Educator, essayist, journalist, scholar, social critic, and activist W.E.B. DuBois, was born to Mary Sylvina Burghardt and Alfred Dubois on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He excelled in the public schools of Great Barrington, graduating valedictorian from his high school in 1884. Four years later he received a B.A. from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1890 DuBois earned a second bachelor degree from Harvard University. DuBois began two years of graduate studies in History and Economics at the University of Berlin in Germany in 1892 and then returned to the United States to begin a two year stint teaching Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1895, DuBois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University. His doctoral thesis, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America,” became the first book published by Harvard University Press in 1896. Later that year DuBois married Nina Gomer and the couple had two children. After the death of his first wife in 1950, DuBois married Shirley Graham who remained his wife until his death. DuBois also joined Alpha Phi Alpha and Sigma Pi Phi Fraternities.

Before the close of the 19th century, DuBois also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Atlanta University. During this time, he became the first scholar to systematically study African American urban life. DuBois’s first post-dissertation book, The Philadelphia Negro, released in 1899, determined that housing and employment discrimination were the principal barriers to racial equality and black prosperity in the urban North. His work and conclusions initiated the field of African American urban history.

DuBois lacked black public appeal of his contemporaries such as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Paul Robeson. He remained scathingly critical of white racism his entire life and unlike Washington he was unwilling to seek compromise in the quest for civil rights and racial justice. In 1903, DuBois published a groundbreaking collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, which challenged the civil rights strategies of black leaders like Washington while inspiring a cadre of young black activist scholars to use their work to combat racial oppression.

In 1905 DuBois and other black leaders created the Niagara Movement to provide an organizational challenge to segregation and discrimination. DuBois edited the organization’s magazines, the Moon and the Horizon. As the Niagara Movement declined, DuBois became the co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and served as the editor of its magazine, The Crisis, until 1934 when he was fired by the organization.

DuBois’s departure from the NAACP reflected his disillusionment over the continuing power of white racism and what he felt was the compromising approach of black leaders, including his NAACP colleagues. Moreover, DuBois’s speeches and editorials made him unpopular with many whites and some blacks who, fearing white backlash, refused to support his positions on race.

DuBois, however, continued to believe scholarship could promote racial equality. He wrote numerous books and articles including Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. Largely discounted by scholars at the time, the book eventually became the basis for a dramatic reappraisal of the Reconstruction era by scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. His conclusions regarding the progress made by African Americans during the decade of Reconstruction have now been accepted by almost all mainstream historians.

By the early 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, DuBois devoted much of his energy to promoting peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. He embraced this controversial position at great personal and professional peril. His only foray into politics, a failed run in 1950 as a Socialist for the US Senate seat from New York, drew the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Stripped by the State Department of his passport in 1950 and criticized by many former allies and associates in the civil rights struggle, DuBois became a Communist, believing it offered the only hope for working class people around the world and the only major challenge to racism.

In 1961 DuBois gave up his citizenship and left the United States permanently for Accra, Ghana. With the support of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, DuBois became the editor of the proposed Africana Encyclopedia. Before the project was completed, DuBois died in Accra on August 27, 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington, the largest civil rights demonstration in the US to that date.

hello everyone - happy Black history month 🌌 here’s a massive archive list of Black and Marxist writing and film (with downloads!) to check out xoxo

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  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    6 minutes ago

    I have made more tortillas!

    Letting them sit a little longer to hydrate seems to have helped a lot, as did letting my pan heat up more. Unfortunately my pan now has a bunch of burned dough crusted onto it and is going to have to soak for a while before I scrub it. Might have gotten it too hot?

    They’re really good, and don’t seem to flake apart or crack anymore when I roll them!

  • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    1 hour ago

    Every defence of why the llm hype isn’t a waste of resources is like smuglord yeah well have you heard of this classic ML/deep learning technique that cures cancer/makes plasma calculations more efficiently. Like yeah I have because that was around when I was an undergrad and it ran on a cluster of PS3s.

    • Coolkidbozzy [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      Nobody who regularly talks about ML in the west understands what it actually is, obviously there are some useful applications of various techniques. Probably the most visible example is it’s how navigation apps work. Autonomous robots will maybe someday transform labor-intensive jobs, but we already have the technology other than improved batteries and they’re not so I’m skeptical. LLMs will ALWAYS be slop machines and nothing more because that is what they fundamentally are

    • Goblinmancer [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      Me a 12 year old discovering chatbots “hahaha silly robot toy!”

