Embryonic intersectionality: W.E.B. Du Bois and the inauguration of intersectional sociology

Abstract

As a brief exercise in the critical sociology of sociology, this article demonstrates W.E.B. Du Bois’s undeniable contributions to the history, discourse, and development of American sociology in particular, and the wider world of sociology in general. This dialectical approach to Du Bois’s sociological discourse will enable objective interpreters of his work to see that when compared and contrasted with the monumental work of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, what was and what remains really and truly distinctive about Du Bois’s sociology is precisely his unpretentious preoccupation with uniquely and unequivocally American social, political, and cultural issues, such as, for example: race and anti-Black racism in the context of slavery, lynching, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression in the United States; racial capitalism and the racial colonization of social classes in the United States; and the racial colonization of gender and sexuality in the United States.