The Future Of The Race

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Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” These exceptional men, and Du Bois did mean men, would "guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst.” The Talented Tenth would shoulder the task of uplifting the race without succumbing to money-grubbing selfishness; their formal education signified their intelligence and enlightened character. In 1903, the Talented Tenth was broadminded and big-hearted by definition.
The passage of forty-five years diminished Du Bois’s assurance. By 1948 he had revised his appraisal, and that revision also appears in the Appendix. He confessed error of his assumption that altruism flowed automatically from higher education. The Best Men had not become the best men. He lamented that the Talented Tenth had mostly produced self-indulgent egotists who turned their training toward personal advancement. Meanwhile, Du Bois had been learning to respect the masses from reading ...

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memories Gates threads current social science data reflecting the tragedy of black life at the end of the twentieth century. Stuck in chronic poverty, the one-third of U.S. blacks who belong to the underclass are desperate and self-destructive. Gate’s “Parable of the Talents” casts middle and underclass blacks as the servants in the book of Matthew, in which “unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Weeping and gnashing their teeth, the black poor have been cast into outer darkness, their paltry store of money taken away from them and bestowed upon ...

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