The souls of black folk
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work; its insights into life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.
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- Edit: downvoting this without a response is pretty much against the guidelines, I am hardly distracting from the conversation here, and the downvote is not a "disagree" button. I put in a lot of effort to showing you why you have a shallow understanding of the topic; I'm open to being wrong.
Xenophobia and racism are completely separate concepts, although xenophobia does underly racism. It's entirely possible to construct a form of race that relies on other qualitative factors than skin color—just look at colourism, which ironically explicitly lays out non-color qualitative identifiers of "dark and light skinned"—hair type, body shape, hyperpigmentation, prevalence of certain genetic disease, whatever. These terms arose from feedback loops where racist capital dictate societal beauty standards and cultural norms. You certainly can't explain phenomena like skin bleaching or the long history of hair straitening with simple xenophobia. But, colourism is just one effect globalized racist capital has produced.
When academics talk about how racism is a problem, they definitely aren't discussing a general form of qualitative, personal discrimination. These racial structures underly our communities, our politics, our identities, here in America our state's use of slave labor in prisons, how our wealth is divided among our citizens, how we construct and discuss trade deals and foreign "charities" such as the Gates foundation, etc. simply put, you cannot discuss racism without discussing how race is embedded in the structures and processes all around us. These dynamics are easier to ignore in ethnically homogenous societies... unless of course you are a minority or immigrant.
Whiteness and blackness as we know it here in America were invented to formalize the structures of slavery here between the 15th and 18th centuries—this took centuries to move from the enslavement and sale of both Africans and indigenous Americans to a codified racial hierarchy, driven by European capital and nearly complete genocide of the indigenous people. I am sure there are similar narratives in the Congo, in Rhodesia, in South Africa, in Brazil, in European involvement in Southeast Asia, in virtually every part of the carribean and West Indies—it's colonialism, baby!
Every single aspect of the development of racism was ultimately driven by European capital. When countries "decolonialized" the west simply replaced formal state oppression with oppression through trade deals and proxy wars, which could not take course without European capital and violence. Make no mistake, European wealth is racist blood money.
This attitude of "oh the form of racism I learned about on Mister Roger's Neighborhood is just xenophobia with a different name" is just completely ignorant of the past 150-200 years of analysis of race and racism. I recommend these books if you have any serious inclination of discussing race:
* "Black Reconstruction" and "the souls of black folk", by WEB du Bois.
* "Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern" by J. Sakai
* Toni Morrison's "the origin of others" directly addresses your attitude towards racism—after all, though racism is distinct from xenophobia, xenophobia is necessary for racism.
* "Color Stories: Black Woman and Colorism in the 21st century (intersections of race, ethnicity, and culture)" by JeffriAnne Wilder.
* "redefining race: Asian american panethnicity and shifting ethnic boundaries" by Dina Okamato.
* "Marxism and the National and Colonial Question" by Joseph Stalin. Note, I am not a Stalin fan, but he's a decent essayist and laid out an excellent argument for separating the concepts of state sovereignty and nationhood, which is basically a collective recognition of being part of a shared people. You see this in the "union" part of the soviet union and the 56 nations of China, though this is frequently disingenuously translated as "ethnic groups".
* building off the above book, "The Nine Nations of North America" is a must read. This was written by Joel Garreau.
* "Racial ideas and the impact of imperialism in Europe": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1084877980857986...
* "the color complex: the politics of skin color in a new millennium." by Kathy Russell
This is also neglecting vast swathes of racial dynamics across central and South America, Asia, Australia and Polynesia—you really can fill up entire libraries with how racism is distinct (materially, culturally, subjectively) from xenophobia and manifests through labor exploitation and capital transfer.
- For a history of the start of WWI, I really liked Guns of August by Barbera Tuchman.
Also, there are some books whose authors wrote with a musicality that they are far better on audio than on paper. Included in this category are:
- Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
- Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois
- It definitely depends on my mood and what I'm doing.
My default is Lindsey Stirling[1]. Her music is up-tempo instrumental. I'll also put on a Pandora station seeded on Natalie McMaster.
Sometimes I'm doing something where I'm spending a bunch of time waiting on the machine and I will listen to a history audiobook. Recommendations:
- Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
- Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois
- to answer the Question DuBois raises at the end: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
- 1776 by David McCulloch
- Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
- not history, but if you've only read Lord of the Rings on paper, you really should listen to the Audiobook.
Also lately I've been repeatedly listening to the songs from a musical about a certain bastard orphan son of a whore...
- Tangentially related, The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black American to have gotten a PhD. from Harvard, is not only a great window into the struggles of black Americans in the generation after the Civil War, but also some of the finest writing in the English language:
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong- limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
- I was reading The Souls of Black Folk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Souls_of_Black_Folk) written in 1903, so about 38 years after the end of the Civil War. And the opening essays talk about the incredible climb that freed slaves had to endure to try to take care of exactly those responsibilities. I think it's a case of freedom and responsibility going together and that freed slaves were never given the tools to assume those responsibilities quickly and seamlessly.
- I would go by something like:
"The industrial society and its future" - Theodor Kaczinski.
"The communist manifesto" - Karl Marx.
"Rules for Radicals" - Saul Alinsky
"Hitler's War" - David Irving
"The Souls of Black Folk" - W.E.B. Du Bois
"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" - Tom Pickety
"Las venas abiertas da America Latina" - Eduardo Galeano
"The question of Palestine" - Edward Said.
"Grapes of Wrath" - John Steinbeck.
"The conquest of Bread" - Kropotkin
"Problems of Leninism" - Josef Stalin
If adventurous, I'd cite another one I've read that should not be mentioned amongst educated XXI century folks, as they think reading a book means you agree with the author.
Not the last 10 books I've read, but books I've read along my life and that would maybe make the guy think twice before considering making me an offer.
