The overlay of Du Bois & Poitier

In my reading ventures this year, I read Sidney Poitier’s Measure of a Man and listened to the audiobook of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk during the same period of time. There was beauty but also bitter realizations in experiencing these books simultaneously. They both captured so well the feeling, landscape, and nature of the times of which they spoke. They took great care to furnish details and to address the overall picture as they saw it, and I felt transported and entranced by the emotions and the weight felt at the times discussed. I also appreciated them speaking about their contemporaries. Poitier talked about Harry Belafonte and Paul Roberson, and Du Bois spoke of Booker T. Washington. It gave me a chance to see these figures as they were back then, early in their greatness, fallible and able to be criticized. Not just as the summarized revered figures they are now. Once people have aged or died, there is a tendency to revere what they represented, but that has always struck me as only part of the picture of who they were and makes it hard to relate to them. There is value in seeing the flawed humanity of a person.

In contrast to the beauty in these books was the blinding light shun on the role of race, power, and privilege in the oppression of Black people. Progress has clearly been made in some regards. But, it is quite clear that the change we see evident in society now is a mere sliver when considered in the context of how much change is needed for Black people to be valued in a manner deserving of every human being regardless of his/her race. What is unmistakable about reading books concerned about the experience of Blacks in different periods of time is the stark similarity of past and current experiences despite the passage of time. Souls of Black Folk was written almost a century before the Measure of a Man. Yet, the struggles were very similar. The minor and major ways that the blossoming and thriving of Blacks was not an expectation and in fact was intentionally thwarted. The clear roadblocks, sinkholes, and brutalities that explain why Blacks struggle the way they do. It makes it clear why saying “everyone has a chance to pull themselves up by their boot straps” does not take into account how punch drunk and fatigued some of the “everyone” are, and the shredded straps with which some have to pull themselves up. If those factors are not accounted for, there is a false equivalence of circumstances the will pervade your visual field and will blind you into thinking the playing field is merit base and therefore level.

Du Bois made the point that education, opportunities, and jobs were not made available to freed Blacks. Ideas such as saving money was not a message freed Blacks were exposed to. Those with knowledge kept such ideas to themselves. And coming from slavery, saving money is an unreachable concept when all you are concerned with is finding work, feeding your family, and keeping your family safe and sheltered. The main means of survival, work, was not laid at a freed Black's feet because they were now free. Poitier took a different approach to commenting on the state of affairs. He pointed out how many different ways the dominant culture tried to paint him into a corner of seeing himself as unworthy of dignity, a corner that never fit for him. He also focused on how many times he had to push back, when it was safe to do so, to reject the notion that he was as small as the culture at large wanted him to be. Thank goodness he had made the connection early in his life that he represented more than himself, that he represented his parents. That connection, that deep understanding of being an extension of family seemed to save him from being enveloped in the force of the oppression, brokenness and the rage that living as a Black man in society creates.

Both books, in my estimation, had a theme of the importance of finding not just a way to survive, but a way to deal with the rage of having to survive unnecessary ills and atrocities that you could not fight without paying your life and dignity as the price of fighting. Poitier seemingly used his sense of self, his grounding in wanting to honor his parents and his childhood imagery of himself as a good soul in order to fend off as much as he could the fire inside that develops from being treated like garbage and worthy of little. Du Bois spoke from a rational standpoint of what Freedmen need to thrive. He spoke more broadly of the need to attain education, savings, and social leverage. In looking at the world we live in now, it is clear that progress has happened. However, that progress does not negate the underlying inequities that remain. The souls of some men are given inherently more value than others in the culture at large and in the eyes of many who hold societal power. And while that value has increased in some regards, that value remains less than whole. No matter how many changes have happened, the value of each soul must be seen as comparable in order for true harmony and humanity to exist.