A Native Son

Weekly Wrap Up - September 18, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:25:12 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie contrasts the inspiring energy of Pittsburgh’s grassroots organizers with ongoing systemic cruelty, condemning a new $2.8 billion U.S. arms sale to Israel and domestic efforts to silence pro-Palestinian speech. He highlights the domestic toll of an unchecked executive branch and the endless U.S.-Iran war, pointing to surging diesel prices and Alabama’s rushed execution of Jeffery Lee as evidence of a metastasizing national selfishness. Despite these crises, Eddie finds hope in recent conservative pushback against MAGA’s white Christian nationalism, urging a multiracial coalition that forges a new democratic social contract.

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Middle East Conflict & Gaza Policy

U.S.-Iran Escalation & Global Trade

The Economy & Technology

Executive Overreach & Domestic Projects

Civil Rights, Justice & Party Divisions

An Epidemic of Selfishness

Eddie — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:25:50 GMT

There is a moment in James Baldwin’s interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark on May 24, 1963, that keeps drawing my attention. Against the backdrop of the horrors of Birmingham and in the immediate aftermath of a meeting with Robert Kennedy who, with a kind of insufferable arrogance, dismissed the idea of his brother escorting a small Black girl to school in the deep South as a “meaningless moral gesture,” Baldwin judged the character of the country and found it corrupted.

Babies had been beaten. Dogs sicced on innocents. Firehoses, with enough pressure to rip the bark off trees, were directed at children. Ours, in his view, was a nation full of “moral monsters.”

This moral apathy – this death of the heart – strikes me as a particularly apt description of our current days. Cruelty, selfishness, greed, and hatred have overrun our politics and policies. Children are thrown in detention centers. People disappeared. And politicians post photographs of men in chains with the caption, “Next Stop, Haiti.”

We talk about an epidemic of loneliness and what it portends for our democracy: that people are isolated and lack meaningful social connections. But what of the epidemic of selfishness, the death of the heart, that makes men and women so cruel?

Over the last forty years or so, this country has been guided by a political and economic philosophy that has centered selfishness as the key to well-being. We have been transformed from people in community with others into self-interested persons in competition and rivalry with each other. The sole measure of value has been material gain. The role of government reduced to ensuring the efficient workings of the economy and national defense (often in the service of American corporations). Social safety nets shredded as the most vulnerable among us have been demonized. We have seen the massive transfer of wealth from working people to the richest of the rich. And we now confront the monstrous consequences of it all.

Liberty stands as a synonym for selfishness. Empathy considered a sin.

Much of this has been motivated by the ongoing effort to undo the gains of the freedom movements of the mid-20^th century. The inheritors of the people Baldwin described in 1963 as moral monsters now seek to rip apart the very idea of the state that emerged in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.

That hatefulness joined with a view of political economy gave birth to this “zombie democracy.” A nation full of the walking dead (no wonder “wokeness” presents such a threat).

Appeals to charity and philanthropy as an indication of the goodness of American character won’t hide the reality of this deep malaise. These are often sentimental gestures. Virtue performances mostly. A gift masquerading as justice. Sentimentality buries the harsh reality underneath what Wallace Stevens called “a failure of feeling.” It masks cruelty.

But in our days people don’t even hide behind sentimentality. They are simply mean-spirited and cruel.

Something more is required to address this epidemic of selfishness. We must attack the root causes: the idea that the country belongs only to white people, an economic system that assumes that some people are disposable, that material gain is our primary source of value, and that government’s responsibility is limited to economics and defense.

We have to imagine a robust idea of the public good that assumes that every human being has dignity and standing. We need a revival in this country that gives voice to a social contract that states our basic obligations to one another. Not to retrieve some idea of an Edenic past. The fantasy of American goodness will only seal our fate. But a revival of our moral and political imaginations to make real, once and for all, the Beloved Community. A new politics for a new America.

That will require an antidote to the selfishness – the death of the heart – that has covered the land in the darkness and made moral monsters of so many.

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Weekly Wrap Up - September 11, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 21:36:48 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie connects the 25th anniversary of 9/11 to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the economic strain of the U.S.-Iran war. Domestically, he warns of blatant midterm election interference—highlighting postal service disruptions and Trump’s promise of a $5,000 voter dividend—while condemning the administration’s cruel, dehumanizing treatment of immigrants - like the Haitian community in Ohio. Eddie echoes demands for a federal investigation into a disturbing string of Black hanging deaths before concluding with a tribute to retiring Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch.

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9/11 Anniversary & Middle East Conflict

U.S.-Iran Escalation & Economic Impacts

Elections, Voting Rights & The Republican Convention

Federal Data & The Census

Civil Rights & Hate Crime Investigations

Immigration Enforcement & ICE

Cultural Institutions & Transitions

The New York Times: Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch Announces Resignation

Forge Negro-Labor Unity for Peace and Jobs

Eddie — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 14:39:13 GMT

On this Labor Day, I decided to post an edited version of Paul Robeson’s speech, “Forge Negro-Labor Unity for Peace and Jobs,” delivered at the National Labor Conference for Negro Rights in Chicago in 1950. [For the sake of space, I excluded the sections on Africa in World Affairs and The Truman Plan for Africa. I would urge you to read the entire speech.]

Forge Negro-Labor Unity for Peace and Jobs

Paul Robeson

I am profoundly happy to be here tonight.

No meeting held in America at this mid-century turning point in world history holds more significant promise for the bright future toward which humanity strives than this National Labor Conference for Negro Rights. For here are gathered together the basic forces—the Negro sons and daughters of labor and their white brothers and sisters—whose increasingly active intervention in national and world affairs is an essential requirement if we are to have a peaceful and democratic solution of the burning issues of our times.

Again, we must recall the state of the world in which we live, and especially the America in which we live. Our history as Americans, black and white, has been a long battle, so often unsuccessful, for the most basic rights of citizenship, for the most simple standards of living, the avoidance of starvation—for survival.

I have been up and down the land time and again, thanks in the main to you trade unionists gathered here tonight. You helped to arouse American communities to give answers to Peekskill, to protect the right of freedom of speech and assembly. And I have seen and daily see the unemployment, the poverty, the plight of our children, our youth, the backbreaking labor of our women—and too long, too long have my people wept and mourned. We’re tired of this denial of a decent existence. We demand some approximation of the American democracy we have helped to build.

Who Built this Land?

For who built this great land of ours?

Who have been the guarantors of our historic democratic tradition of freedom and equality? Whose labor and whose life have produced the great cities, the industrial machine, the basic culture and the creature comforts of which our “Voice of America” spokesmen so proudly boast?

It is well to remember that the America which we know has risen out of the toil of the many millions who have come here seeking freedom from all parts of the world:

The Irish and Scotch indentured servants who cleared the forests, built the colonial homesteads and were part of the productive backbone of our early days. The millions of German immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century; the millions more from Eastern Europe whose sweat and sacrifice in the steel mills, the coal mines and the factories made possible the industrial revolution of the Eighties and Nineties; the brave Jewish people from all parts of Europe and the world who have so largely enriched our lives on this new continent; the workers from Mexico and from the East—Japan and the Philippines—whose labor has helped make the West and Southwest a rich and fruitful land.

And, through it all, from the earliest days—before Columbus—the Negro people, upon whose unpaid toil as slaves the basic wealth of this nation was built!

These are the forces that have made America great and preserved our democratic heritage.

They have arisen at each moment of crisis to play the decisive role in our national affairs.

The Strength of the Negro People

In the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Negro soldiers who took arms in the Union cause won, not only their own freedom—the freedom of the Negro people—but, by smashing the institution of slave labor, provided the basis for the development of trade unions of free working men in America.

And so, even today, as this National Labor Conference for Negro Rights charts the course ahead for the whole Negro people and their sincere allies, it sounds a warning to American bigotry and reaction. For if fifteen million Negroes, led by their staunchest sons and daughters of labor, and joined by the white working class, say that there shall be no more Jim Crow in America, then there shall be no more Jim Crow!

If fifteen million Negroes say, and mean it, no more anti-Semitism, then there shall be no more anti-Semitism!

If fifteen million Negroes, inspired by their true leaders in the labor movement, demand an end to the persecution of the foreign-born, then the persecution of the foreign-born will end!

If fifteen million Negroes in one voice demand an end to the jailing of the leaders of the American progressive thought and culture and the leaders of the American working class, then their voice will be strong enough to empty the prisons of the victims of America’s cold war.

If fifteen million Negroes are for peace, then there will be peace!

And behind these fifteen million are 180 million of our African brothers and sisters, 60 million of our kindred in the West Indies and Latin America—for whom, as for us, war and the Point Four program would mean a new imperialist slavery.

The Issues of Our Time

I know that you understand these problems—and especially the basic problem of peace. You have already outlined the issues in your sessions, and they are clear to liberty-loving men around the world.

Shall we have the atom-bomb and hydrogen bomb and rocket-ship and bacteriological war, or shall we have peace in the world; the hellish destruction of the men, women and children, of whole civilian populations, or the peaceful construction of the good life everywhere?

This for all men is the over-riding issue of the day. From it all other questions flow. Its solution, one way or the other, will decide the fate of all other questions which concern the human family.

For the warmakers are also the fascist-minded; and the warmakers are also the profit-hungry trusts who drive labor, impose Taft-Hartley laws and seek to crush the unions.

Depending on how we succeed in the fight for peace, then, we shall find the answers to the other two major questions of the day.

Shall we have fascist brute rule or democratic equality and friendship among peoples and nations; the triumphant enshrinement of the “master race” theories our soldiers died to destroy, or liberty and freedom for the American people and their colonial allies throughout the world.

And finally, shall we have increased wealth for the already bloated monopolies in the midst of rising hunger, poverty and disease for the world’s poor; or shall the masses of toiling men and women enjoy the wealth and comforts which their sweat and labor produce?

American Imperialism vs. the Colonial World

Yes, these are the issues.

They will be resolved in our time—and you may be sure that you have met, not a moment too soon. Because in the five years since V-J Day the American trusts and the government which they control have taken their stand more and more openly on the side of a cold war which they are desperately trying to heat up; on the side of the fascist and kingly trash which they seek to restore to power all over Europe and Asia; on the side of the princes of economic privilege whose every cent of unprecedented profits is wrung out of the toil-broken bodies of the masses of men.

Mr. Truman and Mr. Acheson want us to believe that they seek peace in the world. But the people’s memory is not so short.

How well and how bitterly do we recall that soon after Roosevelt died American arms were being shipped to the Dutch—not for the protection of the Four Freedoms, not to advance the claims of liberty—but for the suppression of the brave Indonesian patriots in their fight for independence.

That was 1946, and today—four years later—we have the announcement of another program of arms shipments to destroy a movement for colonial independence—this time arms for the French imperialists to use against the brave Vietnamese patriots in what the French progressive masses call the “dirty war” in Indo-China.

These two acts of the Truman Administration are significant landmarks of our time!

They cry out to the world that our nation, born in a bloody battle for freedom against imperialist tyranny, has itself become the first enemy of freedom and the chief tyrant of the mid-century world. They warn more than half the world’s population who people the vast continents of Asia and Africa that, until the course of our foreign policy is changed, they can no longer look to the U.S. government for help in their strenuous struggles for a new and independent life.

And, to be sure, they have already averted their gaze from us….

