It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice.
Du Bois critiques the oversimplified arguments from both Black and white communities regarding the causes of racial prejudice and social conditions.
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Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.
Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.
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.
Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.