When W.E.B. DuBois declared that the color line was the problem of the twentieth century, just as that century was beginning, it was hardly a conventional sentiment outside black communities. He was prophetic—more than he might have hoped, because the twentieth century has come and gone and the color line has not. We are now in one of our country’s intense, recurring moments when people who aren’t black realize that they have been in a kind of slumber about how immensely and persistently the color line imposes itself on every aspect of Americans’ lived experience.
 
In the three years we have been operating Columbia World Projects, we have launched many initiatives aimed at finding ways to address problems in the world by applying university research. In every case, without exception, racial disparities have been glaringly evident. Look at maternal health, and you see the racial divide. Look at access to energy and you see it. Look at disaster preparedness and you see it. Look at voting. Look at what isn’t working in higher education. The next important challenge we will focus on is the current pandemic—and of course it’s there, too. Racial inequity has also been an ever-present theme in the work we do with the Obama Foundation to teach every year’s cohort of Obama Foundation Scholars, who come from other countries, about American life.
 
The work of Columbia World Projects is not abstract. We devise projects and intellectual inquiries that we staff, fund and operate with partners in New York City, across the United States and around the world. Our aim is to improve people’s lives in concrete, lasting ways. In the coming months we are planning more activities, with the same overall purpose, that will continue to address racial issues. These include including a Forum on the theme of justice; a series of discussions of the consequences of living in segregated neighborhoods; and a conference in cooperation with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture that will consider the present-day relevance of St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s classic work of urban ethnography, Black Metropolis.
 
We approach this work with determination and humility. Everything we do is designed to direct the intellectual resources of the University outward, with a focus on addressing large challenges in specific, tangible ways. It isn’t our job simply to condemn racism; our job is to try to design and implement interventions that would change institutional systems to help make things better. The immensity of America’s racial problems means that anything we try to do about it is going to be difficult and incremental, but we welcome the discipline that comes from having to produce results. As John Dewey wrote, not so many years after DuBois: “Wholesale creeds and all-inclusive ideals are impotent in the face of actual situations; for doing always means the doing of something in particular.” That is what we are called to do.

Nicholas Lemann
Director
Columbia World Projects