The Task of Labor

Your tasks, then, are clear. The Negro trade unionists must increasingly exert their influence in every aspect of the life of the Negro community. No church, no fraternal, civic or social organization in our communities must be permitted to continue without the benefit of the knowledge and experience which you have gained through your struggles in the great American labor movement. You are called upon to provide the spirit, the determination, the organizational skill, the firm steel of unyielding militancy to the age-old strivings of the Negro people for equality and freedom.

On the shoulders of the Negro trade unionists there is the tremendous responsibility to rally the power of the whole trade-union movement, white and black, to the battle for the liberation of our people, the future of our women and children. Anyone who fails in this does the Negro people a great disservice.

And to the white trade unionists present—a special challenge. You must fight in the ranks of labor for the full equality of your Negro brothers; for their right to work at any job; to receive equal pay for equal work; for an end to Jim Crow unions; for real fair employment practices within the unions as well as in all other phases of the national life; for the elimination of the rot of white supremacy notions which the employers use to poison the minds of the white workers in order to pit them against their staunchest allies, the Negro people—in short, for the unbreakable unity of the working people, black and white, without which there can be no free trade unions, no real prosperity, no constitutional rights, no peace for anybody, whatever the color of his skin. To accept Negro leadership of men and women and youth; to accept the fact that the Negro workers have become a part of the vanguard of the whole American working class. To fail the Negro people is to fail the whole American people.

I know that you who have come from all parts of the nation will meet this challenge. I have watched and participated in your militant struggles everywhere I have been these past years. Here in Chicago with the Packinghouse Workers; with auto workers of Detroit; the seamen and longshoremen of the West Coast; the tobacco workers of North Carolina; the miners of Pittsburgh and West Virginia; and the steel workers of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota; the furriers, clerks and office workers of New York, Philadelphia and numerous other big cities and small towns throughout the land.

I have met you at the train stations and airports, extending the firm hand of friendship. You have packed the meetings which followed Peekskill to overflowing, thus giving the answer to the bigots and war-makers. I know you well enough to know that, once the affairs of my people are in the hands of our working men and women, our day of freedom is not far off. I am proud as an artist to be the one who comes from hearty Negro working people—and I know that you can call on me at any time—South, North, East or West—all my energy is at your call.

So—as you move forward, you do so in the best traditions of American democracy and in league with the hundreds of millions throughout the world whose problems are much the same as yours.

These are peoples of all faiths, all lands, all colors, and all political beliefs—united by the common thirst for freedom, security, and peace.

Our American press and the commentators and politicians would discourage these basic human aspirations because Communists adhere to them as well as others. Now I have seen the liberty-loving, peace-seeking partisans in many parts of the world. And though many of them are not, it is also true that many are Communists. They represent a new way of life in the world, a new way that has won the allegiance of almost half the world’s population. In the last war they were the first to die in nation after nation. They were the heart of the underground and anti-fascist movements and city after city in Europe displays monuments to their heroism. They need no apologies. They have been a solid core of the struggle for freedom.

Now, Mr. Truman and Mr. Acheson would have us believe that all the problems of this nation, and the chief difficulties of the Negro people are caused by these people who were the first anti-fascists.

I, for one, cannot believe that the jailing of Eugene Dennis for the reason that he contended that the House Un-American Activities Committee lacked proper constitutional authority because it harbored as a member John Rankin who holds office as a result of the disfranchisement of the Negro half of the population of Mississippi and most of the white half as well—I cannot believe that Dennis’ jailing will help in the solution of the grievous problems of Negro working men and women.

Mr. Truman calls upon us to save the so-called Western democracies from the “menace” of Communism.

But ask the Negro ministers in Birmingham whose homes were bombed by the Ku Klux Klan what is the greatest menace in their lives! Ask the Trenton Six and the Martinsville Seven! Ask Willie McGee, languishing in a Mississippi prison and doomed to die within the next month unless our angry voices save him. Ask Haywood Patterson, somewhere in America, a fugitive from Alabama barbarism for a crime he, nor any one of the Scottsboro boys, ever committed. Ask the growing numbers of Negro unemployed in Chicago and Detroit. Ask the fearsome lines of relief clients in Harlem. Ask the weeping mother whose son is the latest victim of police brutality. Ask Maceo Snipes and Isaiah Nixon, killed by mobs in Georgia because they tried to exercise the constitutional right to vote. Ask any Negro worker receiving unequal pay for equal work, denied promotion despite his skill and because of his skin, still the last hired and the first fired. Ask fifteen million American Negroes, if you please, “What is the greatest menace in your life?” and they will answer in a thunderous voice, “Jim-Crow Justice! Mob Rule! Segregation! Job Discrimination!”—in short white supremacy and all its vile works.

Yes, we know who our friends are, and we know our enemies, too. Howard Fast, author of the epic novel Freedom Road who went to jail this past Wednesday for fighting against the restoration of fascism in Spain, is not our enemy. He is a true friend of the Negro people. And George Marshall, Chairman of the Civil Rights Congress, who went to jail last Friday and whose fight for the life of Willie McGee of Mississippi is one of the great democratic sagas of our time—he is not our enemy; he is a true friend of the Negro people. And John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood screen writers, who went to jail the day before yesterday for maintaining their faith in the sacred American doctrine of privacy of political belief—they too are friends of the people.

Our enemies are the lynchers, the profiteers, the men who give F.E.P.C. the run-around in the Senate, the atom-bomb maniacs and the war-makers.

One simple reason why I know that we shall win is that our friends are so much more numerous than our enemies. They will have to build many, many more jails—not only here but all over the world to hold the millions who are determined never to give up the fight for freedom, decency, equality, abundance, and peace.

….

Your meeting tonight as men and women of American labor is in good time because it places you in this great stream of peace-loving humanity, determined to win a world of real brotherhood. It will enable you, I hope, to place the Negro trade unionists in the front ranks of a crusade to secure at least a million signatures of Negro Americans to this Stockholm appeal for peace.

As the black worker takes his place upon the stage of history—not for a bit part, but to play his full role with dignity in the very center of the action—a new day dawns in human affairs. The determination of Negro workers, supported by the whole Negro people, and joined with the mass of progressive white working men and women, can save the labor movement, C.I.O. and A.F. of L., from the betrayals of the Murrays and the Greens, the Careys, Rieves and Dubinskys—and from the betrayals too, of the Townsends, the Weavers and Randolphs. This alliance can beat back the attacks against the living standards and the very lives of the Negro people. It can stop the drive toward fascism. It can halt the chariot of war in its tracks.

And it can help to bring to pass in America and in the world the dream our fathers dreamed—of a land that’s free, of a people growing in friendship, in love, in cooperation and peace.

This is history’s challenge to you. I know you will not fail.

For a brief introduction to Paul Robeson’s life look at this documentary: Paul Robeson: A Man for the Future

Weekly Wrap Up - September 4, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:14:00 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie analyzes a chilling week of escalations, condemning Israeli proposals to forcibly remove Palestinians from Gaza and the ongoing economic toll of the U.S. war in Iran. Domestically, he warns of coordinated midterm election interference—including mail-in ballot restrictions, polling place closures, and greenlit ICE arrests at voting sites—while mourning the tragic suicide of Pierre Damas Bel, a Haitian student that took their own life after enduring ICE’s dehumanizing tactics and policies. Eddie concludes by calling out the administration’s threats against universities’ tax-exempt status, Trump’s disruptive D.C. monument plans, and honoring the late Gloria Steinem and Cassandra Wilson.

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Middle East Conflict & Gaza Policy

The Economy, U.S.-Iran War & Military Operations

Voting Rights & Election Interference

Domestic Projects & Administration Actions

Immigration Enforcement, ICE & Federal Agencies

Higher Education & Tax Policy

In Memoriam

Class in Session - September 2, 2026

Eddie — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:08:14 GMT

Did you miss Eddie’s Livestream yesterday? Not to worry! As a subscriber to A Native Son, you’ll be able to watch the recording!

In this livestream, Eddie discusses “The Forethought” and “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” in DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk.

~ Class is now in session! ~

Skip to 1m:55s to jump right in!

A New School Year

Eddie — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 19:04:17 GMT

It is the beginning of a new school year, and I must admit I am anxious. I love seeing the bright faces of first year students. So young—fresh out of high school, wide-eyed and ready to begin their college careers. But they are stepping onto campuses as universities and colleges face an unprecedented assault on their mission and purpose. Dark politics shadow the excitement of the start of the term. And students, faculty, staff and administrators are walking on eggshells because of it.

At least two reasons motivate these attacks: 1) to break the back of campuses as ideal places of political independence and 2) to muddy how our students learn and what they take to be knowledge. All with the aim, I believe, to make college students more compliant to authoritarian rule or, at least, compliant to the authority of traditions as conservatives understand them.

Ever since the student movements of the mid-20th century college campuses have been seen by conservatives as the last (and, perhaps, most dangerous) bastion of liberal radicalism. Some version of William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) has been written over the successive decades decrying college campuses as the primary reason for the intellectual and moral decline of America. Instead of learning the “classics” and “the best which has been thought and said,” students, these people believe, are being indoctrinated by radical leftists (and their students like me) who retreated to the safety of universities after the social movements of the 1960s.

Their students end up questioning authority and, on occasion, protesting policies as they seek to hold government and others accountable.

The goal has been, and continues to be, to bring these institutions, faculty, and their students to heel.

The Trump administration has expended a lot of energy trying to corral institutions that could hold power accountable. And that has involved an all out assault on universities. They have attacked revenue streams (from federal financial aid, federal funding of the sciences to impacting the enrollment of international students), admissions policies, and what is being taught in classrooms. The end of affirmative action has directly affected who has access to campuses (just a glance at the demographics of the first year classes at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley and Stanford offers a sense of the impact). The steady drumbeat of war against DEI (and the threat of lawsuits) has been used to bludgeon universities into compliance.

The aim has been to destabilize American higher education, to accelerate policies of austerity that would lead to contraction, and to reorder and limit who has access, especially to elite universities and colleges.

In addition to all of this, we witnessed the harsh reaction to student protests. In response to the horrors of October 7 and to the scale of Israel’s military retaliation and its historic treatment of Palestinians, students across the country engaged in campus protests against what they saw as an unfolding genocide. Some set up encampments and staged sit-ins. Others marched.

Accusations of anti-semitism were hurled about. Students, it was claimed, had made campuses unsafe for Jewish students. Others accused those who protested of failing to understand history or having their minds sullied by the “nonsense” of postcolonial theory. And many of those young people were punished. Some were expelled. Others lost internships and job offers. I saw for the first time in my 20+ year career at Princeton, seniors embargoing their senior theses out of fear of reprisal.

The Trump administration used the accusation of antisemitism as justification for withholding millions of dollars of allocated monies to universities (a recent whistleblower exposed how the administration cooked the investigations of universities accused of breaking the law). And students found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Campus protests quieted even as Trump attacked Venezuela, strangled Cuba, and launched a war of choice against Iran. Students have become more cautious (and rightly so) even though the current reality has proven them right.

Ironic, isn’t it? Antisemitism has been used in the conservative attack on universities.

All of this has happened at the same time we have witnessed an assault on how and what we teach on campuses. In defense of “western civilization” and “the classics,” some conservatives have decried the relevance of fields like Black Studies and Women Studies. This goes hand and hand with book bans and the Trump administration’s attack on public history. The Washington Post reported on the impact all of this has had on Black studies. Major programs and departments have been shuttered or diminished at universities across the country. “For three straight years,” the Post reported, “students received fewer than 700 degrees in African American studies nationally, the lowest level in the last two decades.”

