Life & Wisdom Quote by W. E. B. Du Bois

Du Bois doesn t just describe poverty; he redraws its map. Being poor, he admits, is already a grinding, daily negotiation with scarcity. But he pivots to something sharper: poverty multiplied by racial caste inside an economy that worships money. "A land of dollars" is a pointed metonym for the United States at the turn of the 20th century, where capitalism isn t merely a system but a civic religion, measuring worth in wages, property, and credit. In that setting, to be a "poor race" is to face not only low income but structurally enforced immobility: barriers to jobs, housing, schooling, and even bodily safety.

The sentence works because it refuses sentimental uplift. Du Bois uses plain, almost ledger-like language to deliver a moral indictment. "Very bottom of hardships" is not rhetorical excess; it s a claim about layered disadvantage. The subtext is that individual grit cannot solve a problem designed to be collective: racial poverty is produced and maintained by policy, custom, violence, and exclusion from capital accumulation. He is also quietly criticizing the dominant American story that poverty is a personal failure. For Black Americans, he implies, poverty is an inherited position in a hierarchy, policed by law and reinforced by the marketplace.

Context matters: Du Bois is writing in an era of Jim Crow, lynching, disfranchisement, and accelerating industrial wealth. His intent is diagnostic and strategic - to name the specific mechanism by which racism and capitalism collaborate, so the audience can no longer pretend the country s "dollars" are race-neutral.