So the black boy asked of sky and sun and flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as he grew, neither the world nor the world’s rough ways.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “So the black boy asked of sky and sun and flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as he grew, neither the world nor…”
Editor's note · Context
In The Souls of Black Folk, this sentence captures a young Black boy's profound existential questioning and growing disillusionment with the world due to his experiences.
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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.
But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.
Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.