Where Did Red Go?: Lewis Henry Morgan's Evolutionary Inheritance and U.S. Racial Imagination

Before W. E. B. Du Bois stated in 1903 that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line" (1968, 23, 41), the hegemonic model of racialization in the United States was comprised of red, white, and black. Du Bois's "color-line," Steven Conn states, reflects the "disappearance" of red from U.S. racial imagination (2004, 1). Although Du Bois conceptualized the "color-line" in global terms, embracing the "relation of the darker to the lighter races" in Asia, Africa, America and "the islands of the sea" (1968, 23), his emphasis on the United States inscribed the black/ white divide as a national binary. This shift occurred in the representational realm of national narrative. The "color-line" model was no more accurate than its red/white/black predecessor, since both are reductive interpretations of complex exclusionary realities. And Native Americans did not disappear, but rather had a marked demographic recovery during the twentieth