Griffin Snyder 11/11 Post

This week’s readings gave me a lot to think about when it comes to the nature of our society and the differences between the end goals of the oppressed and the oppressors. While the majority oppressor society (white capitalist and hetero-patriarchal according to the most intersectional of Black Liberation scholars) sees the end of the world as a terrible thing and wholly undesirable, many minority opressed people see the apocalypse in a completely different light. To them, the apocalypse is to be celebrated, as it means an end to the society that perpetuates White Supremacy and a chance to create a new society that exists beyond the confines of race, class, gender, identity, or nationality and is truly utopian. During our class discussion on Monday, I was reminded of a chapter of W.E.B. Dubois’ “The Souls of Black Folk” wherein Dubois discusses an allegorical story of a man named John. The story follows John (who is Black) as he starts his life happy go lucky without a care in the world despite living in the segregated South, but when he goes to college and travels North to learn and try to enter “high society”, he becomes highly cynical, and he returns to his hometown forever changed. Upon returning home, he kills a white man (who was his friend growing up) who was assaulting a black girl and instead of running from the lynch mob, he waits on a cliff and accepts his fate while humming “here comes the bride”. I see this allegory (the end specifically) as a commentary on the lives of black people within white society and the thought (that Dubois has echoed in previous chapters), that there is no living in a White society for Black people, and I see John’s acceptance of his end as a solid parallel with the BLM interest in the apocalypse of White Society.