Read Beat (...and repeat)
If you're like me, you like to know things but how much time to invest? That's the question. Here's the answer: Read Beat--Interviews with authors of new releases. These aren't book reviews but short (about 25-30 minutes on the average) chats with folks that usually have taken a lot of time to research a topic, enough to write a book about it. Hopefully, there's a topic or two that interests you. I try to come up with subjects that fascinate me or I need to know more about. Hopefully, listeners will agree. I'm Steve Tarter, former reporter for the Peoria Journal Star and a contributor to WCBU-FM, the Peoria public radio outlet, from 20202 to 2024. I post regularly on stevetarter.substack.com.
Read Beat (...and repeat)
"Unveiling the Color Line" by Lisa McLeod
W.E. B. DuBois went on record in 1896 saying that white supremacy significantly warps whites' perceptions and behaviors. Even earlier--in 1890--as a 22-year-old Harvard College student--he called out Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
He outlined the Davis career in a 10-minute speech as one who "advanced civilization by murdering Indians" and participated in the "national disgrace called the Mexican War" before attaining "the crowning absurdity" of his career, heading up the Confederacy, "the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free."
Unveiling the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois on the Problem of Whiteness by Lisa McLeod, a lecturer at Northeastern University in Boston, explores DuBois's views of whiteness as a political and moral issue.
There's a lot to cover with DuBois, an African American who lived to be 95 years old and whose writings about the need for equality for close to a century.
It was Martin Luther King Jr. who credited DuBois as the man who "demolished the lies about Negroes in their most important and creative period of history."
"Slaveholders were convinced that Black people would not work without force, that slavery was their natural condition. DuBois argued that this belief was as certain to southerners as the rising and setting of the sun, and the United States never implemented a widespread reeducation program to correct this or any other misconception regarding African-descended people," wrote McLeod.
"Instead, when southerners rebuilt after the war, they attempted to make Negores slaves in everything but name. This is a shameful and shamefully underreported truth of American history," McLeod noted.
DuBois said the South understood the capabilities of Blacks. "It is nonsense to say that the South knew nothing about the capabilities of the Negro race. Southerners knew Negroes far better than Northerners. There was not a single slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learning and efficiency as the mass of poor white people around and about, and some quite as capable as the average slaveholder," DuBois noted in 1935.
McLeod presses DuBois's point that it was the duty of white Americans to work against racism for the benefit of all.
