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maryama 's review for:
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois
Reading this in the twenty-first century was both uplifting and frustrating.
Uplifting because a lot of the things Dubois dreamed about happening and advocated for is visible today. There is an increasing amount of black people in higher education and black specialists in all subject areas. Voter suppression is still an issue in America but there has evidently been a great deal of progress since the publication of this book.
Frustrating because its clear that there's still so much more to be done. Dubois highlights how broken the criminal justice system is in a number of the essays. He presents the link between prisons and capital, demonstrating how prison labour was the South's solution to the economic vacuum left by slavery. It was apparent that this strategy was disproportionality affecting the the African American community and leading to numerous people being wrongly imprisoned. However, little has been done to combat this issue, the prison industrial complex is too profitable to be challenged, even when lives are at stake.
Anyway, I would really recommend this book.
Uplifting because a lot of the things Dubois dreamed about happening and advocated for is visible today. There is an increasing amount of black people in higher education and black specialists in all subject areas. Voter suppression is still an issue in America but there has evidently been a great deal of progress since the publication of this book.
Frustrating because its clear that there's still so much more to be done. Dubois highlights how broken the criminal justice system is in a number of the essays. He presents the link between prisons and capital, demonstrating how prison labour was the South's solution to the economic vacuum left by slavery. It was apparent that this strategy was disproportionality affecting the the African American community and leading to numerous people being wrongly imprisoned. However, little has been done to combat this issue, the prison industrial complex is too profitable to be challenged, even when lives are at stake.
Anyway, I would really recommend this book.