DuBois' Colors

DuBois is obsessed with color in his writing. He describes the boiling black Colorado River, the bold black mountains, the grey and green and blue of the ocean. The descriptions that he uses most often are colors and the reason is clear. He spent much of his time focusing on color and the differences between black and white. DuBois paints a beautifully heartbreaking picture of the trials of a black man in everyday life. The fear of being discriminated against in his neighborhood, his job (or attempts to obtain one), the armed forces, even on a train. The experiences that he describes in Darkwater are things that many people wouldn’t even consider thinking about because it’s not anything that many can relate to. The reason he keeps drawing attention to the colors in the narrative is that he needs people to understand their importance. Something as simple as the amount of pigment changing the color of someone’s skin determines so much of his life, particularly in the time described by DuBois. The colors are so important because they are so trivial. Why should it matter if the oceans are black? Does it make them any less imposing or majestic? Absolutely not—they would be equally impressive if they were purple, or green. The green colors seen at the Grand Canyon could either be moss or pine. Neither is less alive or vital than the other, but the only thing he can see is color. He might be mocking the people who follow the Jim Crow laws with a statement like that. The green could either be moss or trees, but he can only see the color, so it doesn’t really matter. He knows it’s green, so from there he doesn’t need to know anything else. That could be a metaphor for the judgment placed upon black people solely due to skin color. He discusses a veil between two groups of people, one that is nearly impenetrable. Once again, the only difference between the two sides of the veil has to do with color. DuBois displays absolute brilliance in the attention that he pays to color in this narrative, because he is drawing attention to the amount of importance placed on color in the world. Using something as superficial as that as a measuring stick seems a ridiculous waste of time and even life, which is something that I believe he realized very early on and tried to pass on to a white generation that was barely listening and a black generation without any power to change it.