has nothing changed since du bois?

01 Mar 2018

so i’m reading the souls of black folk for the first time. i know, that probably sounds ridiculous that i’m just now getting to it in my 28th year of life. believe you me, it feels ridiculous. there are just so many places and ways that it gets referenced and i just needed to get it from the source finally. i want to tackle his black reconstruction book next, but it’s a doozy and i have a bunch of other things i need to read to…

ANYWAY

as i’m reading it, i’m finding myself in repeated shock at actually how little seems to have changed at the societal level. like… i knew that though there has been change, a lot is the same (or worse). but reading him research about the american south in the days and years right after emancipation sounds SO similiar to right now.

the primary issues that i see linked across all these years are racism, segregation, lack of funding for public schools, extreme economic inequality, the police and courts as white supremacist structures, degradation of farmland, and a society built on debt.

i’m about 4/5 through and i just can’t really stomach these realities.

but what it makes me think is that all the work done to fix the symptoms of the “white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy” is not where i want to focus the majority of my energy. though i 110% see the value in alleviating suffering, it seems like centuries of that attention hasn’t shifted the root causes and therefore has resulted in not that much system change.

i’ll probably share more specifics from his writing later as i’m writing up all the quotes.

ps - i guess i could also be overreading what du bois is saying and i’m aware of that possibility, too. this could be that fallacy where people thought we were gonna run out of food, but then we had technological breakthroughs.

pps - thanks, ceasar, for letting me borrow your copy.

words / writing / post-processing
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