Monday evening. Atlantic station. I’m meeting my friend Cheryl for 50% off Mondays at Dolce Enoteca e Ristorante. I’ve been eagerly anticipating this outing since last week when a co-worker hipped me to the Monday-night deal the restaurant offers. What better excuse to go and indulge in some fine feasting on the day everybody loves to hate? I step into the place and instantly… I am 10 degrees sexier than I was outside.

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“Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. “
~W.E.B. Du Bois

I was browsing the discount stacks at a local Barnes and Noble a couple of days ago and scored a low-priced hardback version of W.E.B Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk”. Being a grad of CAU, this was a book I had often heard about from many of my professors and fellow students, but never took or found the time to actually read. One of the best known quotes from the book is Dubois’ rather accurate assertion that: “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line”. Indeed a major theme of American culture from the Reconstruction era through the ‘80s and ‘90s was that of black people fighting to establish their identity as a race and to achieve equality in the political, educational, and economic arenas of this country. But now we’re well into the first decade of the 21st century, and while Don Imus and Jena are the most recent reminders that the American system is still far from perfect when it comes to treating its darker citizens as equal, it can no longer be argued that blacks don’t have access to almost all of the same opportunities as whites and other racial and ethnic groups.

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