In addition, we hear the demand for “view point diversity” that has given more power to politically conservative voices who see campuses as overrun by radicals (I should note that political conservatism is NOT the only measure of conservatism on campus. Someone can vote for Democrats and still have a very conservative view of, say, the discipline of English).

My point in writing all of this is simple: we begin this school term in the midst of a storm. Students are arriving on campuses in a moment when everything seems unsettled.

I keep reminding myself that no matter the darkness of our days—no matter the attempts by some to browbeat students and faculty into submission—my task is to cultivate a spirit of inquiry in my students and to equip them with the cognitive virtues that will allow them to live lives of meaning and purpose. To help them see and understand the world in all of its magnificent diversity and to view themselves in the most expansive of terms—to teach them that they contain multitudes.

This, I know, is dangerous, especially for those who want our babies’ backs bent.

Weekly Wrap Up - August 28, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:36:00 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie reviews ongoing airstrikes in Gaza, Senate efforts to monitor human rights in the West Bank, and the economic strain tied to the Iran conflict and Canadian trade tensions. Domestically, he covers record ICE arrest numbers, the deletion of federal data tracking police conduct, Democratic leadership meeting with Jared Kushner, and calls for thorough investigations into a series of hanging deaths. Eddie also highlights the widespread downsizing of university Black Studies programs. Finally, he reflects on the civic legacy of Dolly Parton.

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Middle East Conflict & Human Rights

