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Consequences of Slavery

Through all the erudite and eloquent prose, the visually powerful figurative language, and even  through his formula for change, W.E.B. Dubois sought to bridge an understanding for his reader of the African American condition. His larger purpose in a chapter titled "Of Our Spiritual Striving" within his most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, was to allow the reader to fathom the efforts levied by African Americans to realize their freedom.

Within this chapter, something else surfaced that is important for all of us to understand. I mentioned yesterday that slavery remains today, albeit of a subtler kind. Within his chapter, Dubois mentions the consequences of prejudice, which itself can be a result of slavery. He says, in the context of explaining what he called a "shadow prejudice," that
 "...the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate."
Perhaps the most difficult of these consequences is the "lowering of ideals." When we agree with those thoughts, we allow our dreams to diminish, to make us feel as though we are capable of less than what we had once felt so confident we could become. Attainable dreams then become pipe dreams, not because they are impossible, but because we are convinced that they are.

This subtler slavery, then, is a slavery to smallness, and its chains cannot be broken except by the proof that you are bigger than the person in your mind. To put this into practice often takes failure, but the comforting part about failure is that it can teach you your strengths and limitations. In other words, you get a clearer picture of yourself. While dreams may then be tempered, they will not be lost. Duboid goes on to say,
"Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,-- the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress."
To remain small in our minds is not an option.

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