Much has been written about W.E.B. Du Bois’s understanding of whiteness, but little attention has been given to how the term first entered his intellectual corpus. In this talk, I trace the publication and citational background of “The Souls of White Folk,” the pivotal essay of Du Bois’s 1920 book Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. I argue that between its original publication as “Of the Culture of White Folk” in the Journal of Race Development (1917) and its revised form in Darkwater, the concept of ‘whiteness’ emerged as his historically-situated metaphor for race development—the white supremacist ideology that framed the “darker races” as possessing different capacities for evolutionary progress and thus requiring permanent subordination. Returning whiteness to the context of its emergence in Darkwater, I suggest, is key to understanding the distinctive political answer he offers there, as he moves from diagnosing the hegemonic perils of race development to outlining the socio-cultural and material conditions for its overcoming in the post-war period.