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Of The Meaning Of Progress Analysis

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Before every National Football League game, the national anthem reverberates throughout the huge stadiums. Spectators rise from their seats, remain quiet, and when the tune finishes, they get raucous. However, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, shattered this ritual two months ago. Before their season opener, Kaepernick elected to remain seated for the national anthem. Importantly, it took three successive weeks of this silent protest for anyone to notice. However, when audiences did notice, every form of media exploded with a myriad of headlines and opinions on the situation. With the nation impatiently waiting for answers, Kaepernick asserted that standing for the anthem implied that he was proud of the country, …show more content…

Eventually, he met a 20-year-old girl named Josie who told him that her town was in desperate need of both a teacher and a school. Excited at the prospect of finally have a teaching job, Du Bois journeyed, with a white man who wanted to create a separate white school, to meet with the town’s commissioner. The commissioner approved both of the men to operate their schools and asked both to stay for dinner. Du Bois was shocked that he was being treated as an equal to the white man, but was rudely awakened when “even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I – Alone” (Du Bois 407). This reality check was necessary because Du Bois thought that because “[he] was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men thought that Tennessee – beyond the Veil – was theirs alone” (Du Bois 405). The school that he started was housed in an old log building and had vastly inferior resources than the white school. Nevertheless, he was ecstatic to be enlightening the black youth. However, as a young man teaching at this dilapidated school, he not only realized his privilege but also realized that “there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief… from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity” (Du …show more content…

He warned that “Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is beginning to spread… instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School” (Du Bois 417). By emphasizing wealth, as Washington had urged blacks to do, there became no real rationale to be educated, so long as you knew how to do a profitable occupation. However, the major pitfall of blacks pursuing wealth was that they were fundamentally unable to access the same methods that whites were. That is, as one can see, exactly what whites wanted and Du Bois warned against. The result of this, as Du Bois points out, is that “the old leaders of Negro opinion, in the little groups where there is a Negro social consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither the black preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago” (Du Bois 418). That was to say that the number of black teachers and preachers was dwindling because more blacks wanted higher paying jobs. Therefore, there were far less active voices within the black community that promoted education, which created a perpetuating cycle in which fewer and fewer blacks valued holistic education. Du Bois, having tremendous foresight, knew that he wouldn’t be able

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