Saturday, February 3, 2018

The Wisdom of Booker T. Washington

From The Conservative Tribune:
In his 1910 book, “My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience,” civil rights icon and Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington noted that the same class of people you saw sitting on Tuesday were extant during some of the darkest hours in American race relations, as well. And it wasn’t just spite that made them root against the people they claimed to want to help.

“I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public,” Washington wrote.

“My experience is that people who call themselves ‘The Intellectuals’ understand theories, but they do not understand things. I have long been convinced that, if these men could have gone into the South and taken up and become interested in some practical work which would have brought them in touch with people and things, the whole world would have looked very different to them.

“Bad as conditions might have seemed at first, when they saw that actual progress was being made, they would have taken a more hopeful view of the situation,” he noted. This is the perfect description of a modern Democrat Party, nourished on feminist and postcolonialist theory, ever ready to make an appearance on MSNBC or give an interview to Vox — but what have they really changed for the marginalized groups in their balkanized America? (Read more.)
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