Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. I'm not sure exactly why, but April is always a big month in my mind when it comes to the issue of nonviolence. I think a big part of it has to do with the fact that two of the biggest non violent actors that most people probably think of would be, at least in recent memory, would be Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Junior. And both of those men were killed not close to the same year, but Martin Luther King Junior was killed April 4 and Dietrich Bonhoeffer April ninth, within a few decades of each other. But I guess, to me, April is kind of just a time where, for whatever reason, it really hits home, this issue of non violence.

Derek: 01:24

And I think probably another part is because it's sort of spring and things are coming to life and I think that's what non violence represents a lot of times. It's this promise of kind of the kingdom now or the start of living the kingdom now, and seeing the fruit of that, and kind of just living differently. So whatever reason it is, April always comes to mind when I think of nonviolence. Since I've already focused a bit on Dietrich Bonhoeffer before, I thought that this April, it would be a good time to focus, maybe not so much exactly on Martin Luther King Jr, we talked about him in the last episode and cited one of his works. But since King was big into civil rights and working non violence out there, I thought at least taking the first two episodes in April surrounding King's death, it would be good to focus on some of the black voices.

Derek: 02:24

In this season as a whole, my goal is to bring you voices from the past, hearing them directly, less of me talking, and more of hearing the voices of others. Now today, we're going to talk about W. E. B. Du Bois.

Derek: 02:42

Now I know I I said his name Dubois in earlier episode, so I I do want to correct that a little bit. I've always heard it said Dubois. So in in the heat of the moment, why did I say Dubois in that last episode? Well, tell you a short little story that that kind of tells you how my mind works. So in I I'd worked in Mexico City before, and, you know, when you're down there, you say when you see tortilla chips, you don't say tortilla, you say tortilla, right?

Derek: 03:14

Or if Amarillo, Texas, you know, Amarillo is the color yellow, so but it's Amarillo. So it's very difficult, and then in Romanian, you know, same thing, when you're trying to relay names, you know, do you say Bucharest or do you say Bucharest? Brasov or Brasov? Like, what do you do? And I thought that maybe, like in the heat of the moment, when I was looking at Du Bois' name, I was like, I don't know if that's really how you say it.

Derek: 03:47

Like, is everybody basically saying Du Bois like we say Amarillo and it's not really how you say it? Was it really Du Bois? Because that's that's what it looks like, that's how it seems like you should say it. And so I went with what I thought was the authentic, which is how you authentically say it in French. But I looked it up for this episode since I knew I was gonna be saying his name a lot, and it says that Du Bois actually pronounced his own name Du Bois.

Derek: 04:17

Now whether that was kowtowing to how everybody else said it or whether that was just really how he was raised, whatever, doesn't matter. Everybody says Dubois just like everybody here says Amarillo or Tortilla. So we're gonna go with Dubois because that's just how it's gonna be. And that's how Du Bois thought it should be. So today, we're gonna be talking a bit about W.

Derek: 04:46

E. B. Du Bois. And not really talking much about him, but actually just reading an excerpt chapter from his book on the souls of black folk. Now, I don't know, I don't think Du Bois was a pacifist.

Derek: 05:03

Maybe he was, I don't know. But the reason I highlighted this book, this section of this book, is because I remember when I was listening to it, it what really stood out to me was in the very first chapter, as Du Bois was talking, I heard the things that he was saying and I was like, Oh my goodness, this is basically like, you could say the same thing about our culture today. The critiques that the white culture has on black culture, you know, well, they're just having kids out of wedlock, you know, there's a degradation of the family or, you know, people on welfare, they just should get jobs, you know, poverty is kind of their fault and then crime, which is born out of poverty, you know, that's on them. And when I was listening to The Souls of Black Folk, I was like, man, W. E.

Derek: 06:02

B. Du Bois is is basically hearing the same criticism, like, immediately after slavery, which which was amazing to me that we we basically have just rehashed arguments. If we've been saying the same things about black people for one hundred and fifty, two hundred years, now just because something has been said over an extended period of time doesn't make it wrong. But I think it does highlight a lot of times when you hear rehashed things, like whenever it comes around to genocides and other sorts of things that you have the same trope where you just, you dehumanize people. I think a lot of times when you see recurrences of rehashed arguments or ideas, a lot of times that points out more of a propagandized boogeyman type of thing.

Derek: 06:56

And you see the same thing. One of the reasons I highlighted it here is not only because it surrounds MLK and kind of focusing on that issue, but what it does is it exposes this thing that I think you see a lot when it comes to the issue of non violence or social justice, which is a big part of where I wanna take this podcast in the future as well. When somebody tries to do justice or correct injustice for the past hundred or so years, they were given the label communist. Today, you're called a leftist or a liberal or a communist or a Marxist, and it's just this rehashed argument. That's what civil rights workers were called in the 1960s.

