It was the ideal of “book-learning ”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “It was the ideal of “book-learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the…”
Editor's note · Context
From his seminal work, this passage identifies the emerging ideal among Black Americans as "book-learning," driven by a deep curiosity to overcome enforced ignorance and understand the power of knowledge.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.