Deconstructing Power: W. E. B. Du Bois at the 1900 World’s Fair

The cynosure of the exhibition Deconstructing Power was a selection of twenty of the sixty-three data portraits produced by W. E. B. Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University for the 1900 World’s Fair, the Exposition Universelle in Paris (Figure 1).¹ The missions of the Paris Exposition were to commemorate the start of the new century and to display examples of the monumental technological and cultural advancements of the “Great Nations,” which suggested that further progress was still to come. The fair’s displays of national pride, however, typically included, directly and indirectly, derogatory racial and ethnic comparisons, with nonwhite and non-Western peoples portrayed as incapable of modern progress and in need of white Western intervention or management. Du Bois’s intention in creating the data portraits was to put forth an alternative narrative of the social and economic achievements of Black Americans—and by association Black folks generally—within the...