I have loved a little social media star named ‘Lil James since first seeing him interact with his Mother.  Now, probably at the age of about 8, he said recently “I hate 2025.  I just want to go to sleep and wake up in 2026!”  Even if it is over the break up of he and his girl, he is prophetic in understanding that something is just …not right.

In my daily walk to study as a workman who desires to rightly divide the word of God, this 2025 environment is one of contradiction, chaos, confusion— in the National life.  The 50 States “Say No To Trump” Protest this past Saturday was one that America has not yet seen.  No police, no tanks.  No dogs, no water hoses.  No clubs beating down the heads and bodies of the Protesters.  No handcuffs, no arrests.  Just a very visible shift in America’s 1 Sided, 2 Faced Justice System.

Now, in 2025, I am more determined than ever to find voices that have penned with heart some very powerful, conscious and cognitive expressions of life concerning contemporary issues.  Always first is in the voice and writings of W. E. B. DuBois in his “The Souls of Black Folks“.  So timely and timeless and oh so… powerful!  Straight, with —NO chaser!  I long for an “In person, In da churchHouse weekly study that still has the capacity to… transform. 

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second site in this American world,— a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.  It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.  One ever feels his two-ness,— an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,— this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.  In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.  He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa.  He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.  He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.  These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.  The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.  Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gaged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strenth to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness.  And yet it is not weakness,— it is the contradiction of double aims.  The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan— on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde– could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause.  By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, towards ideals that made him ashamed of his lonely tasks.  The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood.  The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the souls of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people.  This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideas, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,— has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.”

All inquiries By email: talk2therev@icloud.com. “Words of Life Study” Wednesdays on Zoom.  12:00 Noon & 6:30 pm CST. Join the Dialogue at my “Swellcast”.  At all times: https://SWELLCAST.com/therev