In 1910, in an article published in a New York journal, the Independent, called ‘The Souls of White Folk’, W. E. B. DuBois, the distinguished black American historian and activist, wrote about his perception of a sudden change of consciousness sweeping the world: ‘the world, in a sudden emotional conversion, has discovered that it is white, and, by that token, wonderful’. Suddenly, white folks had become ‘painfully conscious of their whiteness’, ‘the paleness of their bodily skins … fraught with tremendous and eternal significance’.

At the meeting of the Pan-African Congress, in London, in 1900, DuBois had memorably declared that the problem of the twentieth century was the ‘problem of the color line’, an observation that he elaborated in the path-breaking collection of essays called The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. In the best-known essay, first printed in Atlantic Monthly as ‘Strivings of the Negro People’, DuBois famously defined the condition of the African-American in terms of ‘his two-ness – an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings’. White America, he insisted, had a black history of injustice, struggle and unmet longing: ‘The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.’