Souls of White Folk Dubois\'s

¶ … Souls of White Folk

DuBois's classic work the Souls of White Folk (1910) is a heartfelt analysis of the inexplicable importance of skin color in the American psyche as it existed in the author's lifetime and in the previous century two. First, DuBois explains that the social significance of skin color only arose relatively recently, in the 18th or 19th century when it became a pivotal concept in the minds of white Americans in particular. Prior to that, DuBois explains, skin color was regarded as wholly insignificant or as little more than a "mild curiosity.

Next, the author suggests that part of the evolution of the preoccupation with whiteness has its roots in the same psychological phenomenon that accounts for the greater joy that a child experiences from candy by virtue of the fact that, in addition to its sweetness, "his playmate has none." However, the author goes further and characterizes that analogy as insufficient in its representation of selfishness. In effect, the social significance of whiteness in America is better described "I shall keep my candy and you shall not have yours" or as applied directly to the topic of skin color, "I am white and you are black" really means "I am white and you are nothing."

The author explains that the belief that white skin denotes superiority of worth is patently false and that any objective observation of the human world would be sufficient to establish that. As a result, American white society has invested wholeheartedly in maintaining this false premise through deliberately falsifying the evidence in its universal teachings, particularly to the young, precisely because they are so impressionable. DuBois provides several examples of how thoroughly the belief in white supremacy permeates social culture. He describes how the mere sight of "a little, silent black woman & #8230; sitting by herself in a Pullman car" was enough to enrage a white man, to whom the author purposely refers as being an apparently educated man, to demonstrate the absurdity of such sentiments in someone intelligent enough (especially in his day) to have become educated. Likewise, he describes witnessing a "great grown man curse a little child who had wandered into the wrong waiting room searching for its mother" and the apparent transformation of a "quiet, peaceful man" into a snarling rage at nothing more than the sight of a black people riding in motorcar (at that time, still something of a rare privilege for anyone, given the exorbitant wealth necessary to afford the very latest in human mechanized transportation). Last (and somewhat later in the essay), DuBois recounts the experience of riding (lawfully) on a streetcar as a poor white girl approximately six or seven years old passed by while stealing a ride on a furniture van; she stuck her tongue out at him, "jeered, and made every contortion of countenance to show her personal disapproval of my kind and the superiority of hers."

The author characterizes the obsession with whiteness and the immorality that it inspires in the treatment of blacks as being (ironically) responsible for the "shriveling and dying" of white souls. He also describes how as a black person, he has an unfiltered view into the naked truth of the character of many white people. Since white people regard blacks as completely inconsequential, they routinely suspend their normal efforts to compose themselves as they wish others to see them. Because blacks are not worth the effort of manners, or courtesy, or conversation, white people actually reveal more about who (and what) they really are underneath the usual veil of social politeness or conventions in the presence of blacks.

The author goes on to explain how the preoccupation with white supremacy also succeeded in undermining the integrity of modern science in the effort to justify the differential treatment of the races in scientific principles by suppressing evidence, lying, misquoting authority, and deliberately distorting facts. Similarly, while America "should shine" in the area of social study, the world of American academia (presumably) "has done nothing" to refute the patently absurd and thoroughly immoral lies that support racial inequality, prejudice, persecution, and abuse.

Perhaps the most dramatic point in that regard is the manner in which DuBois raises the incompatibility of racial prejudice and its social consequences and concepts of religious morality in general and with the "Christian ideal" in particular. He concludes (correctly) that the two are fundamentally incompatible: one must necessarily either abandon the claim to respect, value, and uphold the so-called Christian ideal or one must abandon racist sentiments. The only other option (and the one obviously in favor in DuBois's time) is complete hypocrisy. To obscure that hypocrisy, the members of white society had simply asserted that "religion does not enter here" meaning in the distinction between the races. As DuBois points out, abandoning religion and admitting to imposing racial oppression through "barbarism" would at least be more honest than trying to reconcile Christian moral values with racial oppression. .