Chapter 13: The Imputation of Black Inferiority: Does It Contribute to the Achievement Gap?

W.E.B. DuBois was an impeccable scholar in pursuit of the causes and effects of the imputation of Black inferiority. He described the struggle in people of African descent between Africa and Europe,

Du Bois also accurately stated that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line. Both of these ideas appear in The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903.

In DuBois’s now famous debate with Booker T. Washington, he was on the side of high standards and a curriculum commensurate with the White supremacist elite. After all, DuBois studied Latin and Greek. He wanted desperately to produce an “African American Talented Tenth.” In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois stated that he believed in the higher education of a Talented Tenth who through their knowledge of modern culture could guide the American Negro into a higher civilization. He said, “I knew that without this the Negro would have to accept White leadership, and that such leadership could not always be trusted to guide this group into selfrealization and to its highest cultural possibilities” (1968, p. 70). Cornell West concludes in his book, Race Matters, the following: “To be a serious black leader is to be a race-transcending prophet who critiques the powers that be (including the black component of the Establishment) and who puts forward a vision of fundamental social change for all who suffer from socially induced misery” (1994, p. 70). West seems to be the Talented Tenth that DuBois wanted. The question is: Can all Black people transcend race even if they want to do so? Can we have a color-blind society or practice? If so, why have we not begun to implement Du Bois’s fourth solution, “a racial attempt to use the power of the Negro as a consumer not only for his economic uplift but in addition to that, for his economic education” (1968, p. 208).