Derek: 07:42

When you see rehashed arguments, it might be because those arguments are valid and true, but it can also mean that it's uncovering a boogeyman. It's uncovering this idea that people, this word that people slap on things to be dismissive. And so in Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, in the excerpt that I'm gonna read, chapter one, it highlights so much, just it illuminated so much for me how a lot of what people say today are rehashed. And Du Bois deals with that. Bois deals with kind of some of these arguments and he paints the stage of why the blacks were so oppressed and had so much difficulty, and that's something that we still haven't really dealt with, and our culture today is dismissive of recognizing the disadvantages that that community has had by and large.

Derek: 08:47

So I'll go ahead and just jump right into Du Bois' Chapter One of The Souls of Black Folk, and since it is on the public domain, there is no copyright information for me to share with you. You can find this at LibriVox or the Gutenberg something, gutenberg.org I think. So go check it out for yourself. It's also on Skritt as one of their free books with your monthly subscription. Chapter one from W.

Derek: 09:23

E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk. Between me and the other world, there is ever an unmasked question, unasked by some through feelings of delicacy, by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter around it.

Derek: 09:42

They approach me in a half hesitant sort of way. I meet curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, how does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town, or I fought at Mechanicsville, or do not these southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer as the occasion may require. To the real question, how does it feel to be a problem?

Derek: 10:12

I answer seldom a word. And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first burst upon one, all in a day as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England where the dark Housatonic winds between Hussac and Taguchak to the sea.

Derek: 10:46

In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards, 10¢ a package, in exchange. The exchange was merry till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card refused it preemptively with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others, or like, may have, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through. I held all beyond it in common contempt and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.

Derek: 11:29

That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at the foot race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years, all this fine contempt began to fade, for the words I longed for and all their dazzling opportunities were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said. Some, all, I would rest from them. Just how I would do it, I could never decide.

Derek: 11:57

By reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head, some way. With other black boys, the strife was not so fiercely sunny. Their youth shrunk into tasteless psychophancy or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white or wasted itself in a bitter cry. Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison house closed round about us all.

Derek: 12:29

Walls straight and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailingly palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Tutan, the Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, this longing to attain self conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

Derek: 13:48

In this merging, he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both, a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face. This then is the end of his striving to be a coworker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

Derek: 14:32

These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia, the shadowy, and of Egypt, the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since emancipation, the Black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet, it is not weakness.

Derek: 15:13

It is the contradiction of double aims, the double aimed struggle of the Black artisan, on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand, to plow the nail and dig for a poverty stricken hoard, could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogue. And by the criticism of the other world toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks, The would be black servant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a dancing and a singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist. For the beauty revealed to him was the sole beauty of a race which his larger audience despised and he could not articulate the message of another people.

Derek: 16:22

This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of 10,000 people, has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves. Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment. Few men ever worshipped freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all vanities, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice. Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty and ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites.

Derek: 17:16

In song and exhortation swelled one refrain, liberty. In his tears and curses, the God he implored had freedom in his right hand. At last it came. Suddenly, fearfully, like a dream, with one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences. Shout, O children, shout, you're free, for God has bought your liberty.

Derek: 17:44

Years have passed away since then, ten, twenty, forty. Forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy specter sits in its accustomed seat at the nation's feast. In vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem. Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves shall never tremble. The nation has not yet found peace from its sins.

Derek: 18:13

The freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people, a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people. The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp. Like a tantalizing will o'-the wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host, The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku Klux Klan, the lies of carpetbaggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice in friends and foes left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea.

Derek: 19:10

The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the fifteenth amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen?

Derek: 19:36

Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of eighteen seventy six came and left, the half free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly, but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power. A powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day.

Derek: 20:11

It was the ideal of book learning, The curiosity born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic leaders of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan, longer than the highway of emancipation and law, steep and rugged but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life. Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly. Only those who have watched the unguided and faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how pietously this people strove to learn. It was weary work.

Derek: 20:59

The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or someone had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vista is disclosed as yet no goal, no resting place, Little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self examination. It changed the child of emancipation to the youth with dawning self consciousness, self realization, self respect. In those somber forests of his striving, his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself darkly and through a veil, and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission.

Derek: 21:52

He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself and not another. For the first time, he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half named Negro problem. He felt his poverty without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance, not simply of letters but of life, of business, of the humanities, The accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet.

Derek: 22:40

Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home. A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. But alas, while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice and learnedly explain it as the natural defense of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the higher against the lower races, to which the Negro cries, Amen!