U.S.-Iran Escalation & Foreign Policy

Economy, Tariffs & Canadian Trade

Immigration Enforcement & ICE

Federal Data, Census & Government Transparency

Domestic Politics & Party Leadership

Civil Rights, Investigations & Higher Education

In Memoriam: Dolly Parton

The Souls of White Folk

Eddie — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:16:43 GMT

Originally published in The Independent, August 10, 1910, and revised for the collection Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920) Given the clear embrace of white nationalism of the Trump administration, I thought a close reading of DuBois’s biting essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” was in order. Let’s read this together and talk about it on Substack Live.

~~~

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.

Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped — ugly, human.

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing — a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!

This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying:

“My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born — white!”

I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:

“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?”

Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!

Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately to believe such an extraordinary dictum as this? That nations are coming to believe it is manifest daily. Wave on wave, each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time. Its first effects are funny: the strut of the Southerner, the arrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum who vicariously leads your mob. Next it appears dampening generous enthusiasm in what we once counted glorious; to free the slave is discovered to be tolerable only in so far as it freed his master! Do we sense somnolent writhings in black Africa or angry groans in India or triumphant banzais in Japan? “To your tents, O Israel!” These nations are not white!

After the more comic manifestations and the chilling of generous enthusiasm come subtler, darker deeds. Everything considered, the title to the universe claimed by White Folk is faulty. It ought, at least, to look plausible. How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to make children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white man’s soul; that every great thought the world ever knew was a white man’s thought; that every great deed the world ever did was a white man’s deed; that every great dream the world ever sang was a white man’s dream. In fine, that if from the world were dropped everything that could not fairly be attributed to White Folk, the world would, if anything, be even greater, truer, better than now. And if all this be a lie, is it not a lie in a great cause?

Here it is that the comedy verges to tragedy. The first minor note is struck, all unconsciously, by those worthy souls in whom consciousness of high descent brings burning desire to spread the gift abroad,--the obligation of nobility to the ignoble. Such sense of duty assumes two things: a real possession of the heritage and its frank appreciation by the humble-born. So long, then, as humble black folk, voluble with thanks, receive barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous whites, there is much mental peace and moral satisfaction. But when the black man begins to dispute the white man’s title to certain alleged bequests of the Fathers in wage and position, authority and training; and when his attitude toward charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity; when he insists on his human right to swagger and swear and waste — then the spell is suddenly broken and the philanthropist is ready to believe that Negroes are impudent, that the South is right, and that Japan wants to fight America.

After this the descent to Hell is easy. On the pale, white faces which the great billows whirl upward to my tower I see again and again, often and still more often, a writing of human hatred, a deep and passionate hatred, vast by the very vagueness of its expressions. Down through the green waters, on the bottom of the world, where men move to and fro, I have seen a man — an educated gentleman — grow livid with anger because a little, silent, black woman was sitting by herself in a Pullman car. He was a white man. I have seen a great, grown man curse a little child, who had wandered into the wrong waiting-room, searching for its mother: “Here, you damned black — ”. He was white. In Central Park I have seen the upper lip of a quiet, peaceful man curl back in a tigerish snarl of rage because black folk rode by in a motor car. He was a white man. We have seen, you and I, city after city drunk and furious with ungovernable lust of blood; mad with murder, destroying, killing, and cursing; torturing human victims because somebody accused of crime happened to be of the same color as the mob’s innocent victims and because that color was not white! We have seen — Merciful God! in these wild days and in the name of Civilization, Justice, and Motherhood — what have we not seen, right here in America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murder done to men and women of Negro descent.

Up through the foam of green and weltering waters wells this great mass of hatred, in wilder, fiercer violence, until I look down and know that today to the millions of my people no misfortune could happen — of death and pestilence, failure and defeat — that would not make the hearts of millions of their fellows beat with fierce, vindictive joy! Do you doubt it? Ask your own soul what it would say if the next census were to report that half of black America was dead and the other half dying.

Unfortunate? Unfortunate. But where is the misfortune? Mine? Am I, in my blackness, the sole sufferer? I suffer. And yet, somehow, above the suffering, above the shackled anger that beats the bars, above the hurt that crazes there surges in me a vast pity — pity for a people imprisoned and enthralled, hampered and made miserable for such a cause, for such a phantasy!

Conceive this nation, of all human peoples, engaged in a crusade to make the “World Safe for Democracy”! Can you imagine the United States protesting against Turkish atrocities in Armenia, while the Turks are silent about mobs in Chicago and St. Louis; what is Louvain compared with Memphis, Waco, Washington, Dyersburg, and Estill Springs? In short, what is the black man but America’s Belgium, and how could America condemn in Germany that which she commits, just as brutally, within her own borders?

A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers. Say to men, earnestly and repeatedly: “Honesty is best, knowledge is power; do unto others as you would be done by.” Say this and act it and the nation must move toward it, if not to it. But say to a people: “The one virtue is to be white,” and the people rush to the inevitable conclusion, “Kill the ‘n****r’!”

Is not this the record of present America? Is not this its headlong progress? Are we not coming more and more, day by day, to making the statement “I am white,” the one fundamental tenet of our practical morality? Only when this basic, iron rule is involved is our defense of right nation-wide and prompt. Murder may swagger, theft may rule and prostitution may flourish and the nation gives but spasmodic, intermittent and lukewarm attention. But let the murderer be black or the thief brown or the violator of womanhood have a drop of Negro blood, and the righteousness of the indignation sweeps the world. Nor would this fact make the indignation less justifiable did not we all know that it was blackness that was condemned and not crime.

In the awful cataclysm of World War, where from beating, slandering, and murdering us the white world turned temporarily aside to kill each other, we of the Darker Peoples looked on in mild amaze.

Among some of us, I doubt not, this sudden descent of Europe into hell brought unbounded surprise; to others, over wide area, it brought the Schaden Freude of the bitterly hurt; but most of us, I judge, looked on silently and sorrowfully, in sober thought, seeing sadly the prophecy of our own souls.

Here is a civilization that has boasted much. Neither Roman nor Arab, Greek nor Egyptian, Persian nor Mongol ever took himself and his own perfectness with such disconcerting seriousness as the modern white man. We whose shame, humiliation, and deep insult his aggrandizement so often involved were never deceived. We looked at him clearly, with world-old eyes, and saw simply a human thing, weak and pitiable and cruel, even as we are and were.

These super-men and world-mastering demi-gods listened, however, to no low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of clay. Perhaps we, as folk of simpler soul and more primitive type, have been most struck in the welter of recent years by the utter failure of white religion. We have curled our lips in something like contempt as we have witnessed glib apology and weary explanation. Nothing of the sort deceived us. A nation’s religion is its life, and as such white Christianity is a miserable failure.

Nor would we be unfair in this criticism: We know that we, too, have failed, as you have, and have rejected many a Buddha, even as you have denied Christ; but we acknowledge our human frailty, while you, claiming super-humanity, scoff endlessly at our shortcomings.

The number of white individuals who are practising with even reasonable approximation the democracy and unselfishness of Jesus Christ is so small and unimportant as to be fit subject for jest in Sunday supplements and in Punch, Life, Le Rire, and Fliegende Blätter. In her foreign mission work the extraordinary self-deception of white religion is epitomized: solemnly the white world sends five million dollars worth of missionary propaganda to Africa each year and in the same twelve months adds twenty-five million dollars worth of the vilest gin manufactured. Peace to the augurs of Rome!

We may, however, grant without argument that religious ideals have always far outrun their very human devotees. Let us, then, turn to more mundane matters of honor and fairness. The world today is trade. The world has turned shopkeeper; history is economic history; living is earning a living. Is it necessary to ask how much of high emprise and honorable conduct has been found here? Something, to be sure. The establishment of world credit systems is built on splendid and realizable faith in fellow-men. But it is, after all, so low and elementary a step that sometimes it looks merely like honor among thieves, for the revelations of highway robbery and low cheating in the business world and in all its great modern centers have raised in the hearts of all true men in our day an exceeding great cry for revolution in our basic methods and conceptions of industry and commerce.

We do not, for a moment, forget the robbery of other times and races when trade was a most uncertain gamble; but was there not a certain honesty and frankness in the evil that argued a saner morality? There are more merchants today, surer deliveries, and a wider well-being, but are there not, also, bigger thieves, deeper injustice, and more calloused selfishness in well-being? Be that as it may — certainly the nicer sense of honor that has risen ever and again in groups of forward-thinking men has been curiously and broadly blunted. Consider our chiefest industry — fighting. Laboriously the Middle Ages built its rules of fairness — equal armament, equal notice, equal conditions. What do we see today? Machine-guns against assegais; conquest sugared with religion; mutilation and rape masquerading as culture — all this, with vast applause at the superiority of white over black soldiers!

War is horrible! This the dark world knows to its awful cost. But has it just become horrible, in these last days, when under essentially equal conditions, equal armament, and equal waste of wealth white men are fighting white men, with surgeons and nurses hovering near?

Think of the wars through which we have lived in the last decade [1910s]: in German Africa, in British Nigeria, in French and Spanish Morocco, in China, in Persia, in the Balkans, in Tripoli, in Mexico, and in a dozen lesser places — were not these horrible, too? Mind you, there were for most of these wars no Red Cross funds.

Behold little Belgium and her pitiable plight, but has the world forgotten Congo? What Belgium now suffers is not half, not even a tenth, of what she has done to black Congo since Stanley’s great dream of 1880. Down the dark forests of inmost Africa sailed this modern Sir Galahad, in the name of “the noble-minded men of several nations,” to introduce commerce and civilization. What came of it? “Rubber and murder, slavery in its worst form,” wrote Glave in 1895

Harris declares that King Leopold’s régime meant the death of twelve million natives, “but what we who were behind the scenes felt most keenly was the fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo was desolation and murder in the larger sense. The invasion of family life, the ruthless destruction of every social barrier, the shattering of every tribal law, the introduction of criminal practices which struck the chiefs of the people dumb with horror — in a word, a veritable avalanche of filth and immorality overwhelmed the Congo tribes.”

Yet the fields of Belgium laughed, the cities were gay, art and science flourished; the groans that helped to nourish this civilization fell on deaf ears because the world round about was doing the same sort of thing elsewhere on its own account.

As we saw the dead dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture — back of all culture — stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived — these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted. Here is whither the might and energy of modern humanity has really gone.

But may not the world cry back at us and ask: “What better thing have you to show? What have you done or would do better than this if you had today the world rule? Paint with all riot of hateful colors the thin skin of European culture — is it not better than any culture that arose in Africa or Asia?”

It is. Of this there is no doubt and never has been; but why is it better? Is it better because Europeans are better, nobler, greater, and more gifted than other folk? It is not. Europe has never produced and never will in our day bring forth a single human soul who cannot be matched and over-matched in every line of human endeavor by Asia and Africa. Run the gamut, if you will, and let us have the Europeans who in sober truth over-match Nefertari, Mohammed, Rameses and Askia, Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus Christ. If we could scan the calendar of thousands of lesser men, in like comparison, the result would be the same; but we cannot do this because of the deliberately educated ignorance of white schools by which they remember Napoleon and forget Sonni Ali.

The greatness of Europe has lain in the width of the stage on which she has played her part, the strength of the foundations on which she has builded, and a natural, human ability no whit greater (if as great) than that of other days and races. In other words, the deeper reasons for the triumph of European civilization lie quite outside and beyond Europe — back in the universal struggles of all mankind.

Why, then, is Europe great? Because of the foundations which the mighty past have furnished her to build upon: the iron trade of ancient, black Africa, the religion and empire-building of yellow Asia, the art and science of the “dago” Mediterranean shore, east, south, and west, as well as north. And where she has builded securely upon this great past and learned from it she has gone forward to greater and more splendid human triumph; but where she has ignored this past and forgotten and sneered at it, she has shown the cloven hoof of poor, crucified humanity — she has played, like other empires gone, the world fool!

If, then, European triumphs in culture have been greater, so, too, may her failures have been greater. How great a failure and a failure in what does the World War betoken? Was it national jealousy of the sort of the seventeenth century? But Europe has done more to break down national barriers than any preceding culture. Was it fear of the balance of power in Europe? Hardly, save in the half-Asiatic problems of the Balkans. What, then, does Hauptmann mean when he says: “Our jealous enemies forged an iron ring about our breasts and we knew our breasts had to expand — that we had to split asunder this ring or else we had to cease breathing. But Germany will not cease to breathe and so it came to pass that the iron ring was forced apart.”

Whither is this expansion? What is that breath of life, thought to be so indispensable to a great European nation? Manifestly it is expansion overseas; it is colonial aggrandizement which explains, and alone adequately explains, the World War. How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good.

This Europe has largely done. The European world is using black and brown men for all the uses which men know. Slowly but surely white culture is evolving the theory that “darkies” are born beasts of burden for white folk. It were silly to think otherwise, cries the cultured world, with stronger and shriller accord. The supporting arguments grow and twist themselves in the mouths of merchant, scientist, soldier, traveler, writer, and missionary: Darker peoples are dark in mind as well as in body; of dark, uncertain, and imperfect descent; of frailer, cheaper stuff; they are cowards in the face of mausers and maxims; they have no feelings, aspirations, and loves; they are fools, illogical idiots — “half-devil and half-child.”

