandez and Steen 2).

Du Bois's most enduring formulation of the color line appears in The Souls of Black Folk (Reference Du Bois, Gates, Oliver and Norton1903). This lyrical, genre-defying tour de force has become an American classic, and in the process it inspired a vast interdisciplinary literature on race and racialization. Souls offers three distinct iterations of the color line, and each repetition subtly changes the direction and valence of the color line as it travels through the text (Katznelson 463). In the prefatory section “Forethought,” Du Bois sets out to “show the strange meaning of being black . . . at the dawn of the Twentieth Century” (Souls 5). He figures the color line through the concept-metaphor of the Veil, claiming kinship with Black America, for he is “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil” (6). In “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” a preliminary to the magisterial Black Reconstruction (1935), Du Bois reframes the color line's expression of individual and collective Black racial identification within a global context, defining it as “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (17). The third iteration comes at the end of this chapter recounting the incomplete “legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau” and becomes a call to action as Du Bois instructs readers to “behold a century new for duty and the deed” (33). In this serial unfolding, Du Bois's color line limns what scholars have variously called a heuristic, a concept-metaphor, and an analytic of race that moves along different social and political scales and across place and time, always directed toward the project of racial justice and emancipation.

Over the course of his long intellectual life, Du Bois recalibrated the color line to adapt to changing global events and historical epochs. His most comprehensive and perhaps earliest formulation of the color line can be found in “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind,” an address that he delivered before the American Negro Academy in Washington, DC, on 27 December 1899 (“Present Outlook” 125–26n1). Nahum Dimitri Chandler, who recently reprinted this lesser-known address, sees Du Bois grappling with the “question of global differences” and the “epistemological difficulties involved in conceptualizing a history of colonialism in a way that does not simply reproduce a narrative of the making of the West” (21). A product of the Nadir, Du Bois's color line emerged out of a desire to exceed and transform the social forces curtailing Black life. In considering the possibility of its renewed relevance, I follow Vince Schleitwiler's incisive readings of the differently scaled, serial iterations of racial violence in Du Bois's life that directed the global, comparative orientation of this formulation (37–39, 58–61, 64–65).

Du Bois began the year 1899 finalizing the revisions to his landmark sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro, but news of the brutal lynching of Sam Hose in April “shook him to his core,” forcing him to reconsider the significance of his research (Lewis 226). Du Bois later described this event as decisive in his transformation into a political activist. “One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved,” he recalled in Dusk of Dawn (34). A month later in May, Du Bois experienced another shock when his two-year-old son Burghardt died suddenly of diphtheria in a segregated Atlanta that had no hospitals for Blacks (Lewis 212). Suffused by horror, anger, and anguish, emotions “individually felt but collectively determined,” Du Bois found himself at the precipice of an emergent structure of feeling about race and racialization (Lee 1551). Forty years later, Du Bois wrote of this difficult period: “My thoughts, the thoughts of Washington, Trotter and others, were the expression of social forces more than our own minds” (Dusk 48). As the year drew to a close and the segregated nation entered into another overseas war that would claim nearly a million Filipino lives, Du Bois began formulating his world color line (Espiritu 1701).

In the waning hours of a century roiled by slavery, abolition, and a failed Reconstruction, Du Bois boldly proposed in the address's opening line “to consider with you the problem of the color line not simply as a national and personal question but rather in its larger world aspect in time and space” (“Present Outlook” 111). Lacking the refined terseness of Souls, the color line in “Present Outlook” is far more ambitious and dilated in scope, and as a consequence more generative. As Schleitwiler notes, the address is the only text in which the color line appears as a “thesis to be demonstrated” rather than as a premise or assertion (41). As “Present Outlook” follows Du Bois on a journey along the world color line, it anticipates contemporary methods of critical juxtaposition, bringing unrelated events together to make legible the operations of race and racialization under different historical conditions (Espiritu et al. 187). Du Bois begins “on the continent of Africa in the centre . . . of the world problem of the black man” (“Present Outlook” 112) and traverses Asia (“a congeries of race and color problems” [113]) and South America (“where the dark blood of the Indian and Negro has mingled with that of the Spaniard”) before returning to the “race question in America” (114). As Du Bois delves into the historical contours of the “Negro problem in America and in the world,” he holds the United States accountable for waging war against Filipino sovereignty. “[M]ost significant of all,” Du Bois asserts, “is the fact that the colored population of our land is, through the new imperial policy, about to be doubled by our ownership of Porto Rico, and Havana, our protectorate of Cuba, and conquest of the Philippines” (118). This grappling with empire and settler colonialism sends Du Bois back across the Atlantic on a detailed excursus of the color line in Europe as he moves through four centuries of racial and ethnic strife, rising militarization, and competing imperialisms on the continent. The movement of the address is both lateral and transverse, and the effect vertiginous, as it spirals through differently scaled geographies and temporalities. It gives form to a relational analytic that is conjunctural and attuned to the specificities of historical and geopolitical change.

