Читать книгу The Racialized Social System - Ali Meghji - Страница 5

Just over a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois published Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. This book is packed with history, theology, autoethnography, hymns and poetry. One of his central messages is that the world can be otherwise. We live in a time and geopolitical climate marked by anti-intellectualism and campaigns against critical thinking; nothing seems more clear than that we need the world to be otherwise, and thus I wish to begin this book with Du Bois’ comment:

From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms beneath the cloud-swept stars. Eastward and westward storms are breaking, – great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable. I will not believe that all that was must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again today before the sunlight sweeps the silver sea.

If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain, because it is but a cry, – a small and human cry amid Promethean gloom?