Black ukessay

Black ukessay

Everything is so different here from what I have been accustomed to in the United States. No insults to encounter, no prejudice to encounter, but all is smooth. I am treated as a man an equal brother. My color instead of being a barrier to social equality is not thought of as such. I am every where treated with the greatest kindness by all with whom I come in contact. The change is wonderful. 14

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People’s capability to meet job openings based on their possession of the necessary skills and experiences need to inform the decision to employ them. Discriminating people based on their genetic information, skin colour, or ethnicity disadvantages an organisation (Noon 2017). It not only minimises the range of talent potential for building competitive advantage but also hinders the development and nurturing of future aptitude that is imperative for innovation. While workplaces across the UK are aware of this disadvantage, the White race continues to dominate in paid employment. Race Disparity Audit (2017) supports this assertion by noting that despite the increased employment rates for all ethnic groups in the UK, massive differences between the White British and the BME people continue to be witnessed in terms of their participation in the employment market. In fact, “around 1 in 10 adults from a Black, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Mixed background is unemployed compared to 1 in 25 White British people” (Race Disparity Audit 2017, p. 9). This trend exists at a time when the number of people identifying themselves as White decreased from 87.4 per cent in 2001 to about 80% in 2011. Hence, in the UK, discrimination of BME people in workplaces continues to be a major impendent to their career mobility and absorption in the employment sector.

Smith, Shawn Michelle. Photography on the Color Line W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

[3] First published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk throughout this article is paginated in reference to the 1989 London Penguin reprint of the original edition. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (London: Penguin, 1989).

A physical veil covers from sight and hides that which lies beneath, yet is also diaphanous. Du Bois articulates the veil of race as the symbolic consequence of racial hatred. The veil features in each chapter, taking on a plurality of meanings, leading Gibson to remark that, ‘it is not always entirely clear just exactly what the veil means’. [9] For instance, ‘at times it is the Veil of ignorance which education must lift’, and ‘in yet another sense, Du Bois seems to use the Veil as a symbol of a moral and spiritual
paralysis’. [10] I ground my analysis of the veil in Melvin L. Rogers’s observation that ‘the theme of rhetoric, its political character, and its relationship to emotional states has received scant attention in the literature on Souls’. [11] I argue that in Souls there is a deliberate politicization of the metaphorical veil, inducing a ‘philanthropic effort’ from the white reader to cross the colour-line, ‘lift the Veil and set the prisoned free’. [12] In doing so, Du Bois exposes the economic conditions and deterministic white logic of perceiving black individuals as ‘half-men’, thus re-enslaving African Americans since Reconstruction. [13] By insisting upon the arbitrary nature of the veil, Du Bois makes the white reader see how they are implicit in the ‘determined Negro humility’. [14] I analyse the psychological implications [15] , economic post-colonial dependency, [16] and biographical aspects of Souls. This article concludes with an analysis of Du Bois’s most effective rhetorical plea: the deeply personal ‘Of the Passing of the First-Born’, and its evocation of philanthropic urgency. [17] Souls exposes the deterministic conditions sustaining black dehumanization. By a continued ‘black dehumanisation’ I refer to ‘theories of ‘Negroid’ inferiority and ‘Caucasoid’ superiority’ originally used to justify slavery. [18] Du Bois expresses the need to ‘lift’ the veil and journey beyond the metaphorical racial border in order to understand ‘the black folk’. In doing so, Du Bois exposes how arbitrary racism is blind to the ‘handicapped’ black experience, [19] an experience which precludes black self-actualization. [20] By divulging the ways the veil ‘distort[s] the humanity of those within’, Du Bois rhetorically stresses the movable yet nevertheless powerful nature of racially veiled
bias. [21]

[74] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 83.

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Over the last 12 years, women have significantly taken senior job positions, including directorships. Recognising these efforts and considering the benefits, including the case where women now make over 70% of household-related purchasing decisions, the UK is now well capacitated to respond to the issue of discrimination encountered by BME people (Howe-Walsh & Turnbull 2016). After all, women have been ardently included in workforce whereby the fruits from such a move have already been felt in the UK’s economy (Seierstad 2016). Consequently, the case of women involvement in paid labour in the UK continues to constitute an important benchmark in decision-making processes and hence the dire need to respond to the labour market demands that are characterised by increased knowledge repositories among BME people.

[18] Joel Olson, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept’, 118.

[40] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 61.

Writing any kind of paper requires numerous skills from an author. You should be keen on grammar, have big vocabulary, and even talent. So if you can’t be proud of having all the skills mentioned above, you cannot be sure in the quality of the final work.

i George P. Landow, ed. ‘Why I Use the Term ‘Postcolonial’’. Political Discourse: Theories of Colonialism and Related Terms (Brown University revised June 2002) [29 Feb 2020].

