Race
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Race is one of the most bedeviling of social characteristics. The concept, with the barest tips of its roots in biological and the rest of the plant firmly grafted to cultural and sociological ideals, has been debated over and again, with little if any progress being made as to why it remains so central to our understanding of self. This is perhaps especially the case in those nations, like the United States, in which the already usually tangled dynamics of race have been further complicated by a history of slavery. Beginning with the critique of American society offered by W.E.B. DuBois in his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folks, this paper looks at some of the different strategies that have been used in the United States since the end of the Civil War to bring Americans of different races together and the reasons why those efforts have overall been so unsuccessful.Du Bois, a sociologist by training and by profession, was also the most important African-American protest leader during the first half of the 20th century. It was this combination of political engagement and scholarly disengagement that gave his writing its authority - and his writing in turn made him a more powerful political and scholarly leader. As he was beginning his career as a sociologist, he argued that social science - that a careful and objective analysis of the ways in which society was constructed would allow social, cultural and political leaders to disassemble and then reassemble soc
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age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington's programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life. Moreover, this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races. Again, in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given impetus to race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro's tendency to self-assertion has been called forth; at this period a policy of submission is advocated. In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DubSoul.html).
Du Bois's critique of Washington would split black leade
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Approximate Word count = 1833
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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