Racial Inclusivity and Social Media and The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. Dubois

1945 Words4 Pages

Modern innovation has made the infusion of racial inclusivity and social media a tightrope walking affair above a never-ending abyss. Social media when used has been a place for radicalized defense, sensitive humor and to cavalcade swagger. Simultaneously this tool that has been disposed to culture through telephones, computers, tablets and many other places has created a whole new world for inauthentic means of living. In particular in regards to the African American culture. The “new ‘New Negro,’” a term suggested by Marlo David has so much at their fingertips, yet do not know how to use them. She said, “the new New Negro of the millennial age has sought to escape the shadow…that has been more real to him than his personality.” The arbitrary nature that African Americans escape to social media networks to show themselves only serves to cover themselves from what their blackness is. Blackness rooted in the brutalization of systemic objectification of their minds, bodies and expressions in various walks of life. These issues are not new to the Black experience, they are found in the early 1900’s with W.E.B. Dubois in his work, The Souls of Black Folk. His prophetic work confronted the black person then, and resonates in the infusion of Social media today in everyday life. . He writes, “How does it feel to be a problem? I seldom answer a word.” He continues, “Being a problem is a strange experience - peculiar even fro one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.” Social media has only meliorated the way African American persons are viewed, for Dubois and today, as a problem. From Duboisian experience in 1903 to Social Media and the Black Experience today, progress and problems persist....

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