The “Talented Tenth” Dubois

This week's readings explore a new way in which the Europeans continued to subjugate the

African Americans despite their emancipation and how it helped maintain their white supremacy.

Through the theme of racial segregation highlighted in the various literal texts, we get to

understand how the vast gap in social and economic disparities that were created then and are

present in our society today came about. Through Focusing on racial segregation as its theme,

this paper investigates moments in our text when the Europeans had to segregate the African

Americans in various ways to maintain their social and economic superiority.

The “Talented Tenth” Dubois expresses the European oppression through education

segregation through inadequate resources to the African Americans where, “there are today less

Americans to maintain their supremacy in the social, economic and even political sectors of the

country where they would lack political awareness of their situation thus unable to fight these

inequalities. Another literal text in this week's readings that depict how the Europeans in the

United States maintained their economic supremacy is Malcolm X's speech, where he states that

the African Americans are allowing the Europeans to lead their community and control the

economy of their community where they take all the money and dollar that the black people have

https://ilearn.laccd.edu/courses/277211/assignments/6950289?module_item_id=18513845

spend in their community back to where they live which means it only benefits the Europeans

and not the blacks who elected that European.2

In Marcus Gavey address it is evident that the Europeans used various ways to subjugate

and oppress the African American so as to maintain their white supremacy. “And we are the

more aggrieved because of the lynch rope, because of segregation, because of the Jim Crowism

that is used, practiced and exercised here in this country and in other parts of the world by the

white nations of the earth.”3Not only did the Europeans segregate the Blacks through the

education segregation but through the codified laws and system of Jim Crowism that legalized

racial segregation in many parts of the south. The racial segregation brought about economic and

segregated areas in the United States, clearly explains how the Europeans used racial segregation

2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zLQLUpNGsc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI3u1Fvx1Ww.

and discrimination to maintain their economic supremacy. The Jim Crows laws and others were

important in maintaining white supremacy in various sectors of the public as they limited black

power and freedom. One of the effects of the Jim Crows laws was the lynching of black people.

Thus, the song by Billie Holiday, where many African Americans suffered from the violent acts

of lynching by the South Americans. Billie Holiday uses metaphor where the strange fruit

represented the body of black people hanged on a tree after being lynched.5

Through the act of racial segregation in various public sectors of the United States, the

Europeans were able to maintain the superiority and advantages in those sectors till today when

we observe various effects in our contemporary like the economic disparity between the two

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DGY9HvChXk.