Such as they are civilization must, naturally, raise them, but soberly and in limited ways. They are not simply dark white men. They are not “men” in the sense that Europeans are men. To the very limited extent of their shallow capacities lift them to be useful to whites, to raise cotton, gather rubber, fetch ivory, dig diamonds — and let them be paid what men think they are worth — white men who know them to be well-nigh worthless.

Such degrading of men by men is as old as mankind and the invention of no one race or people. Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left, however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal world-wide mark of meanness — color!

Such is the silent revolution that has gripped modern European culture in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its zenith came in Boxer times: White supremacy was all but world-wide, Africa was dead, India conquered, Japan isolated, and China prostrate, while white America whetted her sword for mongrel Mexico and mulatto South America, lynching her own Negroes the while. Temporary halt in this program was made by little Japan and the white world immediately sensed the peril of such “yellow” presumption! What sort of a world would this be if yellow men must be treated “white”? Immediately the eventual overthrow of Japan became a subject of deep thought and intrigue, from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, from the Key of Heaven to the Little Brother of the Poor.

The using of men for the benefit of masters is no new invention of modern Europe. It is quite as old as the world. But Europe proposed to apply it on a scale and with an elaborateness of detail of which no former world ever dreamed. The imperial width of the thing — the heaven-defying audacity — makes its modern newness.

The scheme of Europe was no sudden invention, but a way out of long-pressing difficulties. It is plain to modern white civilization that the subjection of the white working classes cannot much longer be maintained. Education, political power, and increased knowledge of the technique and meaning of the industrial process are destined to make a more and more equitable distribution of wealth in the near future. The day of the very rich is drawing to a close, so far as individual white nations are concerned. But there is a loophole. There is a chance for exploitation on an immense scale for inordinate profit, not simply to the very rich, but to the middle class and to the laborers. This chance lies in the exploitation of darker peoples. It is here that the golden hand beckons. Here are no labor unions or votes or questioning onlookers or inconvenient consciences. These men may be used down to the very bone, and shot and maimed in “punitive” expeditions when they revolt. In these dark lands “industrial development” may repeat in exaggerated form every horror of the industrial history of Europe, from slavery and rape to disease and maiming, with only one test of success, — dividends!

This theory of human culture and its aims has worked itself through warp and woof of our daily thought with a thoroughness that few realize. Everything great, good, efficient, fair, and honorable is “white”; everything mean, bad, blundering, cheating, and dishonorable is “yellow”; a bad taste is “brown”; and the devil is “black.” The changes of this theme are continually rung in picture and story, in newspaper heading and moving-picture, in sermon and school book, until, of course, the King can do no wrong — a White Man is always right and a Black Man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect.

There must come the necessary despisings and hatreds of these savage half-men, this unclean canaille of the world — these dogs of men. All through the world this gospel is preaching. It has its literature, it has its secret propaganda and above all — it pays!

There’s the rub—it pays. Rubber, ivory, and palm-oil; tea, coffee, and cocoa; bananas, oranges, and other fruit; cotton, gold, and copper—they, and a hundred other things which dark and sweating bodies hand up to the white world from pits of slime, pay and pay well, but of all that the world gets the black world gets only the pittance that the white world throws it disdainfully.

Small wonder, then, that in the practical world of things-that-be there is jealousy and strife for the possession of the labor of dark millions, for the right to bleed and exploit the colonies of the world where this golden stream may be had, not always for the asking, but surely for the whipping and shooting. It was this competition for the labor of yellow, brown, and black folks that was the cause of the World War. Other causes have been glibly given and other contributing causes there doubtless were, but they were subsidiary and subordinate to this vast quest of the dark world’s wealth and toil.

Colonies, we call them, these places where “n****rs” are cheap and the earth is rich; they are those outlands where like a swarm of hungry locusts white masters may settle to be served as kings, wield the lash of slave-drivers, rape girls and wives, grow as rich as Croesus and send homeward a golden stream. They belt the earth, these places, but they cluster in the tropics, with its darkened peoples: in Hong Kong and Anam, in Borneo and Rhodesia, in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, in Panama and Havana — these are the El Dorados toward which the world powers stretch itching palms.

Germany, at last one and united and secure on land, looked across the seas and seeing England with sources of wealth insuring a luxury and power which Germany could not hope to rival by the slower processes of exploiting her own peasants and workingmen, especially with these workers half in revolt, immediately built her navy and entered into a desperate competition for possession of colonies of darker peoples. To South America, to China, to Africa, to Asia Minor, she turned like a hound quivering on the leash, impatient, suspicious, irritable, with blood-shot eyes and dripping fangs, ready for the awful word. England and France crouched watchfully over their bones, growling and wary, but gnawing industriously, while the blood of the dark world whetted their greedy appetites. In the background, shut out from the highway to the seven seas, sat Russia and Austria, snarling and snapping at each other and at the last Mediterranean gate to the El Dorado, where the Sick Man enjoyed bad health, and where millions of serfs in the Balkans, Russia, and Asia offered a feast to greed well-nigh as great as Africa.

The fateful day came. It had to come. The cause of war is preparation for war; and of all that Europe has done in a century there is nothing that has equaled in energy, thought, and time her preparation for wholesale murder. The only adequate cause of this preparation was conquest and conquest, not in Europe, but primarily among the darker peoples of Asia and Africa; conquest, not for assimilation and uplift, but for commerce and degradation. For this, and this mainly, did Europe gird herself at frightful cost for war.

The red day dawned when the tinder was lighted in the Balkans and Austro-Hungary seized a bit which brought her a step nearer to the world’s highway; she seized one bit and poised herself for another. Then came that curious chorus of challenges, those leaping suspicions, raking all causes for distrust and rivalry and hatred, but saying little of the real and greatest cause.

Each nation felt its deep interests involved. But how? Not, surely, in the death of Ferdinand the Warlike; not, surely, in the old, half-forgotten revanche for Alsace-Lorraine; not even in the neutrality of Belgium. No! But in the possession of land overseas, in the right to colonies, the chance to levy endless tribute on the darker world — on coolies in China, on starving peasants in India, on black savages in Africa, on dying South Sea Islanders, on Indians of the Amazon — all this and nothing more.

Even the broken reed on which we had rested high hopes of eternal peace — the guild of the laborers — the front of that very important movement for human justice on which we had builded most, even this flew like a straw before the breath of king and kaiser. Indeed, the flying had been foreshadowed when in Germany and America “international” Socialists had all but read yellow and black men out of the kingdom of industrial justice. Subtly had they been bribed, but effectively: Were they not lordly whites and should they not share in the spoils of rape? High wages in the United States and England might be the skilfully manipulated result of slavery in Africa and of peonage in Asia.

With the dog-in-the-manger theory of trade, with the determination to reap inordinate profits and to exploit the weakest to the utmost there came a new imperialism — the rage for one’s own nation to own the earth or, at least, a large enough portion of it to insure as big profits as the next nation. Where sections could not be owned by one dominant nation there came a policy of “open door,” but the “door” was open to “white people only.” As to the darkest and weakest of peoples there was but one unanimity in Europe — that which Hen Demberg of the German Colonial Office called the agreement with England to maintain white “prestige” in Africa — the doctrine of the divine right of white people to steal.

Thus the world market most wildly and desperately sought today is the market where labor is cheapest and most helpless and profit is most abundant. This labor is kept cheap and helpless because the white world despises “darkies.” If one has the temerity to suggest that these workingmen may walk the way of white workingmen and climb by votes and self-assertion and education to the rank of men, he is howled out of court. They cannot do it and if they could, they shall not, for they are the enemies of the white race and the whites shall rule forever and forever and everywhere. Thus the hatred and despising of human beings from whom Europe wishes to extort her luxuries has led to such jealousy and bickering between European nations that they have fallen afoul of each other and have fought like crazed beasts. Such is the fruit of human hatred.

But what of the darker world that watches? Most men belong to this world. With Negro and Negroid, East Indian, Chinese, and Japanese they form two-thirds of the population of the world. A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men. If the uplift of mankind must be done by men, then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of darker nations.

What, then, is this dark world thinking? It is thinking that as wild and awful as this shameful war was, it is nothing to compare with that fight for freedom which black and brown and yellow men must and will make unless their oppression and humiliation and insult at the hands of the White World cease. The Dark World is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer.

Let me say this again and emphasize it and leave no room for mistaken meaning: The World War was primarily the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races. As such it is and must be but the prelude to the armed and indignant protest of these despised and raped peoples. Today Japan is hammering on the door of justice, China is raising her half-manacled hands to knock next, India is writhing for the freedom to knock, Egypt is sullenly muttering, the Negroes of South and West Africa, of the West Indies, and of the United States are just awakening to their shameful slavery. Is, then, this war the end of wars? Can it be the end, so long as sits enthroned, even in the souls of those who cry peace, the despising and robbing of darker peoples? If Europe hugs this delusion, then this is not the end of world war — it is but the beginning!

We see Europe’s greatest sin precisely where we found Africa’s and Asia’s — in human hatred, the despising of men; with this difference, however: Europe has the awful lesson of the past before her, has the splendid results of widened areas of tolerance, sympathy, and love among men, and she faces a greater, an infinitely greater, world of men than any preceding civilization ever faced.

It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this rôle. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred — making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike — rather a great religion, a world war-cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts!

Instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood America has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow peoples are concerned. And this, too, in spite of the fact that there has been no actual failure; the Indian is not dying out, the Japanese and Chinese have not menaced the land, and the experiment of Negro suffrage has resulted in the uplift of twelve million people at a rate probably unparalleled in history. But what of this? America, Land of Democracy, wanted to believe in the failure of democracy so far as darker peoples were concerned. Absolutely without excuse she established a caste system, rushed into preparation for war, and conquered tropical colonies. She stands today shoulder to shoulder with Europe in Europe’s worst sin against civilization. She aspires to sit among the great nations who arbitrate the fate of “lesser breeds without the law” and she is at times heartily ashamed even of the large number of “new” white people whom her democracy has admitted to place and power. Against this surging forward of Irish and German, of Russian Jew, Slav and “dago” her social bars have not availed, but against Negroes she can and does take her unflinching and immovable stand, backed by this new public policy of Europe. She trains her immigrants to this despising of “n****rs” from the day of their landing, and they carry and send the news back to the submerged classes in the fatherlands.

All this I see and hear up in my tower, above the thunder of the seven seas. From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms beneath the cloud-swept stars. Eastward and westward storms are breaking — great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable. I will not believe that all that was must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again today before the sunlight sweeps the silver seas.

If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain, because it is but a cry — a small and human cry amid Promethean gloom?

Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful dead, why will this Soul of White Folk — this modern Prometheus — hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, “I am white!” Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, “I am black!”

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Weekly Wrap Up - August 21, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 21:57:05 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie surveys a devastating cascade of systemic crises, starting with severe shelter shortages impacting 94% of Gazans and escalating U.S. economic warfare against Iran that exacerbates global instability while national debt climbs past $40 trillion. He details how domestic overreach and deregulation directly harm ordinary people—from widespread FDA food recalls to ICE’s cruel enforcement tactics, including the planned deployment of electric shock gloves and the detention of young children. Eddie also highlights institutional assaults, including whistleblower revelations exposing manufactured federal investigations into elite universities, the prolonged power outages in Gary, Indiana, and continued demands for justice in the cases of Nolan Wells and Karmelo Anthony. Ultimately, he urges grassroots organizers and voters to reject centrist compromises, focus on concrete policies that serve the public good, and mobilize from the bottom up to defeat authoritarianism.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict & U.S.-Iran Escalations

Domestic Politics, Elections & The Economy

Immigration Enforcement & ICE

Infrastructure & Weather Crises

Justice, Investigations & Local News

Higher Education, Public Health & Military Affairs

Shifting the Frame

Eddie — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:43:36 GMT

I sat down to write about the death of Jason Arday, but my emotions kept overwhelming my pen. Our times are so cruel and the days so dark, and I have grown weary of responding to rank racism. Moreover, I am about to begin another semester at an institution shadowed by the belief by so many in this country that I do not belong there. It is, at once, depressing and enraging.

What bothers people like Nick Cofnas (the man who accused Arday of plagiarism and the self-described “race realist” who imagines himself, after the “revolution,” as the chair of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard), beyond the plagiarism claims, is the simple fact that Arday had been hired by Cambridge in the first place. For them, he did not belong there.

And now that Arday is dead these monsters trample on his grave and announce that DEI killed him.

To hell with them and their so-called arguments.

What might it entail to respond to such claims? I am reminded of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and his response to Thomas Jefferson’s declaration to the world, “that we are inferior to whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and our minds.”

