Darkwater: Voices from Within the VeilDu Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
General
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
Of course, the foundation of such a system must be a high, ethical
ideal. We must really envisage the wants of humanity. We must want the
wants of all men. We must get rid of the fascination for exclusiveness.
Here, in a world full of folk, men are lonely. The rich are lonely. We
are all frantic for fellow-souls, yet we shut souls out and bar the ways
and bolster up the fiction of the Elect and the Superior when the great
mass of men is capable of producing larger and larger numbers for every
human height of attainment. To be sure, there are differences between
men and groups and there will ever be, but they will be differences of
beauty and genius and of interest and not necessarily of ugliness,
imbecility, and hatred.
The meaning of America is the beginning of the discovery of the Crowd.
The crowd is not so well-trained as a Versailles garden party of Louis
XIV, but it is far better trained than the Sans-culottes and it has
infinite possibilities. What a world this will be when human
possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger
is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!
What hinders our approach to the ideals outlined above? Our profit from
degradation, our colonial exploitation, our American attitude toward the
Negro. Think again of East St. Louis! Think back of that to slavery and
Reconstruction! Do we want the wants of American Negroes satisfied? Most
certainly not, and that negative is the greatest hindrance today to the
reorganization of work and redistribution of wealth, not only in
America, but in the world.
All humanity must share in the future industrial democracy of the world.
For this it must be trained in intelligence and in appreciation of the
good and the beautiful. Present Big Business,--that Science of Human
Wants--must be perfected by eliminating the price paid for waste, which
is Interest, and for Chance, which is Profit, and making all income a
personal wage for service rendered by the recipient; by recognizing no
possible human service as great enough to enable a person to designate
another as an idler or as a worker at work which he cannot do. Above
all, industry must minister to the wants of the many and not to the few,
and the Negro, the Indian, the Mongolian, and the South Sea Islander
must be among the many as well as Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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