An acclaimed African-American sociologist and civil rights activist who fought for racial equality in the early 20th century. He remains best known for the classic study The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which he opened by asking, “How does it feel to be a problem?” Bayoumi took Du Bois’s question for his title because he sees Arab and Muslim-Americans as the 21st century version of this “problem.”
W.E.B. Du Bois Quotes in How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
The How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? quotes below are all either spoken by W.E.B. Du Bois or refer to W.E.B. Du Bois. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Preface
Quotes
The last several years have taken their toll. I ask him about life after September 11 for Arab Americans. “We're the new blacks,” he says. “You know that, right?”
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W.E.B. Du Bois Term Timeline in How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
The timeline below shows where the term W.E.B. Du Bois appears in How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Preface
...system of Jim Crow segregation more than a century ago, the black sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois asked, “How does it feel to be a problem?” Throughout American history, groups from Native...
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Afterword
...law enforcement officials. Arab Americans’ fate, like that of African-Americans a century ago, is (in W.E.B. Du Bois ’s words) “a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic.”
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