The Souls of Black Folk

My first impressions of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois was that this book had potential to be my favorite of the class readings yet.  I think I still would say I enjoyed this more than some of our other books, but for me a big drawback was the language.  I really struggled to get through each chapter mostly because it took me so long to read each word and really understand what was going on, causing me to get distracted easier and not get as into the stories as I wanted to be.  The sentences are very long and have multiple forms of punctuation in them, and coupled with the outdated wording, I was completely lost a good majority of the time.  This is understandable, however, because of the time period at which this was written.  Du Bois, being a well-educated man, was writing in a style that was common for erudite men at the time.  It does come off as very scholarly, in my opinion, which helps add a sense of credibility to the already spot-on assessments addressed in each essay.

The content of this book is what made it closer to the top of my favorite books for this course.  Racism is a topic that is still, unfortunately, a problem in today’s society, making the discussion more interesting because I can relate to it more closely.  The sad truth is that it is more than a hundred years from the time when Du Bois wrote this book, and many of the things he points out as problems are still issues today.  For example, Du Bois talks a lot about the “Color Line”: the imaginary “line” that separates whites and blacks.  Although he is writing just after the Emancipation of slaves and the end of the Civil War, this color line still exists today, although perhaps a little less severely.  African Americans, along with all other citizens regardless of race, have the right to vote and are protected by law to be treated equally.  However, whites and blacks are not totally integrated and a lot of prejudice and stereotypes keep the two groups separate from each other. 

This point is illustrated really well in the recent controversial article, “Being White in Philly” by Robert Huber.  Huber interviews multiple Philadelphia citizens on topics about slavery and ultimately exemplifies how there is a distinct, almost physical color line present today in North Philadelphia.  Certain streets and neighborhoods are notorious for being almost entirely black and have a bad reputation as being somewhere that whites especially should not go wandering.  Whether or not it is actually dangerous to go there is irrelevant compared to the fact that what Du Bois was talking about all those years ago has survived and been carried all through the generations.  We still don’t trust each other.

This is probably exactly why Temple wants us to read The Souls of Black Folks.  As an intercity school in the midst of one of those notoriously black and “dangerous” neighborhoods, this affects us all.  For me, it has really opened up my eyes to how the color line still persists today.  I like to think that racism and segregation are decreasing and we are becoming a single community of American citizens, but now I realize that maybe this isn’t entirely the truth.  And in that case, we need to take a look around us and figure out a way to start to diminish the color line.  Our generation has the power to make a change.