I'm writing a paper about inner-city violence and one of the sources I'm using is this giant, dusty, frayed and beautifully falling apart old book I found in the library. Being from the 1800s, it smells very much as all old books should. It's by W.E.B. DuBois, a super famous sociologist dude that I'll probably be an expert on by the time I graduate. Anyway, the book is called "The Philadelphia Negro" and it's a study about post-slavery urban inequality among the black population of Philly. As I was looking through it, I found this bit of treasure that made me both sad inside because of the consequences of this line of thinking and glad that even in 1896 there was someone who understood the profound absurdity of racial injustice. Figured I'd share.
“And still this widening of the idea of common Humanity is of slow growth and to-day but dimly realized. We grant full citizenship in the World-Commonwealth to the “Anglo-Saxon” (whatever that may mean), the Teuton, and the Latin; then with just a shade of reluctance we extend it to the Celt and Slav. We half deny it to the yellow races of Asia, admit the brown Indians to an ante-room only on the strength of an undeniable past; but with the Negroes of Africa, we come to a full stop, and in its heart the civilized world with one accord denies that these come within the pale of nineteenth century Humanity. This feeling, widespread and deep-seated, is, in America, the vastest of the Negro problems. We have, to be sure, a threatening problem of ignorance but the ancestors of most Americans were far more ignorant than the freedmen’s sons; these ex-slaves are poor but not as poor as the Irish peasants used to be; crime is rampant but not more so, if as much, as in Italy; but the difference is that the ancestors of the English and the Irish and the Italians were felt to be worth educating, helping and guiding because they were men and brothers, while in America a census which gives a slight indication of the utter disappearance of the American Negro from the earth is greeted with ill-concealed delight.
Other centuries looking back upon the culture of the nineteenth would have a right to suppose that if, in a land of freemen, eight millions of human beings were found to be dying of disease, the nation would cry with one voice, “Heal them!” If they were staggering on in ignorance, it would cry, “Train them!” If they were harming themselves and others by crime, it would cry, “Guide them!” And such cries are heard and have been heard in the land; but it was not one voice and its volume has been ever broken by counter-cries and echoes, “Let them die!” “Train them like slaves!” “Let them stagger downward!”
