Summary Of The Atlanta Compromise By Booker T. Washington

Today, there is a very interesting situation that is happening, where people are questioning the value of past ideas and political systems, but also the mechanisms that they use to bring about the political goals that these systems claim to promote. In the case of democracy, people are not only questioning if democracy can really make all citizens politically equal, meaning that each person has one vote, freedom of speech, and the right to determine their own lives within the bounds of the law. But people are also questioning whether democracy requires rational deliberation at all. This makes sense with not only the amount of people today who refuse to participate in it due to their own biases and often ignorance, but also how much seems to

He also highlights some of the paradoxes that the approach of the Atlanta Compromise, and how Booker T. Washington “is striving nobly to make Negro artisans businessmen and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage.” (Du Bois p.43). The results and paradoxes of the approach of Booker T. Washington show how when issues aren’t discussed, people tend not to pay any attention to them, leading them to get worse. But it also shows how when issues are only discussed in the way that is comfortable to society or the population at large it leads to people not discussing the issue in away that will meaningfully solve it, rational deliberation allows people to break through these

While it is true that full impartiality is illusionary as Young points out, a certain degree of impartiality can be achieved. One example of this is the attitude of an imprisoned group and the three forms it takes according to Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, where on of the forms is “a feeling of revolt and revenge.” (Du Bois p.39). Even though this an understandable feeling and desire, it can often lead to people outside the imprisoned group to be less open to listening to their issues as they then start to act defensively, but more importantly, it would involve using violence against people. This shows how certain desires must be left out of rational discussions, people should always be careful on what desires they cut out of discussion, but when that desire involves harm to other people, it should be left out of the conversation. The unity demanded by rational deliberation should also be criticized and diminished, but it also serves an important role in rational discussions. It allows people to see an issue from different angles. An example is John Rawls’s Vile of Ignorance, a thought experiment where people are to imagine that they don’t know what position in life that they will be born into and how that leads to people wanting a more