Joshua Briggs on Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk

The Souls of Black Folk embodies the collective realization of the struggles black people will face post emancipation. It’s an almost helpless reading; the Negro mind was completely shut out from society and relegated to a tier considered less than human. It’s a miracle the black community has made it so far in modern society; the sudden shift from slavery being the only problem to quite literally everything being a problem is jarring. No longer is slavery the predominant focus and instead the entire society that constructed it is, a fact infinitely scarier. It’s similar to leaving a baby bird on its own, alone and exposed with no protection: no one predicts an auspicious outcome. It means a tougher, often judged existence, ridiculed by the exact same people who created “a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (Du Bois 2). It is a world that views his existence as a problem. Born in a black country, my experience could never compare to the wickedness others have suffered. However, moving to America gave me the curiosity of people of color to peer through the veil of the white people, especially those close to me, inhibiting hairstyles based on assumptions created by white people, praising the restricted use of my Jamaican dialect from early on. The behavior is so pervasive actually and goes generally unnoticed; in reality they’ll always see you as just black regardless of what you do. The main continuity is hopelessness. There seems to be a stagnation in the fight against racism, it’s in a place where it’s not so direct, making it hard to combat, because most people won’t focus on the fine print. The main focus is big major events, similar to the BLM movement in wake of George Floyd’s death. Laws passed silently, though, go unnoticed until it's too late, and social media has made anti-black rhetoric skyrocket. The entire situation feels fruitless.