W.E.B. Du Bois and the Unveiling of Whiteness

Background and Purpose: The great intellectual and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois used the term “veil” to describe the experience of being a Black American and the special vantage point that provided for understanding whiteness and white supremacy. In this paper, we use this concept of “veil” and “unveiling” to offer a Du Boisian perspective for social work research as the profession makes greater investments in grand challenge #13: eliminating racism.

Methods: We analyze Du Bois’ use of the term “veil” in four of his texts—The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folks (1903), Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920), and The Gift of Black Folk (1924). We then apply the concepts of “veil” and “unveiling” to the response to the recent (and on-going) pandemics of COVID-19 and police violence against Black Americans.

Results: We identify three distinct aspects of unveiling. The first—more obvious and less threatening—highlights the disparate and unfair conditions under which Black Americans live, their experiences of racial discrimination in employment, education, housing and health. This form of unveiling, featured throughout The Philadelphia Negro and Du Bois’ subsequent empirical investigations of Blacks living in the South, focuses on bearing witness, expressing outrage, and directing resources toward those in need. According to Du Bois, this kind of unveiling generally elicits a response of pity, charity, and sympathy and ultimately reinforces ideas of Black depravity and white supremacy. White people can feel they are helping if they are contributing money, donating food, tutoring poor children, or posting on social media about being outraged and saddened by the suffering of Black people. This type of unveiling generally reinforces the status quo, current power structures and economic arrangements. A second—more radical—form of unveiling involves revealing whiteness, whiteness as property, and white supremacy as the root cause of racial inequity. This means forcing white people to see their whiteness and how racism is institutionalized, consistently sanctioned, reinforced, and even initiated by government. A third form reveals the resourcefulness, resilience, and agency of Black Americans. This offers a perspective of Black Americans as capable of surviving hardships and as active participants in their own liberation.

Applying these ideas to COVID-19 responses reveals greater attention to the first form of unveiling—laying bare disparities in infection rates, health care access and utilization, and vaccine distribution. This includes a focus on behavior, lifestyles, and underlying economic, educational, and health conditions of Black Americans and other people of color. We have seen far less of the second form of unveiling, laying bare the role of whiteness and white supremacy in the spread of COVID-19 and state-sanctioned violence, or the third, acknowledging Black -led initiatives.

Conclusion and implications: We use our findings to envision how we can hold social work research and practice accountable to these second and third forms of unveiling, disrupting the status quo, decentering whiteness, and upholding the humanity of Black Americans as a way of honoring all people.