The Truth Leads to Beauty

In W.E.B Du bois’ “Criteria of Negro Art”, Truth is a term that is repeated by Du bois to emphasize how it is an important aspect of Beauty that Black artists need to demonstrate in their works. Dubois sates that for a Black artist to demonstrate beauty, there must be Truth, and, “… not for…

The Beauty of Truth and Right: Du Bois on Black Art and Justice

In “Criteria of Negro Art”, W. E. B. Du Bois acclaims the development of black art alongside the continuing fight for racial equality in the United States, condemning both those who cannot understand its development, considering their understanding that a people cannot at the same time be fighting and creating art, and those who are…

The Twilight Zone: Galactic Obscurity and Objectification of Blackness

One: Science fiction often centralizes upon the consideration of the benefits and consequences of acquiring a means of superior technology possessed by a technologically superior species.  Regarding the latter (consequences), the genre often depicts humanity deliberating moral questions in order to determine if whether or not a sacrifice needed to be made by their species…

The Soul of Double Consciousness in America

In one of the most well-known passages of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois expounds on the ideas of what it is like to be black and American in a racist America of the early 1900s. In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”, Du Bois describes a “double-consciousness” in which African Americans can only “[see themselves]…

“A Mother-Like Form,” Not a Mother

“A form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife – aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low…

The Humanness of “Blood” in The Souls of Black Folk

Early on in The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois, the author presents his frustration living in America separated so strongly by a “color-line”. After reading more of the book, it becomes clear DuBois is presenting anecdotes and people that prove the humanness of black Americans. One tool that stuck out to me was…