W. E. B Dubois Public Good Analysis

The subjectivity of what is “good” is substantially overestimated. Countless hours and innumerable pages have been spent quibbling over the boundaries, specifications, and quantifiers of the concept of good. But good has never been all that difficult to pin down. Certainly its trappings, its manifestations over the course of human history, may shift and change somewhat, but the things we as a species identify as “good” remain fundamentally static. What we think of as good, what we as people want from life, is essentially the same as it ever was. We want security. We want comfort. We want the freedom to enjoy our lives as we see fit. We want a better present than our past and a better future for our children. These desires do not change, and they …show more content…
Around the turn of the 20th Century, W.E.B. Du Bois underwent a crisis of faith in his scientific approach to the eradication of racism. He became increasingly embittered with the ability of scientific methods to transform racial bias. Instead he began to think about racism and its roots as “forces or ideologies [which] embraced more than our reasoned acts,” or as "habits, conventions, and enactments (DuBois, 1997).” He observed that "the echo of this industrial imperialism in America was the expulsion of black men from American democracy, their subjection to caste control and wage slavery,” and that the white European Empire in America continued to dominate people of color because it had "political power built on economic control of labor, income and ideas (DuBois, 1997)." In essence, black interests were not being included in the Public Good due to the fragmentation and underrepresentation induced by the legacy of slavery. Membership in the American public was still controlled by white power brokers, forces which were habitually dismissive of the legitimacy of black