Walker rejected the idea that such claims could be debated rationally. And he bluntly responded to Jefferson and to those who embraced his view, “You are not astonished at my saying we hate you, for if we are men, we cannot but hate you, while you are treating us like dogs.”

Dispassionate engagement with vile claims made little sense to Walker. Instead, he voiced what he felt in his gut and shifted the frame.

It is a lesson, I think, we should all learn, especially in politics.

How many times have Democrats, for example, found themselves arguing within the framework established by Republicans? Defending themselves against the charge that they are communist or socialist, or walking back their commitment to diversity and inclusion, or conceding the criticisms of so-called “wokeness”? They move as if the label of liberal or progressive is a scarlet letter and, as such, they fight for the center in our politics that has long ago moved to the right.

How is it possible that Republicans, whose policies and leaders literally threaten the very foundations of American democracy, have the political standing to determine the frame of the debate? These people have revealed repeatedly that their political souls have been corrupted – that their policies benefit a select few and that they are willing to undermine democratic processes for the sake of power.

But they can demand that people denounce Hasan Piker as they embrace Nick Fuentes and his ilk? They describe the election of members of DSA or the Working Families Party as an existential threat to the country as they support a war of choice, allow Trump and his family to rob the country blind, burden working families with high gas and grocery prices, dismantle the institutions of governance, destabilize the country’s standing in the world, and lie through their damn teeth daily.

Meanwhile, as if they have no spines or bones, Democrats contort themselves to respond to the accusations and avoid the condemnation of these morally corrupt people.

This is the long-term effect of triangulation. The constant co-optation of Republican issues has, like cigarette smoke on the lungs of a long-time smoker, compromised the body of the Democratic party. These folks can barely breathe.

Democrats, if they can muster the courage and break free from their consultants, need to go on the offensive.

Stop responding to the nonsense of MAGA and their enablers. Stop presuming the reasonableness of their claims (about communism and socialism) and address directly who they are and what they support. MAGA should be forced to explain why they shouldn’t be banished from our politics as Democrats and others present an alternative vision of how we are to live together.

I am tired of arguing with racists and mean-spirited people who could give less than a damn about our democracy. I am exhausted by the idea of treating them as rational actors.

It is time to give voice to what we feel in our gut and shift the framing.

As for Cofnas, Rufo, and all the others who do not believe that people like me have earned our place – that the tragic death of Arday signals the deadly consequence of DEI – letters don’t kill people. People do. Beyond that, they can kiss my ass.

And that is a passionate response to an irrational claim.

Thanks for reading A Native Son! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Weekly Wrap Up - August 14, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:31:18 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie reviews a tumultuous week defined by Israel’s rejection of a U.S.-led 15-point peace plan and escalating tensions with Iran as the U.S. faces global economic pressure from a continued blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. Connecting international policy with domestic hardship, Eddie highlights skyrocketing gas and grocery prices, the terrifying expansion of ICE enforcement—including ankle monitors on Ohio-based Haitian immigrants—and the dangerous confusion stirred by President Trump’s recent executive order on vaccines. Pointing to fiercely contested primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan, he issues an urgent plea to Democratic leadership: abandon centrist triangulation and outmoded anti-socialist rhetoric in favor of progressive, grassroots policies aimed at defeating the existential threat of MAGA authoritarianism.

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Middle East Conflict & Foreign Policy

Global Conflicts & Intelligence

Economy & Energy

Immigration Enforcement & Civil Rights

Healthcare & Executive Orders

Domestic Politics & Primary Elections

Thanks for reading A Native Son! This post is public so feel free to share it.

A Moment to Rest

Eddie — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:08:10 GMT

After a grueling twenty-day book tour—meeting wonderful people, shaking hands, taking photographs, and receiving thousands of hugs—I needed rest. Waking up in a different hotel, forgetting where you are in the middle of the night when you have to go to the bathroom, struggling with hotel room pillows (some too soft; others hard as a rock) takes its toll. I must admit that I have been running on fumes.

Fortunately, thanks to Errol and Paula Taylor, I have been able to spend the last week or so in Sag Harbor in one of its historic Black beach communities, Ninevah. Ninevah Beach was established in 1952 to give affluent and middle-class Black professionals a place to vacation. I was first introduced to the village in Colson Whitehead’s novel, Sag Harbor. And this week’s experience left me with details and scenes that filled my notepad. It is a lovely and complicated place.

Growing up in Mississippi, I knew nothing of the old whaling town and its stunning beauty or of the Black people who built homes there. As a child, my summer days in Moss Point were spent at home. We didn’t vacation. I didn’t go to camp. My parents had to work and, if it wasn’t too hot, I spent my days playing until the streetlights came on. Walking in the house smelling, as my mother used to say, like “outside.” The likes of Sag Harbor never entered my imagination.

This week has been a little slice of heaven, though. I haven’t watched much news. Trump entered my conversations only sporadically. Instead, I enjoyed the company of good friends. Relaxation had been gifted, and I took full advantage. I did two book events: one at The Church in downtown Sag and the other in East Hampton. Vastly different worlds. Both monied. But different. It didn’t matter. I needed to rest.

And that got me thinking. We all need to rest. I don’t mean that we need to disengage from the world. And I am not suggesting that we all have the capacity or the relationships to pack up for a week and spend time in a beach community in the Hamptons. But we all need some respite. Some means to replenish, because life is hard.

Americans spend so much time working. My dad spread out his vacation days over the entire year. Never took a week off. He just delivered mail day in and day out. My mother worked, too. Every afternoon, she finished cooking dinner for her family, gathered her things and the pink construction helmet, and made her way to Ingalls Shipyard to work the third shift. Only to return home after midnight. The rhythm of work dictating the substance of life.

In this country, it feels like rest is a luxury, and deep rest and relaxation the possession of the wealthy. (Maybe I am confusing rest with leisure here.)

But it doesn’t have to be so. The most enjoyable moments of this past week were found in the laughter as we sat and talked—in the company of friends. Being still. Being present. Being loved. It’s hard to do when the demands of work grind fingers to the bone.

Each of us must be deliberate, especially now, in creating and curating the space to rest and to replenish. That does not require beachfront property or a trip to Disneyland (the purchase of leisure), but rather, the creation of moments, however long or short, to put the demands of work aside and attend to the heart.

To be still. To be present. To love.

Weekly Wrap Up - August 7, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:01:56 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie analyzes a week of rampant political corruption, highlighting Capital One’s quiet closure of nearly 300 Trump Organization accounts over money laundering concerns. He condemns Senate Republicans for advancing Todd Blanche’s Attorney General nomination despite clear threats to judicial independence. Internationally, Eddie notes escalating Gaza airstrikes, a CIA directive to destabilize Cuba, and the rollback of Temporary Protected Status for 300,000 Haitians. Pointing to the Michigan primary, he urges Democratic leadership to abandon outdated anti-socialist rhetoric and instead harness grassroots progressive energy to defeat MAGA authoritarianism.

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Middle East Conflict & U.S. Intelligence

Financial Investigations

Justice Department & Political Appointments

Democratic Primaries & Party Divisions

THE SHAPE OF FEAR

Eddie — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:57:05 GMT

In June 1926, W.E.B. DuBois was asked to respond to an article, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” written by the Imperial Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Hiram Wesley Evans, and published in The North American Review. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25113510.pdf) Evans’s essay aimed to defend the Klan’s purpose and practice. Reading it in the full light of what is happening in the country today (with MAGA’s version of 100% Americanism, the barbarism of ICE, and the ongoing assault on multiracial democracy) is startling. The echoes of history are deafening. Here I have reprinted DuBois’s response. It is a masterful account of the danger the Klan represented and the conditions that allowed it to flourish. That account, I believe, offers insight into our own moment. I know the essay is a bit long, but the read is definitely worth it. Note what he says about the danger of lies!

THE SHAPE OF FEAR

BY W. E. B. DU BOIS

The North American Review, Vol. 223, No. 831 (Jun. - Aug., 1926), pp. 291-304 (14 pages)

Faced by the fact of the Ku Klux Klan, the United States has tried to get rid of it by laughing it off. We have talked of masquerading “in sheets and pillow cases”; we have caricatured the Klan upon the stage; we have exposed its silly methods, the dishonesty of some of its leaders, and the like. But we have not succeeded in scaring it away by ridicule. It is there. It is a fact, and those who do not wish to believe the sinister meaning of its existence should go to the nearest movie and see that Washington parade, that tremendous outpouring of hosts, white-gowned and hooded if not masked.

It is quite beside the point to compare the present Ku Klux Klan with the Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction days. They have nothing in common except their birthplace and their methods. The present Klan is a different movement from the older Klan. It has simply made the older movement’s name its present starting point.

Until last year I was of those mildly amused at the K. K. K. It seemed to me incredible that in 1925 such a movement could attract any number of people or become really serious. And then at first hand and at second I saw the Klan and its workings in widely different places. I was lecturing in Akron, Ohio. Now Ohio is one of those States upon whose essential Americanism and devotion to the finer ideals of democracy I have long banked. There in the Middle West that finer flower of democracy, born in New England, and later choked by the industrialism of the East, had, to my mind, gone for replanting and renewal. I looked for sanity in the United States to come from a democratic appeal to the Middle West. And yet, there in Akron, in the land of Joshua R. Giddings, in the Western Reserve, I found the Klan calmly and openly in the saddle. The leader of the local Klan was president of the Board of Education and had just been tremendously busied in driving a Jew out of the public schools. The Mayor, the secretary of the Y. M. C. A., prominent men in many walks of life, were either open Klansmen or secret sympathizers. I was too astonished to talk. Throughout parts of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana I found a similar state of affairs.

I am not saying that the Klan was triumphant everywhere, but it was there; it was influential; it was recognized; it was important. Again, and further west, the work of the Klan has been manifest. Today there are under arrest at Detroit, Michigan, a young colored physician, well-trained and successful; his wife, torn from her infant child, and nine of his friends; and they are on trial for murder in the first degree because they shot at the mob that tried to drive them out of their own homes and that had a few months before driven out another Negro physician and destroyed his furniture; and that mob was there because the Ku Klux Klan aroused it and sent it; and the Ku Klux Klan is so tremendous a power in that city which is, in some ways the most significant of American cities, that the Mayor is openly appealing against its activities.

Or again: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People held its annual meeting in May, 1925, in Denver and there appeared before it two speakers: one, a little man, nervous with energy and shrill of speech. He was, without a doubt, one of the dozen notable figures which America has given to the world, Ben Lindsay, the maker of the Children’s Court. The other had been one of the most successful and enlightened Governors in America. And yet they stood speaking in self-defense; defending themselves against this city and this State; and the great, dark, menacing thing that turned them from social uplift and political reform was the Ku Klux Klan.

In the East, New England and New Jersey, the Klan has been mobilized; and need one mention the South?

What is the cause of all this? There can be little doubt but that the Klan in its present form is a legacy of the World War. Whatever there was of it before that great catastrophe was negligible and of little moment. The wages of War is Hate; and the End, and indeed the Beginning, of Hate is Fear. The civilized world today and the world half-civilized and uncivilized are desperately afraid. The Shape of Fear looms over them. Germany fears the Jew, England fears the Indian; America fears the Negro, the Christian fears the Moslem, Europe fears Asia, Protestant fears Catholic, Religion fears Science. Above all, Wealth fears Democracy. These fears and others are ancient or at least long-standing fears. But they are renewed and revivified today because the world has at present a severe case of nerves; it feels it necessary to be nervous because the Unexpected has happened.

For years we talked of the possibility of European War with bated breath; then we talked of it jauntily; and then we almost joked about it. While here was a Fear, it was one so far away that it did not seem possible for it ever to materialize, at least not in our day. And then suddenly it became a terrible fact, horrible beyond the dream of men. So that all our other fears today have become portentous. Abd-el Krim may be the vanguard of the launching of Asia against Europe; Ghandi and Das may be at the point of destroying the British Empire; the American Negro despite all precautions, may force himself into a place where he will enter Congress, storm Wall Street and marry white women.

Now against such fears as these there are three possible attitudes. One is the attitude of reason and examination. What does the ferment in the colored world mean and how far is our fear of it but a reflex of its fear of us? What do colored folk really want, and do their wants interfere with and oppose the just desires of the white world ? How far is free, scientific inquiry going to undermine religious sanction? What is there in the objects of the Bolsheviki which should not appear in the objects of American social reformers? These questions indicate one attitude, mental, moral and practical, toward great pending questions; but it is not the attitude which we are disposed to take today in the world.

On the contrary so imminent does our danger seem to some people that they turn to one of two other methods. They are both forms of Force; one an open appeal to force: Fascismo, either in its bold, physical form as it is appearing in Italy and Spain or in its more spiritual form as it appears in American Fundamentalism; in the determination to drive out of the Church every person who will not honestly or by perjury subscribe to a certain, narrow, outworn and partially false creed.

The other method is the method of Force which hides itself in secrecy, and that is the method of the Ku Klux Klan. It is a method as old as humanity. The kind of thing which men are afraid or ashamed to do openly and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked and at night. The method has certain advantages. It uses Fear to cast out Fear; it dares things at which open methods hesitate; it may with a certain impunity attack the high and the low; it need hesitate at no outrage of maiming or murder; it shields itself in the mob mind and then throws over all a veil of darkness which becomes glamor. It attracts people who otherwise could not be reached. It harnesses the mob.

