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4.27 AVERAGE
4.27 AVERAGE
[read as part of #10books10decades]
I didn't exactly DNF this but I did skim more than I would like. Obviously, Du Bois is one of the most important writers of the 20th century and the impact of his work is unparalleled. What was challenging for me was the way he talked about poor Black people. Describing them as "dull-eyed," "lazy," "bland," etc. without a clear analysis into his own biases (who prides education over everything) and/or why they may be perceived this way (for example, if I was getting pennies for essentially share-cropping I too would be pretty lazy because that sounds terrible!). This tone is in direct alignment with Du Bois ideas regarding the Talent Tenth, in which he posits that Black liberation should be left up to the most intelligent amongst Black folk and everyone else should fall in line. Of course that brings up a whole host of questions such as: who's deciding the definition of "Talent"? Is book learning the only way to be smart? And why are we honoring certain areas of expertise over others? Also, how do Black women fit into all of this...because I have a hunch....there may be some gatekeeping at the door of that particular party.
If nothing else, this is very thought-provoking work.
PS his shade towards Booker T. Washington is iconic and a master class in scholarly fisticuffs.
I didn't exactly DNF this but I did skim more than I would like. Obviously, Du Bois is one of the most important writers of the 20th century and the impact of his work is unparalleled. What was challenging for me was the way he talked about poor Black people. Describing them as "dull-eyed," "lazy," "bland," etc. without a clear analysis into his own biases (who prides education over everything) and/or why they may be perceived this way (for example, if I was getting pennies for essentially share-cropping I too would be pretty lazy because that sounds terrible!). This tone is in direct alignment with Du Bois ideas regarding the Talent Tenth, in which he posits that Black liberation should be left up to the most intelligent amongst Black folk and everyone else should fall in line. Of course that brings up a whole host of questions such as: who's deciding the definition of "Talent"? Is book learning the only way to be smart? And why are we honoring certain areas of expertise over others? Also, how do Black women fit into all of this...because I have a hunch....there may be some gatekeeping at the door of that particular party.
If nothing else, this is very thought-provoking work.
PS his shade towards Booker T. Washington is iconic and a master class in scholarly fisticuffs.
I wanted to like this book more, but I didn't understand half of the things going on. So three stars are all it gets.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
The fact that much of what is said here still holds so true today is heartbreaking
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Genocide, Hate crime, Racial slurs, Racism, Slavery, Violence
Moderate: Hate crime, Rape, Religious bigotry, Murder
Minor: Forced institutionalization, Colonisation, Classism
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
I'd been wanting to get into W.E.B. Du Bois' works for some time, and when I saw this beautiful "Penguin Vitae" edition of The Souls of Black Folk: With the Talented Tenth and the Souls of White Folk, I knew I just had to have it.
Onto the contents of the book, there's a very nice introduction written by Ibram X. Kendi (author of How to Be an Antiracist, among many other greats), followed by some suggestions for further reading. After this, we finally begin The Souls of Black Folk.
Throughout the book, Du Bois swings back and forth between an almost poetic prose and a more traditional textbook style. Some may find this to be disjointed and/or annoying, but I personally enjoyed it. Books from this era and before tend to lose me off and on, especially denser works, however, I found myself laser-focused on Du Bois' observations and findings.
Comparing all these pages, written over a century ago, to the world as it exists today, we as a society really haven't progressed much.
W.E.B. Du Bois was an incredibly brilliant man, and while he wasn't without his own blind-spots and shortcomings, I would say that The Souls of Black Folk: With the Talented Tenth and the Souls of White Folk is a timeless, invaluable work of sociology, as well as an essential piece of African-American writing.
I hope more and more people read the works of Du Bois and other great Black minds.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Rape, Slavery
Moderate: Racial slurs, Colonisation
Minor: Violence, Antisemitism, Classism
challenging
hopeful
slow-paced
Political, historical, and spiritual.
Did not finish, but would like to. It was just due back at the library.
After reading two separate books that referenced this one, I figured it was high time I got it straight from the source.
This book was passionate, pleading, and rather pitiful. It forces contemplation.
But with all that, I found myself distracted and kept putting it down to pursue other books.
After reading two separate books that referenced this one, I figured it was high time I got it straight from the source.
This book was passionate, pleading, and rather pitiful. It forces contemplation.
But with all that, I found myself distracted and kept putting it down to pursue other books.
There were two profound lessons I took from this collection of essays.
1. 1903 looks a lot like 2017 for race relations and black freedoms. While this is crushingly depressing, it is also critically important to know. White people have to do better, and that leads me to the other lesson learned.
2. Most white people know very little about black history - by design. This is how systemic racism works. The system is literally keeping us from doing better by manipulating what we learn. If you don't believe me, read these essays and mark every person and historical event new to you. I have an embarrassing number, and I plan to fix it by reading more. All it takes is wanting to make those changes and bringing them into the light.
1. 1903 looks a lot like 2017 for race relations and black freedoms. While this is crushingly depressing, it is also critically important to know. White people have to do better, and that leads me to the other lesson learned.
2. Most white people know very little about black history - by design. This is how systemic racism works. The system is literally keeping us from doing better by manipulating what we learn. If you don't believe me, read these essays and mark every person and historical event new to you. I have an embarrassing number, and I plan to fix it by reading more. All it takes is wanting to make those changes and bringing them into the light.
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
"Sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins."
"It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details, in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorant it may be and poverty stricken. Black and curious in limbs, in ways, in thoughts. And yet it loves, it hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life."
"Throughout the category of means for intellectual communication: schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment and the life; it is usually true the very representatives of the two races, who, for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land out to be in complete understanding and sympathy are so far strangers that one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks educated negros dangerous and insolent...Such a situation is so difficult to correct. The white man as well as the negro is bound and barred by the color line...because some busy body has forced the color question to the front, and brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators."