      Sillicon valley bros : “OMG AI IS SO GENIUS AND BETTER than us THEY SHOULD MAKE EVERY MOVIE MUSIC GAME ever we should SHOVE IT everywhere”

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      sometimes it’s at least tenuously connected because it uses transformers, or some technique with enough pieces that could be sped up by tensor cores, but that isn’t even always the case.

  • Goblinmancer [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    1 hour ago

    You can tell deadlock characters are liike infinitely more complex and well written than dota “lol my name is anti mage i hate magic” “my name is silencer i want to silence everyone”

  • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    Getting choked to death because you forgot to drop by the book store or chose the wrong book seems like something that would happen in a visual novel roguelike game.

  • WokePalpatine [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    3 hours ago

    Guys are buying broken 3DSes (like snapped hinge broken) probably for like $5-10 at garage sales and then putting them on eBay for $90+ $20 shipping “as is”. Fuck off.

  • miz [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    4 hours ago

    today in “Best of Hexbear”, this comment by SeventyTwoTrillion:

    Hitler grew up reading Karl May’s American western novels for young people, which featured tales of taming the “Wild West” through “Indian wars.” He also regularly re-read them into adulthood, even recommending them to his generals as sources of creative ideas. Writing in “Mein Kampf” in the 1920s, Hitler praised the way the “Aryan” America conquered “its own continent” by clearing the “soil” of “natives” to make room for more “racially pure” settlers and lay the foundation for its economic self-sufficiency and growing global power. Indeed, the concept of Lebensraum was coined and popularized by Friedrich Razel, who said his theory of colonization and racial replacement drew inspiration from the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” and its identification of “colonization of the Great West” as central to American history and identity.

    Once the Nazis gained power in Germany, Kakel details how the American West became an “obsession” for Hitler and his closest followers, such as SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Their goal was to remake the demographics of Europe the same way the United States remade the demographics of North America. The Nazi leadership routinely referred to Eastern Europe as “the German East” or the “Wild East,” and its inhabitants as “Indians.” Admiring how the United States had “gunned down the millions of removed to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage,” Hitler spoke of his intention to similarly “Germanize” the east “by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as removed.” Echoing American justifications for westward settlement, he stated, “It is inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.” His answer? “Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America.” For Hitler, “Our Mississippi must be the Volga.”

    As in the American case, Hitler used threats of war and then war itself to gain territory in the east. Then regular army troops, paramilitary units called “Einsatzgruppen,” and collaborating locals began killing, terrorizing and expelling inhabitants considered racially inferior. A “Hunger Plan” envisioned mass starvation, mainly of Slavs. Meanwhile, the SS drew up plans to expel all European Jews to a massive Judenreservat, or “Jewish reservation,” either in Madagascar (once British control of the sea lanes was defeated) or Siberia (once the Soviet Union was defeated). Most were expected to die of disease and starvation.

    After the invasion of Poland, Germany quickly annexed part of the country and began the process of moving in ethnic German and other sufficiently “Aryan” settlers. Nazi propaganda showed photos of German colonists departing in covered wagons and described the lands to the east as the “California of Europe.” German newspapers featured headlines such as “Go East, Young Man!” — an imitation of Horace Greeley’s famous advice to American settlers to seek their fortune in the west. As for resistance by those being conquered, killed and cleared? Hitler compared it to “the struggle in North America against the Red Indians.” After all, he said, “who remembers the Red Indians?”

    source

    If Hitler had been successful in Eastern Europe, leaders and politicians today would be talking about them the same way we talk about American native groups. “Sure, what a tragedy it is, but that’s all in the past now! We had to ensure that civilization and order spread across the region! There were some unfortunate casualties, but the number of graves show that it was relatively minimal, and those camps were merely for labor, not extermination! Look, how about we do a minute of silence out of remembrance of the people who used to stand where we’re building this next mall? That’s good enough, right?”

    America is the prototypical example of a fascist state that won. “But they aren’t doing that anymore!” No shit, most of them are dead. And, as Awoo states below, the government still is oppressing what remains of indigeneous communities.

  • Euergetes [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    4 hours ago

    I was aware that deviantart had taken a plunge but holy fuck, it’s all AI now. heaps upon heaps of trash with narry a grain of actual human-made art in sight. jfc

  • Parzivus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    5 hours ago

    Just caught a three day ban from Reddit for saying Germans love genocide, lol. Nevermind that I was replying to a German questioning why people hate the literal waffen SS more than “all the other groups who commit war crimes”