Search This Blog

Stuff I'm Currently Reading

B. P.'s bookshelf: currently-reading

by Virgil
tagged: poetry-stuff, classical-greco-roman-stuff, and currently-reading
tagged: currently-reading, un-decade-african-descent, and poetry-stuff

goodreads.com

About Me

So far, I write about what ever holds my attention the most stubbornly. Until the sidebar works regularly for me, The display is going to have the sidebar stuff here, then the main blog.

Featured Post

Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. Du Bois

My first post here is of course a Goodreads review, but one of my favorite and the only one that won't show-up on the book's entry p...

Friday, September 11, 2020

To My Grandmother E. M. H. (1938-2020)

 Moist with one drop of Thy blood, my dry soul

Shall—though she now be in extreme degree
Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly—be
Freed by that drop, from being starved, hard or foul,
And life by this death abled shall control
Death, whom Thy death slew ; nor shall to me
Fear of first or last death bring misery,
If in thy life-book my name thou enroll.
Flesh in that long sleep is not putrified,
But made that there, of which, and for which it was ;
Nor can by other means be glorified.
May then sin's sleep and death soon from me pass,
That waked from both, I again risen may
Salute the last and everlasting day.

--Resurrection by John Donne

Monday, September 7, 2020

Black Reconstruction on YouTube, Episode 2

Still experimenting with how I plan to post about this series, so I'll try this out for this post.
View this post on Instagram

@thereadinseries posted chapters 3 & 4 of Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. Du Bois on YouTube being read by @thereal_shafiq , @michaelmichaeltheartist , and @marquisevilson respectively. Chapter 3 dealt with the Planter oligarchy as it looked before the Civil War, while chapter 4 dealt with the American Civil War itself as it relates to Reconstruction since much of the foundations of Reconstruction were created during the war. What I liked about chapter 4 is how Du Bois really demonstrates that black people—even as they were enslaved—had to make their moves pragmatically. Because of the initial Northern policy of not ending slavery, black workers had to wait and persist until a small Northern faction (which Du Bois calls Abolition-Democracy) was able to lobby the United States towards emancipation and the use and arming of black workers against the Confederates. A very good read here. #bookstagram #book #blackreconstruction #webdubois #thereadinseries #shafiqhicks #michaelmcelroy #marquisevilson #blackwriters #blackhistory #americancivilwar #reconstruction #history #americanhistory #diverseclassics #classicliterature #nonfiction #bookcollection #blackmenread #bibliophile #wellreadblackguy

A post shared by Ken's Bookshelf & Movieshelf (@rinehartstation) on

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

My Goodreads Review of The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

This may be my most popular or second most popular review on Goodreads which is astonishing to me since I personally think I have written much better. But given the wide-lack of knowledge people have of Du Bois and the way that popularity does not always equal quality when it comes to popular opinions, I 'm not totally shocked. I am happy I helped interest more folks on this scholar and his work.

The Souls of Black Folk (Everyman's Library (Cloth))The Souls of Black Folk (Everyman's Library by W.E.B. Du Bois
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother's children were angry with me;
They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
But mine own vineyard have I not kept.
" - Song of Solomon 1:5-6 KJV

Bright Sparkles in the Churchyard

These are the lyrical and musical epigraphs preceding chapter seven.


"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." This is going to be a hard book to review well. That is because of how well rounded and layered this book is at examining African-American life. There is much in this book that has made it so special. This book is to modern sociology what The Interpretation of Dreams was for psychology. In this book W.E.B. Du Bois offered one of the most complete studies of African-American life, history, politics, and culture. No book has really been able to over-shadow its relevance and its timelessness. It was written by the first Black man to earn a Harvard University doctorate degree. The book was published in 1903, a generation removed from slavery in the United States, yet it is still relevant to my life (four generations removed from slavery) and the present day. 112 years has not seen a lot of time pass!

This book has been the foundation text that civil rights and Black advancement in America was built on. This book influenced so many people whose careers come out of it. From the Harlem Renaissance to the thesis of my favorite novel (Invisible Man) to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness all find roots in this book. Du Bois would, in the long years after 1903, change is stance on certain ideas presented in this book, most famously concerning his theory on The Talented Tenth, but he never had anything beyond spelling or proofreading corrections done in subsequent editions of this book since he wanted it to stand as a snapshot of how he saw the world in 1903.

Trying to list the ideas and multiple purposes this book is putting forward is maddening. It puts forward in idea that a special 10% of African-Americans would become this alpha-class that would lead the rest of the race (he abandoned that as his interest in socialism grew). The book also list the theory of Black people having "double-consciousness" which he defines as the "sense of always looking at one's self 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." He goes onto say that the history of Black Folks is the tension between this duality of identity and I do not see any good counter-argument to this from my personal experience.
"Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half- hesitant sort of way, eye me 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? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, -- peculiar even for one who has never been anything else...
"
The above quote is from the first two paragraphs of the book. This excerpt is something that Black Americans consciously or unconsciously have to always confront. Of course this book, being part self-study, uses Du Bois own life in order to examine the Black experience.

This book is also a very thorough polemic against Booker T. Washington. Du Bois sees Washington and his influence as one of the worst calamities to hit the African-American nation. Booker T. Washington believed that Black people should not seek social equality or political independence, but should strive for economic equality only and be guided on political matters under strict, White supervision; Black education should not include the liberal arts, but be limited to vocational trades. All of this infuriated Du Bois and led to an intense rivalry between the two that only ended with Washington's death in 1915. A whole chapter of this book is devoted solely to refuting Washington and his accommodationist beliefs.

The sad state of political status and employment of Black Folk are also covered in this book and it is depressing to see how much things have not changed. Given the recent spat of police shootings it makes reading the following quote even more painful:
"...the police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves...For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the South had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police. Thus grew up a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. For, as I have said, the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of re-enslaving the blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man's conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims. - from chapter 9.
This has been confirmed, by now, as not just a Southern problem, but as a nation-wide issue now. Another issue is the lack of balanced employment. Du Bois was convinced that if greedy land-owners did not perpetually swindle Black people out of ownership, there would not be such a large movement of people from rural areas to the urban areas. He was, in-fact, witnessing the origins of The Great Migration.

One of the more interesting things covered in this book are Negro Spirituals. Each chapter of this book contains two epigraphs (as demonstrated at the beginning of this review). One is a random quote vaguely related to the chapter, but the second quote is a musical notation of a passage from a spiritual. The last chapter of this book is dedicated to talking about the deep cultural and artistic importance of the spirituals (called Sorrow Songs by Du Bois) and he talks about their origins and of the musical group most noted for interpreting them: The Fisk Jubilee Singers. Each chapter quotation is also listed in this part of the book, but if you can read music you will guess the universally recognized ones like Swing Low or Steal Away.

While I would like to keep thoroughly dissecting this book, I will probably just keep shaping the review as I think of new things to examine in it, in the future I may keep adding on, but I find that it is especially difficult for me to analyze this book that is so old, but so relevant and personal. I will give Dr. Du Bois the last word then:


"Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed

THE END
"

View all my reviews