Thus, economic subjection renders Southern African-Americans devoid of agency despite gaining notional legal freedoms. Reconstruction following Emancipation in 1863 was not a ‘single climatic event but …a long process that stretched across a near-century’. [105] Instead, it saw the former slave ‘called to purchase his survival in a white-oriented world’ with ‘manual labour, turning himself into a mechanic[ism] of white dominance’. [106] Du Bois shows how, following reconstruction, whites sustained their supremacy by making African Americans ‘laborers and nothing more’. [107] As Marx and Engels put it: ‘the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production’, meaning ‘men [are] distinguished from animals [only] by consciousness’. [108] Forcibly implemented black subjugation renders the antithesis, white superiority, an empty signifier. The now ‘disturbed’ and ‘honestly’ reviewed ‘social facts’ [109] have decentered the previously purported fixed origin of racial dynamics controlled by whites. ‘Through realistic facts’, Du Bois shows how ‘white Americans wished to have them living in submission and silence […] requiring that Negroes remain powerless and dependent in slave capacities’. [110] When ‘consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life’ deprived self-actualization appears systematically and economically contrived. [111] Thus, for Du Bois, this psychologically hindering and Hegelian ‘unequal form of recognition’ is reinforced by economic structures of oppression.

The Use and Usefulness of Strategies for Overcoming BME Discrimination in the Workplace

Marx, Karl, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, Marx: Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 158–162.

‘A Conversation with Ossie Davis’, Souls, 2:3 (2000), 6–16.

Mariotti, Shannon. ‘On the Passing of the First-Born Son: Emerson’s ‘Focal Distancing,’ Du Bois’ ‘Second Sight,’ and Disruptive Particularity’. Political Theory, 37 (2009), 351–374.

Tsiokos, Panteleimon. ‘Veiled Interpretations of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903)’. US Studies Online: Forum for New Writing. British Association for American Studies, (revised January 2018), [29 February].

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Double-consciousness refers to how African Americans risk ‘being torn asunder’ [41] in the ‘warring’ between the two elements of self: one enforced and one ‘truer self’. Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ further explains the individual’s ‘perpetual psychological effort of suturing self-identification to image’, which renders learnt-identity a ‘social determination’ and an ‘artificial…activity’. [42] Lacan’s theorization describes the formation of the Ego as caused by one’s external expectation, image, and ultimately misrepresentation of oneself. Consequently, the secondary prescribed self-awareness is ‘founded in misrecognition, in one’s misrecognition of self in and as an image reflected in the mirror’, [43] producing ‘the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality’. [44] Shawn Michelle Smith states, ‘for Du Bois, double consciousness result[s] from an inverted mirror stage brought about by a classmate’s racialized rejection of him’: it is thus ‘an effect of misidentification’. [45] Therefore, racial self-awareness of the supposed ‘dehumanised’ black race is socially predicated and not a moment of ‘true’ self-actualization.

In the chapter ‘Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece’, the South represents an ‘economic organization [that] is radically wrong’, causing Du Bois to ask: ‘who is to blame?’. [85] He writes:

The next time I saw Karen, before she engaged in any small talk about what I’d been up to, she couldn’t resist asking about my hair. “Your hair is different. How did you get it like that? Your hair is always changing”. That was a strange opening considering the previous incident, but I understood that she’s racist so I wasn’t surprised. It was then confirmed when we all got a bit boozed, and Karen asked me without context, “Where are you going?” I was confused, so I stayed quiet and waited for her to clarify. She quickly added, “I don’t mean you shouldn’t be in this country or anything. I mean, are you planning a trip for when lockdown lifts?”

Disadvantages of BME Discrimination in the Workplace

[91] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 33.

Meeting one of my partner’s friends — we’ll call her Karen—— is the first time I was being forced to directly confront a racist. From the first time we met, she began drilling me about my ethnic background. It was strange, but being an international student in both Canada and the UK, it’s something I was used to from both white people and people of colour. While I explained my upbringing and that of my parents, she snidely said, “Oh, that’s an interesting mix.” When asking about her background, she became defensive, and got very short with me, “I’m not finished [drilling you about your ethnicity]!”. The room became awkward and tense, people were embarrassed, but no one came to my defence. In that moment, I realised how the difference between being nonracist and antiracist can literally become a situation of life or death.

before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black [73]

Robbins, Sierra. ‘The Souls of Black Folk and the Essentiality of Human Connection’, Arts One: The University of British Columbia, (revised May 2016) [29 February].

[100] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 33, 126.

Hurston, Zora Neal. ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’, The World Tomorrow, 11 (1928), 215–216.

Saxena, A 2014, ‘Workforce diversity: a key to improve productivity’, Pocedia Economics and Finance, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 76-85.

Racism was always a very foreign concept to me, until I moved to the UK. The privilege of being pretty by society’s standards and being mixed race shielded me from a lot of the experiences that my deeper-skinned sisters struggled with since childhood. Now, I feel like I am being called into the front lines of a battle that’s been raging for centuries, and I’m scared. I don’t want to lose my softness — I’m the type of person to get teary eyed at small animals, children playing, and cute old couples holding hands — but my light-skinned privilege can no longer protect me, and I have no choice but to fight.

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