Democracy In America Tocqueville Analysis

Pleasantville is what we are going for right? We want to live in a nation and world where everything is peaceful and everyone gets along. What if this actually were to be true? Diversity is said to be a positive influence on America, the most famous of “melting pots” around the world. With the arguments presented by Tocqueville, Harris, and DuBois we see that this perfect world of harmony between races is unrealistic. In Democracy In America, Tocqueville shares his notion that no matter what there will always be a divide because the races are simply not on similar playing fields. Harris brings about the point in The Price of The Ticket that the fight for a black agenda is a lost cause. Lastly, DuBois gives the idea that the line between …show more content…
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” says W.E.B DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk(p.1). The lines need to be blurred for there to be success not sharpened. However, the driving message here is still clear that change needs to come. The policies that have been put into place since the days of Tocqueville are seen to be failures in the eyes of DuBois. There is a ‘veil’ that is placed over all of the issues we see and creates a stigma against the black people. DuBois in fact has the connotation that his race of black people in fact was at a lower standing than his white counterparts because the society he lives in makes him believe this. To change this, his idea is that black people themselves have to change. They must conform to a higher standard set by the white folk because this is what would be seen as correct. Policy itself will never be in favor of the blacks so they must changes their ways if they want any sort of respect in the future or in their lives at all. This can also be seen as a sort of identity conflict for blacks as to where they can relate to the society in which they are living in. Post Emancipation Proclamation comes Southern Reconstruction, which introduces the black codes. These codes are set in place to quite clearly target the black population, but are said to only target criminal activity. Such included vagrancy laws, and unfree labor. This proves to be an extremely corrupt era in our American history. Reconstruction is a democratic reform failure. There still is a lack of integration between blacks and whites, not to mention increasingly high tensions. The limited distribution of land, and black people still being treated as if they were not human beings allowed on this earth are all clear evidence that DuBois gives us. Now known as the “Incomplete Southern Reconstruction” drastically fails on the front of