Is Booker T. Washington any Different From Ron De Santis?

Just asking….

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The souls of Black folk.

It was William Edward Burghardt Dubois’s classic which anticipated the titanic culture wars, which our politicians (on both sides of the Atlantic) have waged against us in the last century.

Those who have read the book will readily recognize the point being made here on the subject of this article —Booker Taliaferro Washington.

We must appreciate that the profoundly complex issue of the education of the Black man and woman in America has been with us for the very longest time and in Booker T. Washington, white America had a man who spoke their language and sought to assuage them at every turn.

In our protagonist’s head, three things mattered:

· The Industrial education of Black folk

· The conciliation of the south

· Silence and submission on the question of civil rights

To explain things further, Booker T. Washington didn’t care very much about his own people learning the sort of things which could see them competing at the highest levels in Yale, Harvard and America’s leading universities, but absorbing the sorts of things which would have a race of people in perpetual subservience to white folk.