Trenton, sorry to break it to you but WEB Du Bois was a black elitist. His theories about racial equality had more to do with middle class light skinned blacks [such as himself] gaining parity with whites than the whole black "race" [to use his word] gaining parity. His concept of the "Talented Tenth" is elitist and as unAmerican as arguing for the imposition of Latin American latifundismo in the US.
Booker T Washington, which Du Bois hated, cared more for regular black people than Du Bois ever did. If anything, the "twoness" that Du Bois felt related more to his discomfort of being both black and middle class at the same time. While Washington's Atlanta Compromise sought to secure a firm economic base from which blacks can then ascend the social hierarchy after some generations [same assimilation trajectory as the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, etc] Du Bois was concerned more with blacks getting an elevated social status in society when they did not have a widespread economic base. This desire really emanated from the small percentage of blacks in the 1890's to 1920's that have achieved middle class status.
Du Bois' failed and bankrupt strategies and philosophies are unfortunately enduring--from the vulgar race baiting of Al Sharpton to the corporate shakedown shenanigans of Jesse Jackson to the sophisticated yet subsidy-addicted visions of the current NAACP.
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Originally posted by Trenton
As a Muslim American, I find myself, rather, conflicted in the same way that Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois described African Americans nearly a century ago in "The Souls of Black Folk." "One ever feels his twoness," Du Bois wrote in 1903, "an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
As unforgiving as was the Nation of Islam's Elijah Muhammad toward the sins of America's "blue-eyed devils" against my enslaved African American forefathers, the message I learned from him was that Allah (God) and Allah alone would bring about that judgement, that universal peace wherein all people could at last live together.
Mr. Muhammad found his followers in a state of lethargy -- mentally "dead" for all practical purposes. Instead of recruiting young men and women to die for a cause, he raised them to want to live, so they could influence for the better their own downtrodden and neglected black communities.
Black Americans who were converted to Islam walked away from crime and drugs and alcohol and death, into energetic lives with only their wits and the message of Islam -- peace, submission to the will of Allah -- as their weapons.
When civil rights workers and their more militant brethren in movements like the Black Panther Party were being routinely beaten and murdered, "Black Muslims" went forward in a hostile America in safety, with not so much as a penknife in their possession. And black America -- all of America -- is much better off thanks to the presence of Black Muslims in the last half of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, Americans reviled them as "the hate that hate produced," and in the Arab world, orthodox Muslims dismissed them as not being "real" Muslims.
For myself, I learned during my orientation into the faith that the most often used word in the Qur'an -- the Islamic scriptures -- is not "jihad," which is mistakenly construed to mean "holy war," but rather "raheem," which means "mercy." I, for one, am quite content to worship a God more merciful than warlike.
Jihad is better defined as a striving toward self-purification in the path of Allah by the individual, and the collective struggle of a community against all forms of injustice and tyranny. The Arabic word "qitaal" is the word that means fighting.
"I believe, as one who has declared himself to be a righteous Muslim, that I should not participate in any wars which take the lives of humans. I do not believe that this nation should force me to participate in such wars."
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