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Record W4413290450 · doi:10.1017/s1479244325100085

Du Bois’s Eugenic Democracy

2025· article· en· W4413290450 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueModern Intellectual History · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicNeurology and Historical Studies
Canadian institutionsMcMaster University
FundersUniversity of Toronto
KeywordsEugenicsDemocracyPolitical scienceLawPolitics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

W. E. B. Du Bois is credited with debunking the social Darwinism pervasive in turn-of-the-century social and political theory, exposing the environmental causes of black disadvantage and undercutting claims regarding “inborn” racial deficits. This, however, misses the constructive role that Darwinism played in his account of racial advancement. This article shows how Darwinism, eugenics, and race science shaped Du Bois’s conceptualizations of race and of racial uplift. Darwinism, I argue, informed his analysis of the harms that slavery and segregation visited on black Americans. It also influenced his defense of democratic equality: setting aside its other virtues, democracy would remove “artificial” constraints on the competitive struggle, enabling the best of white and black races to succeed. It was, then, eugenically advantageous. Against the common view that Du Bois rejected social Darwinism and eugenics, I demonstrate that their relationship was far more ambivalent and that his racial politics appealed to them.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.401
Threshold uncertainty score0.991

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.037
GPT teacher head0.240
Teacher spread0.204 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it