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.
Interpretation
The quote expresses feelings of alienation and confinement, highlighting struggles faced by marginalized individuals.
W. E. B. Du Bois articulates the profound sense of alienation that can arise when one feels like an outcast within their own community or home. The imagery of the 'prison-house' symbolizes the barriers and limitations imposed on those who are marginalized or disenfranchised, emphasizing their struggles to navigate a world that is unwelcoming and often oppressive, leaving them with a sense of resignation or hopelessness in the face of their circumstances.
In practice
In a discussion about social justice at a community meeting.
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.
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.
The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.
When God measures a man he puts the tape around the heart, not the head.
Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.
Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one's mind to accept a host of incomprehensible doctrines. But this is to put the cart before the horse.
In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
Some counterfeits reproduce so very well the truth that it would be a flaw of judgment not to be deceived by them.
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