My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Interpretation
Du Bois highlights the significance of race in shaping societal narratives during the 19th and 20th centuries.
In this quote, W. E. B. Du Bois reflects on his autobiography as a representation of the complex and often tumultuous history of race in society. He suggests that personal narratives can illustrate broader social themes and issues, specifically how race has influenced people's experiences and perceptions during significant historical periods. Through his life story, Du Bois aims to shed light on the racial dynamics that have defined both personal and collective histories.
In practice
In a speech addressing social justice, this quote can illustrate the importance of understanding historical contexts.
Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.
School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.
For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: 'Give them something to eat.'
No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures. No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.
I used to think consciousness itself was a virtue, so I tried to keep it all in my head at the same time: past, future, etc.
Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.
Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities.
So now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay. And when I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.
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