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Is The Problem Of The 21st Century, The Problem of The Colour Line?
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It was William Edward Burghardt Dubois, who wrote in 1903 that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the colour line.
Even though the Harvard PhD had Black folks in mind, events of the bloodiest century of the history of mankind — First and Second World Wars, holocaust, the use of nuclear weapons in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the systemic genocide of millions of Bengalis, Congolese, Namibians, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Rwandans, along with the countless repression of independence movements across the global South — vindicated this view.
By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and communism died a natural death, the general consensus by leading academics and policy makers was that humanity had evolved to a position of maturity, which meant that ruinous wars were a thing of the past.
And you could argue that this thinking led to the robust approach taken to end the Kosovan, Sierra Leonian and Rwandan wars at the end of the 1990s.
But that Francis Fukuyama world view is quite incongruous.
No sooner had the new century begun than we started to grapple with new sets of problems, with the war on terror kicking things off in 2003, when America decided to invade Iraq, who had no weapons of…