Kwame Anthony Appiah's Lines of Descent is the compilation of the 2010 Harvard University Du Bois Lectures. The volume focusses on Du Bois's cosmopolitanism, the intellectual roots of his thinking, and his struggle with issues of identity, particularly the question of what the Negro is and the construction of a race concept. Early on, Appiah reminds us of the potential pitfalls of claiming straight- or single-line intellectual genealogies. Consequently, his discussion comes from several directions at once.

Readers will find that most of Appiah's conclusions about Du Bois's thinking are very familiar, even when he (Appiah) traces them through studies with which one might be less (or un-)familiar. The first two chapters, “The Awakening” and “Culture and Cosmopolitanism,” which explore Du Bois's experience in Germany and the influence of his Berlin and Harvard professors and others, raise no significant questions. Subsequent chapters, on the other hand, very likely will.

The third chapter, “The Concept of the Negro,” moves deeply into the discussion of what the Negro is. The title fuses the two original issues (defining the Negro and constructing a concept of race) into one. The reason for this shift is suggested in the fourth chapter, in which Appiah explores Du Bois's study of, travels to, and writings about Africa, as a consequence of which he realized that race “was merely an ‘American concept’” (142). But in the third chapter, Appiah's discussion of the likely influence of Hermann Lotze's Microcosmus and Wilhelm Dilthey's various human studies on Du Bois's blending of ideas about nation into his discussions of race and in moving toward the presence of “subtle forces” in making race is convincing (108).

Appiah concludes this weighty (third-chapter) discussion of race, identity, and nation in a way that reduces Du Bois's thinking to what was probably little more than a quip. In response to a question hypothetically asked by Du Bois (“how can you call it ‘black’ when you admit it is not [biologically] ‘black’?”) Du Bois (hypothetically) responds, “the black man is a person who has to ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia” (113, 114, 138, 140, 145). It seems an inadequate answer given that Du Bois knew many black people (e.g. Walter White) who never had to (but chose/agreed to) ride Jim Crow. Even more important is Du Bois's complete description of his own ride in the Jim Crow car during which Shakespeare, Balzac, Dumas, Aristotle, and Aurelius accompanied him. Thus the segregation of the car can only answer the original question “what is a Negro?” if one looks only from the outside (at laws). Equally important, and to return to the fourth chapter, for “race” (as opposed to “the Negro”) to be “merely an ‘American’ concept,” we (and Du Bois himself) would have to ignore all of his (own) conclusions about the global color line.

As Appiah notes, knowing that race could not be defined by blood (science/genetics), Du Bois focussed on social/cultural constructs. Appiah concludes that Du Bois found that problematic, too, because social identity was defined by victimization. For Appiah, Du Bois never succeeded in constructing a theory of race because “[i]dentity theory is an account from outside, an explanation without true understanding” (162). This seems, and only partially, to reflect identity politics more than identity theory. Appiah concludes that Du Bois not only failed to construct a theory of race but was ultimately “undone” by the effort (161).

Appiah has provided a rich narrative about the actual and potential “lines of descent” that contributed to Du Bois's thinking, but the text suggests other questions. Booker T. Washington's public pronouncements should be balanced by the fact that Tuskegee's whole academic (as opposed to vocational) faculty was, very early in its history, college-trained (from “elite” schools), and all black, a claim no other black college or university at the time could make. And Tuskegee offered classes in black history before any other black (or white) school did. Washington's social/cultural (race) identity was more like Du Bois's than Appiah recognizes. Appiah seems to misunderstand the nineteenth-century meaning of “Representative Man” in his characterization of Du Bois. But perhaps more important than any of the foregoing, historians will search in vain for a “line of descent” from nineteenth-century black thinkers (e.g. Edward Blyden, Robert Benjamin Lewis, J. W. C. Pennington, Ann Plato, Mariah Stewart, George Washington Williams, William Wells Brown, Alexander Crummell, Edward W. Blyden), who, having themselves read Gibbon, Volney, Bancroft, and classical and ancient texts, began writing about the rise and fall of civilizations and about an African past of which “Negroes” need not be ashamed more than a generation before Franz Boas, whose influence on Du Bois Appiah recognizes. But even here, as Appiah indicates, we must all be cautious in our connecting “lines of descent” in the history of ideas.