How is it that men who want certain things done by brute force can so often depend upon the mob? Total depravity, human hate and schadenfreude, do not explain fully the mob spirit in this land. Before the wide eyes of the mob is ever the Shape of Fear. Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? of many things but usually of losing their jobs, of being declassed, degraded or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger; of dirt, of crime. And of all this, most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of unemployment.

It is this nucleus of ordinary men that continually gives the mob its initial and awful impetus. Around this nucleus, to be sure, gather snowball-wise all manner of flotsam, filth and human garbage and every inhibition of alcohol and current fashion. But all this is the horrible covering of this inner nucleus of Fear.

How then is the mob to be met and quelled? If it represents public opinion, even passing, passionate public opinion, it cannot permanently be put down by the police which public opinion appoints and pays. Three methods of quelling the mob are at hand, analogous to the three attitudes noted above: the first, by proving to its human, honest nucleus that the Fear is false, ill-grounded, unnecessary; or secondly, if its Fear is true or apparently or partially true, by attacking the fearful thing openly either by the organized police power or by frank civil war as did Mussolini and George Washington; or thirdly, by secret, hidden and underground ways, the method of the Ku Klux Klan.

Why do we not take the first way? Because this is a world that believes in War and Ignorance and has no hope in our day of realizing an intelligent majority of men and Peace on Earth. There are many, many exceptions but in general it is true that there is scarcely a Bishop in Christendom, a priest in New York, a President, Governor, mayor or legislator in the United States, a college professor or public school teacher who does not in the end stand by War and Ignorance as the main method for the settlement of our pressing human problems. And this despite the fact that they may deny it with their mouths every day.

But here again open civil war like Italy’s is difficult, costly and hard to guide. The Right toward which it aims must be made obvious even if it is Wrong. In 1918 in order to win the war we had to make Germans into Huns and rapists. Today we have to make Negroes into rapists and idiots. Tomorrow we must make Latins, South-Eastern Europeans, Turks and other Asiatics into actual “lesser breeds without the law”. Some seem to see today anti-Christ in Catholicism, and in Jews, international plotters of the Protocol. Even if these things be true it is difficult to bring the truth clearly before the ignorant mob and guide it toward the

overthrow of evil. But if these be half true or wholly false, the mob can only be stirred by wholesale lying, and this is costly; or by secret underground whispering, the methods of night and mask, the psychology of vague and unknown ill, the innuendo that cannot be answered.

Now there are two things that stand out in this explanation of the mob and the Klan. First, the double tongues of our leaders in religion and social uplift; and secondly, this fear of losing jobs. Dayton, Tennessee brought the first vividly to our minds. We heard of a sudden, people talking a religious patois which educated folk had well nigh forgotten: Biblical Truth; the Plan of Salvation; the Blood of Christ. And suddenly we began to see what results widespread ignorance of modern science not only had brought but could bring under the leadership of the demagogue. It sent a thrill of amazement through us.

But whom had we to blame? Manifestly, not the farmers and shopkeepers of Tennessee, but those intellectual leaders of the United States who have been willing to subscribe to a religious dogma that they did not honestly believe and yet which they were willing that the mass of people should think they were believing. Was there any surer way of destroying the ability of the Man of the Street to think straight and argue logically? And to stop even his endeavor to think, comes the Fundamentalist; and his answer to Science is Dogma; and his reason for bringing it forward is again, not perverse hatred of the Truth, but the Shape of Fear. The religionist of today sees the sanctions of moral conduct being swept and battered away, laughed at and caricatured. How shall he meet this wicked thing? He can do it by intelligence and argument and persuasion or he can do it by dogma which is spiritual mob-violence; today he is choosing the mob.

Or again; why is it that in a rich country like the United States, in many respects the richest and most prosperous organization of men in the world, we continually have mobs fighting and doing unutterable things because at bottom men are afraid of being unable to earn a respectable living? The answer is that our post war prosperity is built more on gambling than on honest productive industry. Gambling was the result of war, born in war time and coming from the sudden demand for technique machinery and goods, which paid those who happened to hold them enormous marginal rents. The chance to the gambler, the promoter and the manipulator of industry has come during the reconstruction since the war, in the monopoly of land and homes, in the manipulation of industrial power, in the use of new inventions and discoveries, in the reorganization of corporate ownership.

We have today in the United States, cheek by jowl, Prosperity and Depression. Depression among those who are selling their services, raising raw material and manufacturing goods; prosperity among those who are manipulating prices, monopolizing land and mortgaging ability and output.

How shall we meet this situation? Again we revert to the three paths : first and foremost by the spread of wider and deeper understanding among the masses of men of the modern industrial process and the method of distributing income, so that intelligently we may attack Production and Distribution and re-make industrial society. Or, a second method, by hue and cry and propaganda to stop all criticism and desire for change by dubbing every reformer “Bolshevik” and by frightening the wage earner with loss of the very foundation of his wage. And this is the kind of attack that again easily sinks to the whispering courses underground and attempts to save modern industry through mobs engineered by the secret Ku Klux Klan.

I can no better illustrate my meaning than by an actual case. The world has forgotten Mer Rouge—the Red Sea of Louisiana where a few years ago a terrible series of murders was laid at the doors of the Ku Klux Klan. It was so horrible a tale that we hastened to forget it before we really understood it. But it deserved thought and intelligent comprehension.

The cotton and sugar soil of the Mississippi and Red River valleys form a junction in Louisiana. It is a section bounded on the south by the scene of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on the north by the Helena riots, and on the east by that bit of hell which is sometimes called the Mississippi Delta. In the center of this district, in northeastern Louisiana, is Morehouse Parish and in the midst of Morehouse Parish is Mer Rouge. Mer Rouge has the peculiar problems of a little town in the Black Belt. It is ruled by the whites, and since the whites must stand united as rulers there is among them a rather extreme sense of social equality which even wealth and education cannot wholly break down. They go to the same churches and there their social life centers. They send their children to the same schools except the few that go away to boarding school. All this works out fairly well as long as the character of the ruling class of whites is essentially homologous. But today a change is taking place in Morehouse Parish. There are about 20,000 inhabitants there. The white population has increased from five to six thousand in the last ten years while the Negro population has decreased from fourteen to thirteen thousand. This is because of the migration of Negro laborers to the city and north; so that instead of being a county three-fourths black it is today about two-thirds black. To replace these migrating Negroes the poor whites from the neighborhood have been pressing in. They stream in especially from one poor county directly toward the east where there is a majority of poor whites and these new comers bring problems, problems of unrest, drink, of gambling, of wayward women.

Now Mer Rouge has traditions of the time when its white folk were great landowners protecting their women in elaborate homes and having a pretentious social code. These newer and poorer whites coming in not only brought a lower moral tone but a new economic condition. They have become tenant farmers, so that between 1900 and 1920 there was an increase of nearly one-third in the number of tenants. But the great landowners are still in the ascendancy, two hundred and fifty of them with farms of one hundred to more than a thousand acres, with crops valued at two and one half million dollars a year, chiefly cotton, corn and sugar cane. In addition to this the value of the land is rapidly increasing. It has doubled every ten years since 1900. Then too, to complicate the situation further there are a number of small Negro farmers who own their own land, some two hundred and thirty-one in all as compared with the two hundred and fifty large white landowners and one hundred and nineteen small white owners. One can easily scent here tremendous and bitter rivalry between the rich and poor white owners, between the owners and tenants, between the white and black owners, and crushed under all of it lie the mass of black tenants. These tenants are ignorant, forty per cent of them acknowledge that they cannot read or write, and in truth this number should probably be sixty or seventy per cent. There is no modern wage system, but nearly all is

barter and debt peonage. The county reported only one hundred dollars a year in wages for each worker, and this included the white workers as well as the colored.

Here then we have the setting. Here is the little town of Mer Rouge, which proposes to stop the growing lawlessness among the whites and the breaking down of social conventions. Shall it openly appeal to the ballot? Certainly not. There are 6,524 Negroes of voting age and only 3,000 whites; but of course there is no question in Mer Rouge of the black man’s voting. A thousand or more Negroes are landowners able to read and write, but they cannot vote. The white women, too, are disfranchised despite the law, so that the voting population consists of about 1,500 white men, and among these the new white tenants, shop keepers, artisans and small landowners, or in other words the lawless and easy-going new comers, could outvote the whole aristocracy.

Mer Rouge, therefore, turned to the Ku Klux Klan, and when afterward the matter came out it defended itself and claimed with undoubted truth that the Ku Klux Klan was an organization of the best elements in the community and that they were trying to put down the worst, believing that they could do by secrecy and force what they could not do openly at the polls. It was natural for them to come to this conclusion. Secrecy, force and murder have been part of the Black Belt social economy for fifty years. The landlords lived with their hands on the trigger. Formerly this was because of the fear of servile revolt or the hint of it. That fear is still there; but in addition to that there is another fear and these men did not hesitate. They were used to taking the law in their hands. They face baffling social problems. A white face is no longer a badge of aristocracy. A white woman may be rival to a black concubine. Formerly the relations of white men and colored women were open and complacent. The sheriff’s son recently was killed in a colored woman’s cabin. Then too the sex distribution is illuminating: More colored women than colored men and eleven per cent, more white men than white women. To this are added the bootleggers and the loose white women. There is no place, no treatment for them. Colored women, however decent, can always be treated like prostitutes; but unless white prostitutes are treated like ladies the whole scheme of white supremacy fails.

All this led logically, as Mer Rouge thought, to one solution: bootleggers, gamblers and bad women were to be driven out by the Ku Klux Klan. But they miscalculated. The new whites fought back. They were not scared by hoods and nightgowns. The result was appalling. Kidnapping, whipping, murder almost wholesale, torture that would shame the Middle Ages, an atmosphere of terror, hatred and feud that attracted the attention of the world. And in the midst of it all the black, driven cattle who form sixty-eight per cent, of the population were dumb.

Here were white men afraid of degradation; here were white men afraid of hunger; here were black men afraid of hunger and black men afraid of death. And here were secret midnight oath and murder seeking to right it all.

Such were the elements that make for secret mob law: economic rivalry, race hatred, class hatred, sex rivalry, religious dogmatism and before all the Shape of Fear. For years and centuries this method of organized secrecy, sworn to unlimited and ruthless action, has been used to accomplish certain things. Strong arguments have been brought to defend it and it may be admitted that one can easily see circumstances when the only way to make the survival of certain ideas and ideals certain, would be to force them through by secrecy and stealth.

But are we ready to say that this is the case in the first half of the twentieth century? Can we for a moment admit this? Is not the very thought a monstrous attack upon all that civilization and religion have accomplished?

What is there after all, of truth back of what the Klan attacks? And perhaps first, what does the Klan attack? I will not stop to argue this. I simply quote from their own blank application for membership seven of their twenty questions: “7.—Were your parents born in the United States of America?” “8.—Are you a Gentile or Jew?” “ 9.—Are you of the white race or of a colored race?” “13.—Do you believe in White Supremacy?” “15.—What is your religious faith? “ “ 17.—Of what religious faith are your parents?” “20.—Do you owe ANY KIND of allegiance to any foreign nation, government, institution, sect, people, ruler or person?”

Here then is clearly the groundwork for opposition to the foreign-born, the Jew, the colored races and the Catholic Church. I am not the one to defend Catholic or Jew. The Catholic

Church and modern European civilization are largely synonymous and to attack the one is to accuse the other. For the alleged followers of Jesus Christ and worshipers of the Old Testament to revile Hebrew culture is too impudent for words. But in this crazy combination of hates fathered by the Ku Klux Klan (and so illogical that in any intelligent country it would be laughed out of court), is included the American Negro. What is the indictment against him? He was a slave. He is ignorant. He is poor. He has the stigmata of poverty and ignorance—that is crime. He laughs and sings and dances. He is black. He isn’t all black. The very statement of such a bill of indictment is like accusing ashes of fire. The real arraignment of the Negro is the fear that white America with its present machinery is not going to be able to keep black folk down. They are achieving equality with startling swiftness. Neither caricature nor contempt, rape of women or insult of children, murder or burning at the stake, have succeeded in daunting this extraordinary group.

Against it open reasoning and argument has been employed but it has failed to convince even those who employed it. This was followed by propaganda; and the propaganda of emphasizing “race”, “racial” characteristics, “racial” inferiority, is a propaganda which according to all modern scientific dicta is unreliable and untrue. Yet these terms flourish and these things are taught in school and college; they appear in books and lectures and they are used because of what men want them to accomplish, namely, the continual fear and hate of black folk instead of that natural rebound of sympathy and admiration which their work in a half century deserves.

But as I have said, even this propaganda has not been successful. What next then? Next comes the Ku Klux Klan. Next comes the leadership of mob and perpetration of outrage by forces, secret, hidden and underground. And the danger and shame not in the movement itself, so much as in the wide tolerance a sympathy which its methods evoke among educated and decent Americans. These people see in the Ku Klux Klan a way of doing and saying that which they themselves are ashamed to do and say. Go into any western town from Pittsburgh to Kansas City: “The Klan—Silly—but!—You see these Catholics, rich, powerful, silent, organized. Got all the foreigners corralled—I don’t know. And Jews—the Jews own the country. They are trying to rule the world. They are too smart, pushing, impudent. And niggers! And that isn’t all. Dagoes, Japs ; and then Russia! I tell you we gotta do something. The Klan?—silly, of course—but—.”