Derek: 23:38

And swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress. He humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before the nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this, he stands helpless, dismayed, and well nigh speechless. Before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignorance of the better and the boisterous, welcoming of the worse, the all pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil. Before this, there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation, save that black host to whom discouragement is an unwritten word.

Derek: 24:31

But the facing of so vast prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self questioning, self disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents come home upon the four winds. Lo, we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts. We cannot write, our voting is vain. What need of education since we must always cook and serve?

Derek: 25:00

And the nation echoed and enforced the self criticism saying, be content to be servants and nothing more. What need of higher culture for half men? Away with a black man's ballot by force or fraud, and behold, the suicide of a race. Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good. The more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negro's social responsibilities and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.

Derek: 25:31

So dawned the time of Sturm and Drang. Storm and stress today rocks our little boats on the mad waters of the world sea. There is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul. Inspiration strives with doubt and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past, physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands, all these in turn have waxed and waned until even the last grows dim and overcast.

Derek: 26:02

Are they all wrong? All false? No, not that. But each alone was oversimple and incomplete. The dreams of credulous race childhood or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power.

Derek: 26:19

To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need today more than ever, The training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all, the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom too, the long sought we still seek, the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty, all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each and all striving toward the vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood gained through the unifying ideal of race, the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to, or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic in order that someday on American soil, two world races may give each to each the characteristics both so sadly lack.

Derek: 27:33

We, the darker ones, come even now, not altogether empty handed. There are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes. There's no truer American music but the wild, sweet melodies of the Negro slave. The American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African. And all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

Derek: 28:03

Will America be poor if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light hearted but determined Negro humility? Or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good humor? Or her vulgar music with the soul of the sorrow songs? Nearly a concrete test of the underlying principles of the Great Republic is the Negro problem and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this, the land of their father's fathers, and in the name of human opportunity. And now, what I have briefly sketched in large outline, let me oncoming pages tell again in many ways with loving emphasis and deeper detail that men may listen to the strivings in the souls of black folk.

Derek: 28:59

Alright, that was chapter one, and I hope, you know, through through my attempt at at reading it, you can find way, way better versions. This one's this one's free and available without any subscriptions to anything. But you can definitely find better red versions. But I I hope that this at least makes it more accessible and maybe clues people into looking for some of those those other versions and finishing this work. But DuBois, I mean, is just profound the way that he talks about things.

Derek: 29:35

I'm just going to highlight a few things, and you can go back through and read or listen if you want to kind of steepen them a little bit more. So I thought, just kind of on a side note, the very one of the first things that he says, he basically encounters the, well, I have black friends thing and it's interesting to hear that that's not such a new thing that we white people try to do to kind of avoid culpability or responsibility. So I thought that was really funny. I think the most compelling part, the most interesting part is really maybe two thirds of the way through, where Du Bois talks about poverty and ignorance, and the destruction of the black home. And that's something that I guess he was dealing with, right, back then, but it's interesting because those are the exact things that you hear white people, especially conservatives, talking about in terms of their issues with why there isn't so much systemic racism, and really it's the black people's fault.

Derek: 30:44

And again, we all make choices, and so not to discount that some people make choices in which they are bearing responsibility, but it's interesting that Du Bois answers this by saying basically, Hey look, white people, you're the reason we're in poverty in the first place, and then we get out and you make us free by declaration, and what? We're all of a sudden like we have opportunity? It's like, No, we're in a race that's late. You know, I forget who it is, but one of the writers, I don't know if he's quoting somebody from a long time ago, I think somebody from the civil rights era, but he basically says, hey look, we're in a hundred meter dash and you started 50 meters ahead of us. Like, what do you expect to happen?

Derek: 31:37

So it's interesting that Du Bois, of course, shows, look, we're in an unfair competition and yeah, you start us out in poverty. And same thing with ignorance. You're like, oh, poor guys, you just need to be servants. It's like, well, we need to be servants because we're ignorant, but we're ignorant because you wouldn't let us learn anything. And even if we weren't ignorant, even if we didn't have this helplessness in terms of education, if we do get an education, what does that get us?

Derek: 32:09

Because you keep us away from the ballot box anyway. And don't we need the ballot box? I mean, what it's done. It brought the war, it brought emancipation in Du Bois' mind anyway. And so, obviously, voting has a lot of power, so we want that power, but we can't get it without education, and even when we get education, you borrow us from it.

