The Future Of The Race :: essays research papers

The title of Gates and West's book evokes nineteenth and early twentieth-century works: Martin Delayn's Past, Present and Future of the Negro Race (1854), William Hannibal Thomas's The American Negro:What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become (1901)…….. Within all these titles lie two assumptions no longer so openly embraced: that it is possible to speak of African-Americans in the singular—as what used to be called 'the Negro'; and now most often appears as 'the black community';—and that the authors in question possess authority to speak for the whole African American race. Gates and West, two of our leading 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 are taking upon themselves the Talented Tenth's early twentieth century responsibility to lead the race. Who is the Talented Tenth? This time-bound phrase comes from Du Bois's 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 saved by its exceptional men.'; These exceptional men, and Du Bois did mean men, would "guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst.'; The Talented Tenth would shoulder the task of uplifting 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 diminished Du Bois's 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 Men had not become the best men. He lamented that the Talented Tenth had mostly produced self-indulgent egotists who turned their training toward personal advancement. Meanwhile, Du Bois had been learning to respect the masses from reading Marx. Nonetheless, he still cherished a hope that a new, self-sacrificing Talented Tenth of internationally minded men—still men—would ally African Americans to the peoples of the Third World and uplift the colored masses universally. Gates and West, who teach at Du Bois's own 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.