Du Bois and Washington shared a blindness to capitalist exploitation despite their public feud.

Evidence

At the time he saw the difference between his design and that of Washington as quite significant. In time, he knew better. In his last autobiography, written in the “last decades of his 95 years,” he made it clear that in the intervening years he had come to recognize that the differences between them were insignificant when compared to what they did not comprehend. Their dispute was not over ideology but power: … These two theories of Negro progress were not absolutely contradictory. Neither I nor Booker Washington understood the nature of capitalistic exploitation of labor, and the necessity of a direct attack on the principle of exploitation as the beginning of labor uplift. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 899

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls the classic Du Bois-Washington historiographic debate; connects to the reader’s arc of how Black intellectual leadership misread capitalism as the Black radical tradition’s blind spot.