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.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
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.
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.
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.
Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.