Thus the Ku Klux Klan is doing a job which the American people, or certainly a considerable portion of them, want done and they want it done because as a nation they have fear of the Jew, the immigrant, the Negro. They realize that the American of English descent is not holding his own physically or spiritually in this country; that America survives and flourishes because of the alien immigrant with his strong arm, his simple life, his faith and hope, his song, his art, his religion. They realize that no group in the United States is working harder to push themselves forward and upward than the Negroes; and over all this rises the Shape of Fear.

The worst aspect of all this is that when we resort to the underground method it involves a conscious surrender of Truth. It must base itself upon lies. One of the greatest difficulties in estimating the power and spread of the Ku Klux Klan is that its members are evidently sworn to lie. They are ordered to deny their membership in the Klan; they are ordered to deny their participation in certain of its deeds; they are ordered above all to keep at least partially secret its real objects and desires. Now the lie has often been used to advance human culture, but it is an extremely dangerous weapon, and surely we have lived beyond the

need of it today.

Consequently the greatest thing that we have to fear in any such underground movement as the Ku Klux Klan, a thing that makes it much more fearful than anything that has been alleged of Bolshevism or Fascism, is the danger and ease of its being used for exactly the opposite of the things for which it is established or which the thoughts or ideals which its leaders profess. If it is possible to establish a widespread underground movement against Jews, Negroes and Catholics, why isn’t it just as easy to establish similar movements against millionaires, machinery and foreign commerce, or against “Anglo-Saxons,” Protestants and Germans, or against any set of people or set of ideas which any particular group of people dislike, hate or fear? It may be said that at present it is possible to mobilize larger numbers of people in a common hatred against the Hebrew race, the black race, and the Catholic Church than against any similar things; but this is not necessarily true and it certainly is not true in all places and will not be true at all times.

Without doubt, of all the dangerous weapons that civilized man has attempted to use in order to advance human culture the secret mass lie is the most dangerous and the most apt to prove boomerang. This is the real thing that we are to fear in the Ku Klux Klan. We need not fear its logic. It has no logic. Whatever there is of truth in its hatred of three groups of Americans can be discussed openly and fearlessly by civilized men. If Negroes are ignorant underbidders of labor, unhealthy and lazy aspirants to undeserved equality there are plain and well-known social restraints and remedies. First, to improve the condition of Negroes so far as it is improvable; secondly, to teach them the reason behind the objections to their rise so far as there are reasons; and above all to examine thoroughly and honestly what the real questions at issue are. If the hierarchy of the Catholic church is in any way threatening democracy in America there is a chance for perfectly open and honest investigation and conference between this young democracy and that old and honorable government of the spirit of men. If the Jew in self-defense against age-long persecution has closed his fist against the world there is more than a chance to clasp that human hand. In fine, unless we are willing to give up human civilization in order to preserve civilization we cannot for a moment contemplate turning to secret, underground methods as a cure for anything; and the appearance of such a movement is not a case where we stop to ask whether the movement in itself has at present laudable objects or not. It does not make any difference what the Ku Klux Klan is fighting for or against. Its method is wrong and dangerous and uncivilized, and those who oppose it, whether they be its victim like the Jews, Catholics and Negroes, or those who are lauded as its moral sponsors like the white Southerners, the American Legion and the “Anglo-Saxons,” it is the duty of all these people to join together in solemn phalanx against the method which is an eternal menace to human culture.

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Weekly Wrap Up - July 31, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:53:05 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie tentatively welcomes reports of a Hamas disarmament agreement but warns of a rapidly escalating quagmire in Iran that has cost 18 American lives and driven domestic grocery prices to a 50-year high. Shifting his focus homeward, Eddie condemns the administration’s sweeping delegalization of 1.8 million immigrants and the cruel, racially motivated ICE crackdowns expanding across airports and the Dilley Detention Center. To combat these systemic assaults and ongoing voting rights rollbacks, he echoes Rev. William Barber’s call for 1,000 grassroots marches over the next 100 days leading up to the midterms, urging his listeners to mobilize and fight for the nation’s democratic soul.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict & U.S.-Iran Escalations

The Economy, Inflation & Consumer Confidence

Immigration Policy & ICE Enforcement

Grassroots Organizing & Political Commentary

Imagination Capture

Eddie — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:28:51 GMT

Steve Scalise, the congressman from Louisiana and former Republican Majority Whip, recently said that “the Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November, against freedom. Make no mistake about that. The lines have never been more clear in an election.”

His aim, I suppose, was to invoke the bogeyman of the Red Scare of the 1950s or the threat of communism that motivated the Reagan years. Whatever his intention, his words had the feel of shag carpet or sitcoms like “Leave it to Beaver” watched on black and white televisions with antennas and remote clickers. It’s the rhetoric of a bygone era.

But Scalise, like most Republicans these days, was following the lead of Donald Trump. With the recent electoral victories and challenges by Democratic Socialists (DSA), Trump has warned that the nation is imperiled by those hell-bent on destroying “the traditional American way of life.” “Communism,” Trump declared at the Mount Rushmore sesquicentennial event on July 3^rd, “is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

Well, what should we expect from an eighty-year-old President, who believes he is the smartest man who has ever walked the earth? He traffics in a politics of fear and, I guess, the threat of “commies” lingers in his addled head as the most effective way, outside of explicit racist appeals, to motivate voters who are struggling economically.

But Trump and his ilk aren’t the only ones playing at this game. DSA has rattled the Democratic Party, and some within the party’s ranks seem to be in full panic mode as they fight on the terrain set by Republicans and their accusations of a communist/socialist takeover of the Democratic Party.

These Democrats, like Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, insist on a kind of pragmatism inherent in centrist politics, echo the language of the political consultant class about “electability” (a shorthand for troublesome concessions), and declare their commitments to the power of markets even as crony capitalism erode the basic pillars of American democracy.

Ironically, theirs is an echo of a bygone era, too.

In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger published, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. To put it crudely, he understood the destabilizing effects of unbridled capitalism and technological advances on traditional forms of life. People felt unmoored. They experienced a breakdown in the social bonds of society. Communism offered an alternative, new forms of solidarity. But that alternative ended up being a more secure prison.

Schlesinger commended something between the free hand of markets and the dictatorship of the proletariat: he argued for a form of liberalism that would be both practical and affirming of the “balance between the individual and community.” But this approach, practically, would go hand and hand with American Cold War nationalism.

The “vital center” had to hold between the equal threats from the left and the right.

In short, the extremism of fascists and leftists, broadly understood, presented an existential threat to the Republic. What results is a political orientation that sets out to contain any politics that might fall under the category of socialism or the left or radical left.

And what do we hear today from some Democrats about the “far left extremism” of those who embrace democratic socialism? Van Jones, former advisor to President Obama and CNN commentator, recently warned that the extremists in DSA were “hijacking” the party. “I am tired of a set of people on the very far left, telling us that in order for us to be progressive that we have to believe and support ideas that are completely nuts”, Jones declared on his Substack.

He laid out his progressive bona fides and the positions that he fully endorses (e.g., criminal justice reform, the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, free education). But the extremists, he claims, push an agenda far outside of those commitments. They want “no police, no prisons, and no borders.” They “support Hamas” and celebrate “the murder of Israeli civilians.”

But this carries the stench of the bogeyman.

One wonders who these people are who demand that all progressives should hold such views. The slogan, “no police, no prisons, and no borders,” feels like it came straight out of a Republican war room. And criticisms of genocide in Gaza ought not be conflated with support of Hamas or celebrating the murder of Israeli civilians. One can hold the former without embracing the evil of the latter. Think of the positions of AOC or Mamdani here. Just to name two popular politicians. Jones knows these positions among progressives are much more nuanced and the debate more vigorous than his caricature.

But caricature is the point.

Today’s version of vital center politics must work to hold off Trumpists AND the so-called left. Both represent an existential danger, on its view, to the Republic. The old rhetoric of the threat of socialism and communism to freedom seeks to occupy the imagination and cut short any attempt to think outside of the box of its version of liberalism.

***

A while back, one of my former teachers, Jeffrey Stout, wrote a short piece entitled “Ism-mongering.” It involved a rather technical philosophical debate about his book, Ethics After Babel. Stout took issue with the reviewers’ description of the book as “an attempt to refute foundationalism, realism, or any other ism.” In fact, he resisted the shorthand of slogans that stand as substitutes for his own thinking. The reviewers’ attention to “isms,” he claimed, got in the way of what he was trying to argue in the book.

I think we need to resist the allure of “ism-mongering” in our politics, too. Invocations of socialism and communism can gum up the imagination. The slogans stand in for serious thinking. And, in some ways, that is the point.

Our politics presuppose imagination capture. Both parties don’t want us to think outside of set boxes or frames. Our fears and ambitions must be familiar, rote, and contained. And every single time we stick our heads outside of a box, speak words about the possibility of a different way of living (claim that markets are not the answer to all social and moral ills), and demand a responsive politics to our troubles, familiar language interrupts and we are forced, once again, to draw within the lines.

I am not interested in fighting over “isms.” I could care less whether I am thought of as progressive or not. The values animating the fight for a better world draw my attention and heart not ideological fealty. The bogeyman isn’t as effective when we are more concerned about what and who we care about than about what we fear and labels that signal our virtue.

Both parties and established interests want us fighting on old terrain. Debating about socialism, communism, and freedom. The Cold War, vital center politics, Reaganism, the triangulation of the Democratic Leadership Council and its various offsprings, and MAGA are all in a fight for how we imagine the past, present, and the future. Easy slogans will secure our chains.

Let’s break free, allow our imaginations to do the work this moment demands, and draw outside these damn lines.

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Weekly Wrap Up - July 24, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:45:59 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie reviews the growing global and domestic crises, beginning with warnings that over 1.2 million Gazans face severe food insecurity alongside the loss of 18 American soldiers in an escalating war with Iran. He slams newly announced tariffs on 60 trading partners for deepening the domestic affordability crisis while politicians dismiss relief for working families as “socialism”. Eddie further condemns political attacks on the Smithsonian as an attempt to whitewash history and embrace white supremacy without judgment, before highlighting ongoing voting rights rollbacks across the South and the deep institutional mistrust surrounding the death of Mississippi teenager Nolan Wells.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict & Humanitarian Crisis

U.S.-Iran War Escalations & Global Impacts

International Relations: Cuba

AP News: U.S.-Cuba Humanitarian Flights

Trade Policy & The Economy

Disappearance of Nolan Wells

Cultural Politics & The Smithsonian

A Lynching in Creoletown

Eddie — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:52:16 GMT

In the old cemetery of the Black Catholic Church in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the church in which I was raised, lies the unmarked grave of a man who was lynched on June 20, 1899, at 1:40 in the morning. His grave is surrounded by my grandparents on my dad’s side, uncles and cousins, and ancestors I do not know but I have heard their names over the years. Pascagoula stood next to the old railroad town of Scranton then, the two would merge in 1910. The man lived in the northeast section called Creoletown, which stretched north of Telephone Road, where the Josephite mission that would become St. Peter’s Apostolic Catholic church stood. Men and women who were so light-skinned as to look white walked the streets. Some spoke creole French. Others were dark or had a reddish hue with straight or curly hair and aquiline noses. Their faces and food resembled the layered colonial histories of the region.

On a hot and humid Monday in June, a young Dan Patrick stopped and asked Miss Bessie Ireland for a glass of water. The Pascagoula Democrat-Star reported that Miss Ireland “acceded to his request and as she was in the act of handing it to him he caught her arm and struggled with her.” She tried to resist, the paper recounted, but eventually succumbed to “his hellish deed.” Patrick, who was well known in Pascagoula, was captured in Scranton near the Scranton Hotel bar the next day by the local Sheriff, taken to jail where he confessed his crime and, according to the reporting, admitted that “he was ready to face any punishment that would be meted out.”

Crowds began to gather. Rumors swirled. The local sheriff got word that a mob was planning to take Patrick by force. He decided to put Patrick on the freight train arriving from Mobile on Wednesday morning. The idea was to take the prisoner to New Orleans “until the public cooled off.” But the white residents of Scranton and Pascagoula had other ideas. The sheriff brought Patrick to a secluded spot near the depot where the train pulled up around 1:30am only to be overwhelmed by a mob of about 300 people hell-bent on a lynching. According to the Pascagoula Democrat-Star, the sheriff “made a brave stand and did all in his power to hold his man from the infuriated crowd, but after several shots had been fired and [the sheriff] shot in the leg he was compelled to give in.”

Patrick was taken to the Hangman’s Tree, which stood at the intersection of Krebs Avenue and Magnolia Street in Scranton, about a hundred yards from the depot. As they placed the rope around his neck and swung him up, it was reported, Patrick “proclaimed his guilt and cried out to the mob, ‘shoot me, shoot me, get rid of me quick.’ Several hundred shots rang out as his body dangled from the old Oak tree. The Coroner’s jury concluded that “We, the jury, find that the deceased came to his death by climbing a tree, venturing too far out on a limb and broke his neck.”

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Weekly Wrap Up - July 17, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:36:40 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie dissects a brutal week of escalating crises, from the collapse of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire and ongoing strikes in Gaza pushing the death toll past 73,000, to the brazen West Bank detention of Congressman Ro Khanna. Domestically, he condemns a terrifying surge in ICE violence—including the fatal shooting of Colombian national Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine—and warns that the confirmation hearings of Jay Clayton and Todd Blanche signal a dangerous threat to independent justice. Finally, Eddie honors the grieving families of Nolan Wells and Daniel Erving who are forced to fight local authorities just to get basic transparency in the deaths of their children.