The Pharisees and Sadducees have been testing Jesus about who he is. Later, “Jesus asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’
Jesus is letting rulers know who he is, a person of integrity. He is letting the people know through the communities he’s building that they too are people of integrity. The rulers don’t know the people nor do they know Jesus. They know only rule and fear any who challenge it. Jesus is conscious of his integrity and conscious rulers destroy people of integrity. So too W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was conscious of his integrity and conscious rulers destroy such people. He passed away 63 years ago this week. Like Jesus, Du Bois was letting the people know through the communities he built that they too are people of integrity. He founded literary communities like Horizon and Crisis and human rights communities like the NAACP and Pan African. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote about the struggle in consciousness to be a person of integrity amongst rulers who would not know him but would destroy him, “I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief… from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and opportunity.” Du Bois came to believe the Veil could be brought down by the “Talented Tenth.” It reflected rule; the top 10% of the Black population, the most educated, disciplined, and morally upright, had a duty to lead. It was controversial smacking of elitism and therefore viewed by some of his community members as destructive. Du Bois explained that the Talented Tenth would prevent the greater destruction targeting them by white supremacists, “As this Talented Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in alarm: “These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime—these are the happy rule.” Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation made them the rule: Because for three long centuries this people lynched Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous, crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and made to flourish servility and lewdness and apathy. But not even this was able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk.” Du Bois kept asking who we are as a nation, and challenged the rulers who did their best to destroy him. Unlike Jesus, Du Bois survived the rulers. Later in life Du Bois moved to Ghana, the first sub-Saharan nation to gain independence from colonial rule in 1957. Ghana’s president invited Du Bois to organize the Encyclopedia Africana. It was his final contribution of integrity and community building. Among the benefits, it helped white people be conscious of another view of reality than their own privileged view, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness… always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” “One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings… in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
Another dark-skinned man with another message on double-consciousness is asking us about who we are, Eddie Glaude Jr. in, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries. Glaude’s ‘double consciousness’ is the “storybook” America that its white rulers and their white followers love to advertise, at the same time they will not know the real story nor the real Black people who built the U.S.A. and sustain it though it is still intent on destroying them. Like Jesus with the rulers, and Du Bois more specifically with white rulers and compliant white followers, Glaude is letting patriotic U.S. citizens know, “You are not who you say you are.”
Prayer: Beautiful Spirit, strengthen us for communion with people this empire tears asunder?
Question: Who do I say I am, and how do I know the truth of who I am?
August 23, 2026 Gospel Matthew 16:13-20 Twenty First Sunday in Ordinary Time
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