The Future Of The Race :: essays research papers

The title of Gates and Wests book evokes 19th and early twentieth-century works Martin Delayns Past, Present and succeeding(a) of the Negro Race (1854), William Hannibal Thomass The American NegroWhat He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become (1901)& angstrom unitere8230&type A8230..Within all these titles lie two assumptions no monthlong so openly embraced that it is possible to pronounce of African-Americans in the singular&8212as what used to be called the Negro and now most often appears as the erosive community&8212and that the authors in question possess authority to speak for the whole African American race. Gates and West, two of our conveying black intellectuals, cast themselves as the grandchildren of what Du Bois called the Talented Tenth. Perhaps, with the Du Boisian Vandyke beards and the DuBoisian three-piece suits, the grandsons of Du Bois himself. Certainly they atomic number 18 taking upon themselves the Talented Tenths early twentieth century respons ibility to lead the race.Who is the Talented Tenth? This time-bound phrase comes from Du Boiss 1903 essay, The Negro Problem, quoted in the Appendix of The Future of the Race, and begin The Negro race, like all races, is going to be relieve by its exceptional men. These exceptional men, and Du Bois did mean men, would "guide the Mass absent from the contamination and death of the Worst. The Talented Tenth would shoulder the task of intoxicate the race without succumbing to money-grubbing selfishness their formal education signified their intelligence and enlightened character. In 1903, the Talented Tenth was broadminded and big-hearted by definition.The passage of forty-five years diminish Du Boiss assurance. By 1948 he had revised his appraisal, and that revision also appears in the Appendix. He confessed error of his assumption that altruism flowed automatically from higher education. The Best hands had not become the best men. He lamented that the Talented Tenth had mos tly produced self-indulgent egotists who turned their training toward personal advancement. Meanwhile, Du Bois had been learning to respect the populace from reading Marx. Nonetheless, he still cherished a hope that a new, self-sacrificing Talented Tenth of internationally minded men&8212still men&8212would ally African Americans to the peoples of the Third gentleman and uplift the colored masses universally.Gates and West, who teach at Du Boiss consume Harvard University, accept his challenge with all its Victorian mission of uplift. Although they announce their essays as the fruit of long conversations in Cambridge, they do not enter into dialogue.