Dr. W.E.B. DuBois
Lecture on 23feb1953
(Transcribed by Paul Goettlich from a "Voices of Pacifica" recording.)
| Mindfully.org note: These words of W.E.B. DuBois are a half-century old, but could have just as meaningfully been said today. Dr. DuBois was a noted African-American intellectual and social leader. He was the founder of the NAACP, the Pan African Congress, and the Niagara movement, as well as the publisher of Crisis Magazine and author of the Souls of Black Folk (AC McClurg and Co., Chicago, 1903). He studied the African slave trade and the foundation of African-American institutions, schools, and churches. In 1909 he began to examine international affairs, and was a founding member of the pan-African movement. Between World Wars I and II he took advantage of the progressive movement to call for social change, but the Cold War era lead to his being discredited owing to his opposition to McCarthyism and the anti-communist movement. It was not until the 1980's that DuBois' good works have again become a subject of study within American society. source: Pacifica Archive Website 12jul02 |
W.E.B. Du Bois
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There is in America today, a confusion of minds, so tragic and misleading, that our whole thought and philosophy is distorted. At the very time that economics, that is the study of work and income, is of foremost importance to our well being, economics as economics is not being studied in our schools. Neither in the elementary schools, nor in colleges are students learning about the philosophy of money and exchange, production and trade, wealth and savings.
Our university students are pouring into chemistry and physics, and deserting history and sociology. Why? Because to us, the basic problem is how large an income we can get, how much money we can control. What careers for our children will ensure them the most wealth? The object of our ambition is rising to higher and higher incomes brackets. And what we see as progress is escaping from manual labor—the white-collar jobs—thence to employing others to work for us. Then coming into possession of so much property that we may we need not work for ourselves, so that we may sit in stark idleness or grovel in dissipation, having never learned anything to do except to arrange to have nothing to do.
(Laughter in audience)
From this contradiction arises the strange paradox that the poverty for the worker must be perpetual, in order that he be compelled to work for the rich. For most Americans, this paradox is at once true and impossible. They sit dumb and bemused before it.
(Possible editing of tape to skip to a later section of his speech)
What is life, but the attempt of human beings to be happy and contented in a world with which all its ill, has a mass of sun and waters, of trees and flowers, of beauty and love. To realize this at its highest we need food, clothes, and shelter. We need health of body, and balance of mind. We want to know what this world is, how its wonderful laws act, who its peoples are, and how they think and act, and how what they have done in ages passed may guide us today. We want to see, realize, and conceive beauty in form and line and color. We want to know our own souls and the myriad-sided souls of others. And then to imagine what might be if what is should grow to what we wish. This is life.
This is the end of the fairy tale of life. We know this. And yet we sit dumb and muddled before it. Seeing the world as a twisted contradiction, yet the problem is simple. We have a rich land—earth and water, minerals and vegetables of every sort, breath-taking scenery in mountain, ocean, river, and vale. We have combed the Earth of its races for its strength, intelligence, and daring.
All that is asked is that each of us do what we can, first to supply our own wants in food and shelter, health and learning. But more than that, that we do for others what they need done and cannot do for themselves, and yet which must be done least we suffer. Beyond that there are many tasks, which all working together, can do faster and better than many working apart. All for one and one for all is an axiom of life. And to refuse to let all work in common would be as silly as to let no one work alone. All this is clear and true. And yet, it is blinded in our eyes.
The object of work for many is not to work. The end of labor is not to do what must be done, but to get somebody else to do it. The wealth of the nation—the land and water, the coal and oil, the iron and aluminum—aught not to belong to the nation, some say, but to those who by chance or cheating, have legal power to make you pay their price for what God gave to them.
Even if ten-thousand men combined, and in sweat and sacrifice, make steal, wheat, corn, meat, or shoes, the results of a combined labor belongs to one or a few of them, while the others scramble to keep from starving. What has gone wrong?
It is clear that the workers do not understand the meaning of work. Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private property.
We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can/do read worthwhile books.
(This lecture does not end here, but this is all that was played during the fundraising programming in May 2002. The announcer, Andrea Lewis said that later in his speech, W.E.B DuBois mentions how much he hates the F.B.I.)
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