  According to Bernasconi, recent philosophical discussions of Du Bois’s explanation and definition of race “have tended to distort its meaning by imposing an alien question on it” (2009, 519). Rather than read “The Conservation of Races” in light of contemporary arguments about racial eliminativism (about whether, in Appiah’s words, race should be repudiated as a term of difference) and the proper referent of the concept of race, Bernasconi places Du Bois’s essay in its immediate political and historical setting. Specifically, he emphasizes Du Bois’s engagements with the thought of Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummell and Frederick Douglass and argues that the intended point of the essay was “to give hope to blacks at a time when scientists were questioning their future on the basis of suspicions about the impact of race mixing on their capacity to survive the struggle for existence” (2009,  536).[16]  With Bernasconi’s intervention, debate about Du Bois’s 1897 essay has turned to the metaphilosophical question of the relative value of anachronistic (presentist) and antiquarian (historicist) approaches to the study of the history of African American philosophy (see, e.g., Taylor, 2013 and Gooding-Williams, 2017).