Week 5: Du Bois to Chesnutt

Dear Mr. Chesnutt,

Upon reading your composition “What Is a White Man?” I am obliged to express my thoughts. Is it not a surprise the grave obsession the twentieth century ruling class has had with race? The color line, though it may not guide policy and government positions today in 2010, still prove a salient marker to follow the raging path of oppression, like a liquid marker following a prejudiced protein in the bloodstream of America.

This year, I will be turning 142 years old and I have seen a lot on my time on this earth and in this country. Though I moved to Ghana, I do not hate America. It has blossomed into a land that is not about, as you put it, the “exercise of the privileges of the white man.” But I do not appreciate its attempt to cover racialized projects and politics. We are indeed past the time where we are primarily oppressed institutionally and the interpersonal degradation is alive and swimming, but speaking in terms of class. I believe the problem of the twenty-first century is the class line – the challenge of allowing our citizens a fair chance to accumulate wealth and security.

When our government and our President intensifies the social responsibility of our market places, the very foundations of those citadels shake and cause the chaffed elite, ruling class to spew forth the old memes, the vitriolic language of hate. Taxes cause Tea Party Express members, drunken on the wine of their privilege and oblivious to the condition of their country, to shoot racial slurs to minority and progressive leaders who are pruning their vines of wealth. They may not see that this money goes to help provide healthcare to citizens harmed by diseases injected by the reckless industrial contamination the companies they profit from caused these recipients of federal aid. No, they just see a “gangster government.”

These are the challenges of the century – to reconcile these angered members of society to each other lest they continue to despise their darker brothers and sisters for their color because of minority’s effects on hegemony. I appreciate your work on defining the white man because it helps see how limitless the potential of a colored man or woman truly is.

Hopefully,
W.E.B. DuBois

1. How do both Chesnutt and DuBois see being a minority as a "problem"?
2. Is the color-line still the problem of our 21st century?