"In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly in his eyes and feel his heart beating red blood. In a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches. One can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races. Who's separation extends even to parks and street cars. Here then can be none of the social going down to the people, the opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst, in general acknowledgement of a common humanity and a common destiny."
"We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for the harvest of disaster to our children, black and white."
"By refusing to give this talented tenth the key to knowledge, can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water? No. The dangerously clear logic of the negros position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate social organizations preclude the south from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk."
"Behind the thought lies the after thought 'Suppose, after all, the world is right and we are less than men. Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong. Some mock moorage from the untrue.' So here we sink among thoughts of unity, even conquest and slavery, the inferiority of black man even if enforced by fraud, a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who even themselves are not even sure of their right to demand. This is the tangle of thought and after thought for which we are called to solve the training of men for life....Only that same earned selfishness from which education teaches can find the rights of all in the world of work."
"The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land."
From Bill about the history of the book "The Souls of Black Folk was published in 1903, and just as the two directions of black leadership in the tumultuous 60's and '70's were symbolized by Martin and Malcolm, the two directions at the turn of the last century—a period punctuated by lynchings and race riots—were embodied in Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Washington, born a slave in the South, urged blacks, at least for the present, to accept Jim Crow and disenfranchisement in return for safety and peace, while they concentrated on attending trade schools and developing--and demonstrating to white society--their integrity and character. (White society praised Washington; Theodore Roosevelt invited him to dinner at the White House.) W.E.B. Du Bois, born free in the North, insisted on the vote and full civil rights, and encouraged the development of black intellectuals, the “talented tenth," urging them to complete not only four years of college, but post-graduate degrees as well. (Du Bois was the first black person to earn a doctorate from Harvard).
In this collection of fourteen essays, his first great influential work, Du Bois begins by anatomizing racism and analyzing its consequences, most notably how racism—particularly “the color line”—places every black person beneath the “veil,” creating a special way of seeing—painful, but also illuminating—which comes from being set apart. In “The Dawn of Freedom,” he offers a perceptive view of reconstruction, and in “Of Booker T. Washington and Others” he coldly, devastatingly, holds up Washington's ideas for critical examination. Throughout the first quarter of the work, he excels in conveying sociological insights in a magisterial--almost biblical—fashion."
"It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details, in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorant it may be and poverty stricken. Black and curious in limbs, in ways, in thoughts. And yet it loves, it hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life."
"Throughout the category of means for intellectual communication: schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment and the life; it is usually true the very representatives of the two races, who, for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land out to be in complete understanding and sympathy are so far strangers that one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks educated negros dangerous and insolent...Such a situation is so difficult to correct. The white man as well as the negro is bound and barred by the color line...because some busy body has forced the color question to the front, and brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators."
"In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly in his eyes and feel his heart beating red blood. In a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches. One can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races. Who's separation extends even to parks and street cars. Here then can be none of the social going down to the people, the opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst, in general acknowledgement of a common humanity and a common destiny."
"We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for the harvest of disaster to our children, black and white."
"By refusing to give this talented tenth the key to knowledge, can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water? No. The dangerously clear logic of the negros position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate social organizations preclude the south from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk."
"Behind the thought lies the after thought 'Suppose, after all, the world is right and we are less than men. Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong. Some mock moorage from the untrue.' So here we sink among thoughts of unity, even conquest and slavery, the inferiority of black man even if enforced by fraud, a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who even themselves are not even sure of their right to demand. This is the tangle of thought and after thought for which we are called to solve the training of men for life....Only that same earned selfishness from which education teaches can find the rights of all in the world of work."
"The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land."
From Bill about the history of the book "The Souls of Black Folk was published in 1903, and just as the two directions of black leadership in the tumultuous 60's and '70's were symbolized by Martin and Malcolm, the two directions at the turn of the last century—a period punctuated by lynchings and race riots—were embodied in Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Washington, born a slave in the South, urged blacks, at least for the present, to accept Jim Crow and disenfranchisement in return for safety and peace, while they concentrated on attending trade schools and developing--and demonstrating to white society--their integrity and character. (White society praised Washington; Theodore Roosevelt invited him to dinner at the White House.) W.E.B. Du Bois, born free in the North, insisted on the vote and full civil rights, and encouraged the development of black intellectuals, the “talented tenth," urging them to complete not only four years of college, but post-graduate degrees as well. (Du Bois was the first black person to earn a doctorate from Harvard).
In this collection of fourteen essays, his first great influential work, Du Bois begins by anatomizing racism and analyzing its consequences, most notably how racism—particularly “the color line”—places every black person beneath the “veil,” creating a special way of seeing—painful, but also illuminating—which comes from being set apart. In “The Dawn of Freedom,” he offers a perceptive view of reconstruction, and in “Of Booker T. Washington and Others” he coldly, devastatingly, holds up Washington's ideas for critical examination. Throughout the first quarter of the work, he excels in conveying sociological insights in a magisterial--almost biblical—fashion."
This is a work that giving stars to feels silly. A classic in the true sense of the word. I'm shocked I'd never read it before now.
The familiarity of the one or two essays I had read and even taught before really heightened the how unfamiliar the other essays felt. DuBois feels like a figure who is study and discussed and analyzed more than he is actually read. This has certainly whetted my appetite for reading more, especially in light of how long and varied his career was. This feels early, formative. Required reading.
The familiarity of the one or two essays I had read and even taught before really heightened the how unfamiliar the other essays felt. DuBois feels like a figure who is study and discussed and analyzed more than he is actually read. This has certainly whetted my appetite for reading more, especially in light of how long and varied his career was. This feels early, formative. Required reading.