Nicole Sweeney 00:00:00
multiple bachelor's degrees. Harvard University PhD. Berlin study fellowship for two years. Sociology and history professor at two different universities. author of a large number of books. co-founder and activist for a significant civil rights group. Editor and magazine co-founder. additionally a poet. Good resume, would you say? What if I increase its impact a little bit? That Harvard doctorate? An African American was awarded the first PhD at Harvard. the organization for civil rights? : the NAACP. that publication? Since 1910, The Crisis has been the longest-running Black publication in the US.
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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, also known as W. E. B. Du Bois, is the owner of this resume. He was one of the first American sociologists and a pioneer of the theory of racial conflict. The foundations of how sociologists study race are found in his studies of the experiences of African Americans during the Jim Crow era of American history, including the oppression they endured.
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In 1868, W. E. B. Du Bois was born in a small Massachusetts town. Five years had passed since the Emancipation Proclamation as of 1868. Three years had passed since the American Civil War's conclusion, and the 14th amendment had also been ratified. Race was viewed as a biological construct at this time. Slavery and later Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation in the South, were presented as inevitable results of Black people's alleged inherent inferiority to White people. Of course, we now understand that this was not only wrong but also seriously harmful. Furthermore, it is now widely acknowledged to be untrue that race is a purely biological trait that cannot be changed.
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Instead, consider race as a socially constructed grouping of individuals who share biological characteristics that society has valued. Yes, there are many different ways that people look, including differences in skin tone, facial features, body types, and hair textures. However, those physical characteristics do not become a "race" until society as a whole decides that those characteristics belong to a particular racial group. Because of this, the idea of race fluctuates across cultures and historical periods. For instance, Du Bois didn't consider Irish and Italian Americans to be "White" at the time. But try telling a Boston Southie guy or a Pittsburgh Italian grandmother that they are not White today. Observe their responses. Has there been a biological change between Irish and Italian Americans? Obviously not. It’s
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When Du Bois moved to the South to attend college and later spent several years in Europe, he started to think of his race as a part of his identity. He was disappointed by the way Americans treated him because of his skin tone after observing how differently Black people were treated in various settings. He can express this disappointment much more effectively than I can: He stated that "one always feels twoness, an American and a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring id." The concept of double consciousness, which runs throughout much of Du Bois' writing, is revealed in this quotation. Du Bois argued that, for a Black American, there are two competing identities to consider: being an American and being a Black American.
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Sociologists who study racial identity theory, which examines how people come to identify as a particular race, currently study issues of race and identity. However, Du Bois did not limit his research to racial identity; he also examined the daily lives of Black and White Americans and wrote extensively about the reasons behind the stark differences in their quality of life in post-slavery America.
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Du Bois was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a study on Philadelphia's Black communities in 1896. His work eventually resulted in the publication of "The Philadelphia Negro," the first analysis of African Americans' living circumstances. Du Bois went door-to-door and questioned people about their lives and families. Additionally, there were a ton of doors. Du Bois gathered information on 9,675 African Americans in total. The 7th Ward, a historically Black neighborhood in Philadelphia that drew families from all socioeconomic classes—from doctors and teachers to the impoverished and destitute—was the area on which he concentrated. He observed how African Americans differed from Philadelphia's White population by sitting in thousands of parlors and asking questions about age, gender, education, literacy, occupations, earnings, and crime.
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For instance, the Black population was found to be both younger and more female-dominated than the White population. In addition, there were more people working in the service sector than in manufacturing or trade, lower literacy rates, higher rates of poverty and crime, and lower literacy rates. The frequency of illness was higher, as were the mortality rates. But this is what made Du Bois' report particularly distinctive: He came to the conclusion that a large part of the dysfunction in Black communities was caused by their less favorable access to things like education and more lucrative jobs. According to him, poverty, occupational risks, and limited access to healthcare were the main causes of the higher death and illness rates among Black people. It's difficult to convey just how
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Therefore, race is not an isolated concept. It does more than just endow you with some fundamental qualities. Instead, race is significant because of the influence society bestows upon it. Let's use the labor unions in Philadelphia in the 1890s as another illustration. Trade labor unions forbade Black workers from joining due to prejudice against them and misconceptions about their skills and morals. Many Black workers were also unable to obtain manufacturing or trade jobs, which paid significantly higher wages than service jobs, because they were unable to join unions. Black communities had more unemployed men, higher rates of poverty, and more criminal activity as a result of their inability to obtain these jobs, which allowed White workers and unions to defend their decision to forbid
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In the end, racial stereotypes and racism reinforced each other. This is the so-called racial formation theory, which was codified by contemporary sociologists Howard Winant and Michael Omi. The process by which social, political, and economic forces affect how a society defines racial categories and how those categories ultimately shape those forces is referred to as racial formation. Omi and Winant contend that the idea of race was created as a justification and a means of preserving the economic and political dominance of people of European descent.
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The work of sociologist William Julius Wilson offers another contemporary perspective on these problems. He investigates why Black and White Americans frequently experience such disparities in their income, levels of education, and other outcomes. And he contends that for many Black Americans, class—not race—determines their circumstances. But the structural disadvantages that date back to Du Bois' time are what cause these class gaps to exist in the first place. Du Bois kept looking into the barriers that African Americans faced in terms of discrimination, segregation, and access to jobs and education. He frequently disagreed with Booker T. Washington, another prominent Black intellectual, who was a strong supporter of education and fighting against Jim Crow laws.
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Over time, Du Bois grew frustrated with the limits of scholarship in affecting change, so he turned to direct activism and political writing. In 1909, he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the NAACP and was the editor and intellectual driving force behind its magazine, The Crisis. The NAACP fought against lynching, segregation of schools, voting disenfranchisement, and much more. It used journalism as one of its most powerful tools, publishing the records of thousands of lynchings over a 30-year period. And it used lawsuits, targeting voter disenfranchisement and school segregation in decade-long court battles. And, after Du Bois’ time, it went on to become part of many of the landmark moments in the fight for civil rights, including the Brown vs. Board of Education case, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington.
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