Du Bois's vision of social transformation along the color line involves a radical rethinking of the imperialist and racialized constitution of global modernity (or “the civilized world”) and “the boundaries of humanity” (119, 121). He sees in the color line's conditions of racial coloniality and anti-Blackness the possibility of their overthrow, anticipating later engagements with and critical departures from Marxism (Johnson 20–24). In this early address, Du Bois still clings to the ideology of Black uplift, yet the politics of strategic alliance and interracial coalition begin to animate his thinking and his call to action: “Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian, all must stand united . . . for an America that knows no color line” (118). Unlike its later iteration in Souls, in which Du Bois links this call to action to the unfinished revolution of Reconstruction, the address makes racial justice explicit as a global project. Six months later, Du Bois returned to this formulation of the color line in his speech at the historic Pan African Conference in London in 1900, and Du Bois's words set the tone for new era of Black internationalism (Edwards 2).

In the face of mass violence against Black life and in the wake of irreparable loss, Du Bois's voice remained prominent in a growing chorus of heterogeneous Black thinkers, writers, artists, and activists who began theorizing the specificity of Blackness in relation to other histories, migrations, and geographies (from the Negritude of Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire to the intersectional Black feminisms of Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and the Combahee River Collective and beyond). The ongoing refortification of borders in the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union and the return of fascist and white supremacist ideologies to mainstream politics demonstrate the terrifying resilience and durability of Du Bois's world color line. As political divisiveness heightens our yearning for affinity and connection, comparative critique becomes all the more important. Our critical approaches must continue to problematize what it means to engage in the work of comparative racialization instead of collapsing difference or minimizing racial ambivalence, antipathy, and even strife (Medak-Saltzman and Tiongson 1). To undertake this work seriously, we cannot elide the figure of the Hmong American police officer who turned away while his white partner kept his knee on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. How might this question of complicity in the perpetuation of anti-Blackness open other lines of inquiry that strain or even exceed our vocabularies of difference and relational analytics?

The recent BLM mobilizations against anti-Black violence in the United States and the rest of the world invite us to think along Du Bois's world color line, to think Blackness in relation and as relation in our work and in our lives. As Fred Moten insists, “blackness has always emerged as nothing other than the richest possible combination of dispersion and permeability in and as the mass improvisation and protection of the very idea of the human” (1746). As the novel coronavirus exposed the vulnerability of all humans, it further exacerbated the complex differential and relational operations of racialization, especially in the United States, where cases of infection and death initially outstripped other countries. Anti-Asian xenophobia and hate crimes rose as politicians took to calling the novel coronavirus the “China virus” even as Indigenous communities and Black and Latinx Americans became disproportionately affected, bearing the brunt of the economic fallout (as essential workers, the unemployed, and the evicted) and dying at much higher rates than whites. Such racial disparities are set to intensify globally as wealthy and poorer nations vie for priority access to Big Pharma vaccines. As protests persist and monuments continue to fall, the worldwide BLM solidarity movements in 2020 remind us that aspirational color blindness cannot remain the horizon of antiracism as we begin to “build back better.”

As Du Bois began formulating the world color line, grappling with the long history and global reach of anti-Blackness, he made a prescient observation about the progress of racial justice: the “movement with all its retrogression is a spiral not a circle, and as long as there is motion there is hope” (“Present Outlook” 115).