During the decade of the First World War (1910-1920), African American philosopher, W.E.B. Du Bois, argued that white supremacy functioned both domestically and internationally to thwart the democratic political aspirations of the earth’s “darker peoples,” thus intensifying their vulnerability to anti-black mob violence, race-based economic exploitation, and the devastation wrought by the war itself.  During the same decade, Du Bois elaborated an aesthetics—a philosophy of beauty—that conceptualized beauty as a political force capable of supporting the struggle against white supremacy:…