When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk, he was living life during the peak time period of racism and segregation. In writing his book, I think he was trying to inspire some wars inside of people at that time period, hoping to spark a mass change in society. He knew there was a long way to go, but would he think that over a century later we would be going backwards in progress? I think there still lays a hypocrisy at the heart of America that has grown ever more powerful as we “progress.” We must recognize this, but doing so will not be enjoyable. We must allow ourselves to see the ugly that lays within our own reality in order to fix it, but that is going to have to happen through education, which must be emphasized throughout all generations. In educating our society, I don’t think it is bad to talk about these problems with a “double vision,” for white people cannot see the world the way a black person does. This will take lots of effort and courage to have an open conversation, but I feel as though now we need it more than ever. We can be hopeful, but realistic, in hopes to achieve a time when black men no longer hear, “how does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or…Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?” The sad part about this quote is that these things were said over a hundred years ago, yet today they are still said and felt by many. But we must remember that hope, according to the Oxford Dictionary is “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen”, and expectations are not guaranteed, rather a goal, and goals are a lot of work.
I may sound extremely unhopeful, but part of that comes from a recent event that has happened within the last month right here in the North Country. An assault took place at the beginning of September in Governeur and news just broke of it, and it was so significant that it made national news. It was so severe that, “the girl who was assaulted had her right eye blackened from being punched, lost hair when it was pulled and bruised her knee after falling backward onto a school bus seat during the attack, the police said,” according to the New York Times. What makes things worse is that there was an adult bus monitor on the bus that let this happen for a full twenty minutes. What does this say about the progress we made? To me it elicits a lot of fear. I thought I was growing up in a generation that was supposed to be accepting, and we are usually championed as if we are agents of change. Yet these children that are the same age as my little brother are using violence on classmates just because a difference in skin color. We keep blaming this on past generations, but when will these ideals ever fade out? I worry that people will never recognize how wrong these actions are.
I think where we are going wrong is in the fact that we want to be in an ideal world, but we refuse to acknowledge that these issues still exist, therefore we are not educating our children . Du Bois hits home when he uses the example of John’s litter sister when she says, “does it make everyone- unhappy when they study and learn lots of things.” We are too afraid to educate our children on the disturbing reality, and denying what is really going on by depriving our children of the education they need hinders their ability to change the future. We are not showing them the truth, rather we are painting an inaccurate picture of the world and what it is today. We need to tell the stories of people like the little black girl from Gouverneur, and I think the more these things occur, the more we are recognizing that this is still an issue and that things still need to be done.
According to Lauren French, the superintendent of the Gouverneur school system, “the loss of civility in this world is being played out in the realm of 10- and 11-year-olds.” This is the scary reality, not to mention the fact that we just keep brushing it off as bullying. By calling it bullying we are not recognizing the root of the problem. It’s racism in a severe form, not just your typical bullying (not that bullying is okay). But bullying, in a sense, has been drilled into our children in a way that normalizes it, as if it is a part of going to school, so are we going to normalize racism too? Neither should be normalized, and this must be countered by comprehensive educational programs. It shouldn’t just be a single assembly that kids go to, but it should be implemented into the curriculum. I think every high schooler should read Du Bois and teachers should encourage difficult conversations.
Du Bois closes his book with a final thought: “Hear my cry, o God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness.” The sad truth that looms over us is that we have indeed forgotten the words spoken by figures like Du Bois, and have not lived up to his expectations, his hope. We read of terrible acts of racism, both within and outside of schools, and have succumbed to our old ways. We have lost the moral courage to be a “representative of the ideal kingdom” and have failed Du Bois by overlooking reality. I have hope, but with the actions of our own president, we are making such hateful words seem okay to our children and citizens. This leaves me wondering what the future has in store, in which I hope for a better world, but in some ways I carry a small bit of “unhelpfulness,” for we must work much harder as agents of change and have the courage to have difficult conversations.