Derek: 32:32

And then on to the destruction of the homes, he says, so, you you sociologists, you guys count your bastards. Basically, you have sex with the black women, right? Your slave masters through all of these centuries have raped our women. And so, oh yes, you're really a symbol of purity because you don't have any bastards in your household, but man, you just really you are not the bastions of moral purity here, and it's a double standard. So you wanna know why our homes are falling apart?

Derek: 33:09

Well, you ripped families apart when you sold them, and then you sexually assaulted the women in households. What do you mean that our families are falling apart? Of course they are. But yours are too, they just you just have this facade around them, you you immoral, terrible people. Now obviously, the issue is we're we're standing about a hundred years, a hundred and fifty years in the future from where Du Bois is writing.

Derek: 33:39

I think he wrote this around 1900. So, yeah, we could say, well, yeah, but they've they've the black community has had a hundred years to to fix this by then. And hopefully history, through the issues that Black people had voting, through Jim Crow, through civil rights, and through what we see today in terms of the criminal justice system and the way that laws are set up that disproportionately affect minorities and specifically black people, I mean, it's clear that things are better in many ways, but better doesn't mean fixed, and better doesn't mean that there aren't still issues. And I think Du Bois can help us to kind of sift through that and recognize that there was a problem way back then, the same problems that people identify today as excuses of why racism isn't real, and if we've never fixed those problems, are they don't we today have some responsibility as a society to fix them? But then of course, chapter one, I love how Du Bois ends it, and he gives dignity to the black community because it would be really easy to hear Du Bois and to think, oh man, he's just, you know, he's really down on how bad the black community has it.

Derek: 35:02

But he ends triumphantly by saying, hey look, white people, yeah, maybe we need education, maybe we need to kind of go through some of your systems, maybe we need to tap into the political system that you guys have built without us. Okay, maybe we need you for some things. That's true, we do need you, we can learn from you. And that's what I love about him too, he ascribes dignity to white people too, like we can learn from you. But then what he does is he says, But don't you forget that you have to learn from us.

Derek: 35:35

In fact, we experience freedom and and we experience the American dream, this American ideal. Us and the Indian, we experience it more than you can. And and I love the dignity that Du Bois ascribes and the value. He's just got such a good balance of how he writes profoundly, recognizing problems, but then also being triumphant and not despairing in the way that he talks about how the black community has despaired under the shadow of prejudice. So as far as the scope of what Du Bois was writing, that basically covers it.

Derek: 36:16

Now let me just tie this in a couple other things that we have talked about throughout our podcast and that we'll touch on again in the future. So again, I want to remind you that a part of the reason that I wanted to bring in Du Bois, besides it being around Martin Luther King Junior's Remembrance Day here, is that it shows you this tired dismissal strategy of a lot of people. And you're gonna hear the same thing when it comes to pacifism or nonviolence. If you advocate something like nonviolence, then what are you? A Marxist, a liberal, a hippie, whatever else?

Derek: 36:52

And you're gonna see that that people bring up the the same rehashed, tired arguments that that they always bring, which aren't really arguments, they're like ad hominem attacks, but whatever. But another thing that I wanted you to see from DuBois here, and he was well before Critical Race Theory, but we have talked about Critical Race Theory, and we have talked about legislation, and how legislation often doesn't have the power we think it does, and it actually perpetuates injustice. And Du Bois here, you can see, is saying, Oh yeah, the Negro needs the vote, right, is what he says. And because obviously the vote gave power to exact a war and bring emancipation. And so we could get into how how that really worked out, but what we see in hindsight is that, okay, the slaves were emancipated, but then maybe for a decade it was okay.

Derek: 37:58

You had some blacks getting into government. But then here comes the Ku Klux Klan, the repealing of a lot of freedoms for blacks in terms in terms of being able to be in government. You have oppression all the way all the way up through like the civil rights era. You get Jim Crow laws and things like that. And then of course, now we just incarcerate.

Derek: 38:23

So you just have different forms of slavery. It goes from slavery to shadow slavery, to sharecropping slavery, to incarceration slavery, or legal justice system slavery. Wage slavery. You different kinds of slavery, but it's essentially similar in the effects that it has on the black community, and it keeps them oppressed in different ways. So did legislation really fix things?

Derek: 38:58

I don't think so, and Du Bois starts to recognize that he just doesn't have the history that we do to see how terribly right he was that that voting didn't end up working out. I know there's going to be a burden of proof on me to kind of show that, so if you want to go back to our CRT episode, which I will link in the show notes, that will be good. And also, in next season, I'm planning on talking about government, and I hope to make a larger case for why the government shouldn't be the answer, why I think Du Bois was misguided on the power that he was gonna get from government or his pursuit of that. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed the episode and you should definitely go check out W. E.

Derek: 39:50

B. Du Bois some more. That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network.

Derek: 40:22

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