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4.27 AVERAGE
4.27 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I rarely expect "important" texts to blow me away - they've been talked about far too much to possibly meet or even exceed my expectations.
This one did.
This one did.
I have often bemoaned the general lack of exposure to the Reconstruction Era in the history classes to which I had access during my formal education. The more I've learned about it, the more important it seems in the pursuit of understanding America's current problems of racial injustice.
In The Souls of Black Folk, WEB Du Bois captures the beautiful struggle of black folks as they try to recover from the American system of chattel slavery. From memory, the topics he covered that I found most interesting were economic justice, crypto-slavery (sharecropping and forced labor of prisoners), educational freedom, and freedom of movement. He is an excellent primary source on each of those, often providing specific stories of each.
The entire book is worth reading, but if you find yourself with only enough time for one chapter, I strongly recommend reading "Of the Coming of John" which I believe you can find for free online.
In The Souls of Black Folk, WEB Du Bois captures the beautiful struggle of black folks as they try to recover from the American system of chattel slavery. From memory, the topics he covered that I found most interesting were economic justice, crypto-slavery (sharecropping and forced labor of prisoners), educational freedom, and freedom of movement. He is an excellent primary source on each of those, often providing specific stories of each.
The entire book is worth reading, but if you find yourself with only enough time for one chapter, I strongly recommend reading "Of the Coming of John" which I believe you can find for free online.
I enjoyed what I was able to follow but I have to admit to having a hard time with this one. I think it was more my failing than the book's. Timing? Platform (audio book)? I'll try again someday.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
What beautiful prose! It's pretty remarkable how prescient this book remains, even today, about 100 years after it was written. While of course there were themes I found missing from this book - topics related to gender and hierarchies of knowledge, for example - I realize that in the time in which Du Bois was writing, the ideas of this book were incredibly radical, and he clearly laid the foundation for many later scholars of Black liberation and racial justice. Highly recommend this book, despite its age, for its thorough examination (historical, economic, sociological - I certainly learned "new" things) of what the post-Emancipation South looked like for Black people and communities, and also for Du Bois' eloquent, moving writing.
emotional
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
This was astonishing in its form, weight, and feeling. Du Bois so sharply surfaces the ongoing structures of slavery that black subjects in America strive within. There is so much here that hurts but that needs to be tended to. The racist police state, the inequalities in education systems, the generational broken bonds of kinship and family and love, the gaps, the wounds.