#W.E.B Du Bois

[notchainedtotrauma]

I think that one of the things that happens both in Du Bois and in C. L. R. James is that at one moment they are addressing the slave, the ex-slave, the fugitive — then suddenly this figure has been translated into the narrative of the worker. And in the worker’s narrative, the very figure that I’m concerned with, the Black female, the fungible life, the minor figure, totally falls out of the frame of what constitutes the political notion of struggle. The “everyday resistance of enslaved women” in the context of a slave economy, for example the refusal to reproduce life, has never been considered as a component of the general strike. Yet, they too were involved in a fundamental refusal of the conditions of work and intent on destroying an economy of production in which their wombs and their reproductive capacity were conscripted along with their labor.

Saidiya Hartman in conversation with Rizvana Bradley

[rjalker]

some of W.E.B Du Bois' books are available on Project Gutenberg, since they're public domain.

"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/226"

The Comet, the short scifi story mention in this video

"https://youtu.be/YI1xmwqGEBw"

is in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15210"

[liberalsarecool]

"Capitalism can not reform itself. It is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all."

- W.E.B DuBois 1961

[edwordsmyth]

"There was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood—which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world." -W.E.B. Du Bois "What he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa." -Aimé Césaire

[apoemaday]

Striving

by W.E.B. Du Bois

In a castle in the Sea Dwelt a maiden dark and free Who was born amid the madding bellows moan Who was born amid a strife That did sadden all her life The strife between the waters and the foam

Aye she kissed the aged rocks That were swarthy as her looks Aye she whispered to the midnight in her woe Aye the sea-gulls heard her moan As she shuddered there alone As she paced the horrid caverns to and fro.

Yet she was no mermaid fair And she had no golden hair Hers was but a dark and quivering little face Hers a timid little heart That could love and that could smart That could fear the might of storm that moved space

O the storm was fierce and free O the fury of the sea O the mad and mighty anthem of the deep. How the waters and the foam Battled screaming o'er her home Till the weary little maiden fell asleep.

Then she saw the mighty form That was moving o'er the storm Then she heard the trumpet summons 'round her roll Then she knew the dread behest Come from out the crimson west And she clasped her little hands about her soul--

And she left her ocean home And she rose upon the foam And all tremblingly rebuked the angry wave-- And she died beneath the moon Softly sinking in a swoon And the billows murmur idly by her grave.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

W.E.B. Du Bois with his wife, the author, playwright, composer, and activist Shirley Graham Du Bois, at their home at 31 Grace Court in Brooklyn Heights, 1958.

Photo: David Attie via Getty Images/Washington Post

[padawan-historian]

“I'm going to take a long, deep and endless sleep.”

~ august 27, 1963 marks the passing of w.e.b. duBois'

[dustteller]

Now that I am mostly over the Absolutely Feral stage of my Radiant Emperor Obsession and can think again, I want to do a proper write up on how the series handles colonialism. I need to get my sources together and make it all pretty and stuff, but the gist of it is this.

I actually really respect SPC for not making it A Thing. Like, the colonialism is an inherent part of the serting, and a lot of important moments hinge around it, but there's also a pretty clear refusal by the author to turn it into A Statement. I think they do a really good job of walking the fine line between aknowledging it and making it clear that its an important part of the setting, without turning the book into a political thesis on Why Bad Actually.

I think a lot of fantasy authors that frankly have no business making their books into political science treatises try to be super philosophical about it, and inevitably have almost all their points ring flat bc the main character almost always ends up perpetuating the system they spent the whole book critiquing. The classic example being, of course, "We've destroyed The Evil Empire! We will now replace it with The Good Empire, which is functionally identical to The Evil Empire except Good bc our Main Character is in charge! This will totally change the systemic issues we've spent the last three million words exploring! How? Don't worry about it, absolute power only corrupts you if you're A Bad Person!" (atla. atla i am looking at you. my love for you does not mean I am letting you off the hook.)

The Radiant Emperor books interact with and aknowledge the colonialism. The empire canonically falls at least in part because of one guy's willfull ignorance of the differences between his culture and that of two of the people he loves the most, because his culture supercedes theirs to the point where he does not even consider the posibility of this difference truly existing as a real-life power imbalance. And still, these books are not about that! That is not the main theme! It is important. It is handled pretty well, it is aknowledged, and it is not The Point. I really appreciate that more understated approach that SPC takes, because ironically by refusing to partake in dramatic philosophical grandstanding the media often ends up making way better and more nuanced points, because then their point actually fits into the story they are trying to tell.

[davidhudson]

W. E. B. Du Bois, February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963.

With Pablo Picasso in 1949.

[recreationaldivorce]

What turns me cold in all this experience is the certainty that thousands of innocent victims are in jail today because they had neither money nor friends to help them. The eyes of the world were on our trial despite the desperate efforts of press and radio to suppress the facts and cloud the real issues; the courage and money of friends and of strangers who dared stand for a principle freed me; but God only knows how many who were as innocent as I and my colleagues are today in hell. They daily stagger out of prison doors embittered, vengeful, hopeless, ruined. And of this army of the wronged, the proportion of Negroes is frightful. We protect and defend sensational cases where Negroes are involved. But the great mass of arrested or accused Black folk have no defense. There is desperate need of nationwide organizations to oppose this national racket of railroading to jails and chain gangs the poor, friendless and Black.

W.E.B. Du Bois, Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois

[notchainedtotrauma]

Du Bois feared that "armies of black prostitutes" and "undetected prostitutes" passing for regular women were overtaking the race, such women figured prominently in his anxieties about the future.

from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

[imkeepinit]

[liberalsarecool]

The year was 1895.

#BlackHistoryMonth

[edwordsmyth]

W.E.B. Du Bois

[whenweallvote]

Author, historian, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was born on this day in 1868. His most notable contributions to American history include:

🔸 Founding the NAACP in 1909

🔸 Becoming the first Black person to earn a PhD from Harvard University in 1895

🔸 Writing “The Souls of Black Folk” in 1903, an essay collection that is a landmark of Black American literature

[pettybourgeoisculturalreform]

Happy Birthday to one of the greatest historians, and the most profound Marxist in US history, Dr. W.E.B. Dubois. Born February 23, 1868.

Author of Black Reconstruction, three autobiographies, The Souls of Black Folk, numerous articles in The Crisis, and countless poems and encyclopedia entries for Britannica and other collections.

The first Black doctoral graduate of Harvard, founder of the NAACP, member of the Communist Party of the USA, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, Pan-Africanist, and very high on the US government's shit list until his death in 1963 in Ghana, a guest of Nkrumah.

He supported women's suffrage (support that was infamously not reciprocated by the white leadership of the women's movement), was a major teacher of Lenin, and helped articulate and aid the efforts of colonized peoples across the world to find freedom and dignity in their own nations.

"We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books."

"When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer ... I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. ... I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools."

"A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect."

"The honor, I assure you, was Harvard's."