My book is out, and I invite you to read the first of 26 essays, The Souls of White Folk. Estranged Americans: Fallacies of Freedom, Citizenship and Racism is available on Amazon Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and in paperback and hardcover versions. Thanks to those who have encouraged me to do this.

William F. Spivey

The Souls of White Folk

Silence Equals Complicity

“It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different
from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut
out from their world by a vast veil.” — W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois published a historical work, “The Souls of Black
Folk.” It was a series of essays on the topic of race. These essays
addressed the Black experience and the Black condition. But they said
as much about white people and the presumption that whiteness was
the norm and that Black people labored under the assumption that
they were other, that they were a problem.
“Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the
difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutters round it. They
approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or
compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, “How does it feel
to be a problem?” They say, “I know an excellent colored man in my
town;” or “I fought at Mechanicsville; or “Do these Southern outrages
make your blood boil?” At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce