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Apr 25, 2020ryankegley rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I’d gone to the library expecting to pick this book up only to find it hadn’t yet arrived. Instead, I took home Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a potent exploration of what it’s like to be black in the 21st century. W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk” arrived the following day. Though I’d intended to start with the latter, it turns out, I think, that the order matters little — the two books make for a forceful one-two punch: passionate and probing, unflinching, revealing, downbeat but not downtrodden, wary but not weary, fearful but not afraid. Across the fourteen essays that comprise “The Souls of Black Folk,” Du Bois covers an immense amount of territory, personal and political, fictional and sociological, all bursting with passages of intense lyricism and beauty. Despite its publication in 1903 and the specifics of the material being firmly rooted in its day, there is, at its heart, a timelessness, an eternalness to the words, to the sentiments, and sadly, devastatingly, to the tapestry Du Bois weaves about black life and being black in America: “From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,—from this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretense or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.” That passage comes from Du Bois’s essay “Of the Faith of the Fathers” and with but a few changes it doesn’t fall far from where Coates is in “Between the World and Me.” In reading the two books, it’s clear that while much has changed in the 112 years between their publication dates, that change continues to be uneven, unequal, and unfair. The disparities are as entrenched as ever — perilously so. I couldn’t begin to fathom a solution at the societal level, but I’m pretty sure understanding, compassion, empathy, and seeing are all crucial to its undertaking, and “The Souls of Black Folk” is unquestionably a pillar of that foundation.