Both Correct & Both Blind
Lesson for the Right and Left from Booker Taliaferro Washington and William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
You are a black sharecropper in 1890.
You’re proud to be a free man. Determined to make a life for yourself, you head to the local merchant and negotiate to farm fifty acres owned by a distant landlord. You have nothing: no money, no supplies. The merchant offers you a loan—food, seeds, tools, clothing—for the upcoming year. In return, you pledge your mule and wagon as collateral.
You work hard. Extremely hard. Planting, weeding, caretaking, harvesting. It’s a good year and a good crop. Under the terms you agreed to, the merchant takes possession of that crop. He sells it, pays the landlord rent, and reimburses himself for his loans. The rest is profit left for you.
Except there is no profit left for you.
You didn’t know that the merchant was charging you an 80% mark up. You didn’t know you should shop around for lower prices for pork and corn-meal. You didn’t know that a glut of cotton production drove prices down, depressing your revenue. You didn’t know because you started at a disadvantage: you had no one to teach you. And the merchant and landlord are indifferent (at best) to your ignorance.
This no-win situation was captured by black intellectual William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in 1903:
“The Negro farmer started behind – started in debt…. They work for board and clothes.” (Du Bois, Souls of Black Folks, Chapter VIII)
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
No one escapes poverty without two things: financial literacy and the discipline of work hard. Du Bois believed the solution was to develop well-rounded, well-trained individuals.
Du Bois’s contemporary, Booker Taliaferro Washington, shared this vision. He lionized hard work and encouraged black Americans to love labor, despite facing intense racial discrimination:
“I not only learned that it was not a disgrace to labour, but learned to love labour, not alone for its financial value, but for labour's own sake and for the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which the world wants done brings.” (Washington, Up From Slavery, Chapter IV)
Booker Taliaferro Washington
To earn a living requires both:
Foundational finances & knowledge
Grit to persist
After the Civil War, freedmen worked hard, but their gains often withered. A freed man borrowed at such a high cost of capital that he could never save anything. The impossibility of getting ahead bred a culture among some black Americans that Du Bois termed “careless ignorance and laziness.” (Du Bois, Chapter VII).
The story of the sharecropper matters today.
As someone who champions civil discourse and America’s 82%-shared core values, I detest the left-right culture war, people’s willful and emotional efforts to deny others the right to say and believe as they please. Much left-right acrimony today centers around who “deserves” what, especially across racial lines.
But a hundred years ago, two of the most influential Black leaders in American history each understood a truth: getting black Americans the success they deserved required both 1) foundational finances & knowledge and 2) a disciplined work ethic.
Yet today, the left and the right seem to each only understand half the truth.
The challenge isn’t choosing between the two. It’s embracing both.
← On the left, too many deny that discipline and work ethic are critical for success. They emphasize only the lack of financial capital and skills among historically disadvantaged communities. Oppression during the Jim Crow era gave black Americans reason to believe society would never allow them wealth and to develop “careless ignorance and laziness,” but such an attitude should be rejected in a today’s more egalitarian era. Capital and financial skills are necessary to succeed, but only if paired with a strong work ethic. Moreover, efforts that seek solely to give resources to black Americans are sure to create animosity amongst poor white Americans left behind, as Martin Luther King Jr. understood half a century ago when he championed programs to help economically disadvantaged black and white Americans alike.
→ On the right, too many deny the importance of life’s unfair starting points. Many focus on the fact that discipline and thrift should lead to economic rewards. But one must be willfully blind to deny that someone born into a middle-class family with two parents and home equity enjoys a massive advantage over someone who is not. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller started with nothing and became enormously wealthy because they all had chances to learn a trade as young men. Similarly, Booker Taliaferro Washington, born a slave and rising to become a university founder, succeeded in large part because teachers believed in him and invested extra time and faith in him. If you never have the chance to learn what an interest rate is, how to shop for bargains, how to save and avoid luxuries, then you are extraordinarily unlikely to succeed financially.
Thus, both right and left are correct, and both are blind.
Americans must learn both “the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which the world wants done” and must recognize that whose “started in debt” must be given the foundational finances & knowledge needed to rise. America’s core values – Equal Dignity, Agency of the Free Individual, and an Effective Association – emerge from a faith in the sacredness of each individual. Every individual deserves the chance to rise on their own merits.
Many today would place Booker T. Washington alongside Shelby Steele and those who argue that in a post-Civil Rights Era, black people should rise through their own discipline and efforts, and would put W.E.B. Du Bois alongside the Black Lives Matter movement and those who say that the unfair starting points must be addressed. Such labels miss the nuance of these leaders. Both modeled doing hard new things. Both understood each other’s perspectives. Both appreciated multi-faceted truths.
I hear Washington and Du Bois’s wisdom echoed in lyrics from Soul Asylum,
“The Siamese twins
Who grow up to become the first President with two heads
Are better than one
He puts his heads in his hands
Says ‘I gotta put my heads together
I can become the best President ever.’”
In America, we are each President of ourselves: we choose what to believe, what to do.
The left and right are like two heads. Only when we put our two heads together are we the best version of ourselves.