The chief meaning of our present thinking is that the disproportion between wealth and poverty today cannot be adequately accounted for by the thrift and ignorance of the rich and the poor.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “The chief meaning of our present thinking is that the disproportion between wealth and poverty today cannot be…”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois critiques the economic disparity between wealth and poverty, emphasizing that it cannot solely be attributed to individual behaviors.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving.
So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.
If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.