Dubois, Washington, and the Tuskegee Dilemma

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Critics such as W.E.B. Dubois viewed the training of blacks at the Tuskegee Institute as training students to comply with the white social order of the South and that these graduates were denied access to industrial position, leaving them to become manual laborers and domestic workers. Dubois was vocal regarding the cause-and-effect relationship between failure and discrimination. This is a profound statement that continues present challenges in today's education of black youth. Dubois stated, "That prejudice limits what blacks can achieve and that black underachievement reinforces white prejudice". He goes on to elaborate that prejudice and behaviors act as reciprocal cause and effect for which both must change (Clegg, 2008). Dubois and Washington were on the same page with their ideology that blacks needed educating to transform them from their life in bondage to becoming a freedman. Where they differ is their ideology. Washington stressed self-help and economic development as a vehicle to …show more content…

Dubois, on the other hand, believed that liberal education was the pathway to citizenship.
Race Relations
The civil war came about due to the northern farmers not wanting slavery to expand to the north, and the south wanting the expansion (Watkins, 2001, p. 13). Slavery promoted an institution of racism that became embedded into our moral and economical fiber. This culture of inequality created dysfunctional societies and sub-societies that lack resources and funding, poverty, unemployment, and crime riddled environments.
With racism, children are the byproducts of the repercussions of the decisions made by a bias system. A child’s success in school is skewed by the relative position of their family of origin in the hierarchy of racially prescribed relations of domination and subordination (Richardson,

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