[L]et me sum up…the colonial problem: the depressed peoples and classes of the world form the vast majority of mankind today in the era of the highest civilization the world has known. The majority of human beings do not today have enough to eat and wear or sufficient shelter for decent existence; the majority of the world’s peoples do not understand what the world is, what it has been and what the laws of its growth and development are; and they are unable to read the record of this history. Most human beings suffer and die years before this is necessary and most babies die before they ever really live. And the human mind with all its visions and possibilities is today deliberately distorted and denied freedom of development by people who actually imagine that such freedom would endanger civilization. Most of these disinherited folk are colored, not because there is any essential significance in skin color, but because most people in the world are colored. What now can be done about this, in this day of crisis, when with the end of a horrible and disgraceful war in sight, we contemplate Peace and Democracy? What has Democracy to do with Colonies and what has skin-color to do with Peace?
~W.E.B Du Bois, Color and Democracy
