Art & Creativity Quote by W. E. B. Du Bois

Du Bois takes something that sounds like a schoolroom cliché - "learn your numbers" - and turns it into a theory of power. The line hinges on a sly comparison: you don’t truly read a book by staring at letters; you read it by moving through sense, inference, implication. Numbers, he argues, deserve the same promotion from symbol to meaning. That shift is the point. Numeracy isn’t clerical skill; it’s a way of seeing.

The intent is educational, but not innocent. In Du Bois’s world, statistics are never neutral. He built a career using data to puncture the manufactured myths of racial inferiority, from early sociological studies to the landmark visualizations of Black life he helped create for the 1900 Paris Exposition. So the subtext here is: if you can only recite figures, you’re easy to manage; if you can interpret them, you can contest the story being told about you.

There’s also a warning aimed at the comfortable reader. “Mastered” implies discipline and fluency, the moment when the medium disappears and the message hits you directly. That’s what makes the quote work rhetorically: it flatters the learner while quietly raising the stakes. Reading meanings means noticing what’s been counted, what’s been excluded, who benefits from the framing. Du Bois is describing a literacy that turns the tools of bureaucracy into instruments of critique - and, in his hands, into a form of resistance.