Does slow and steady really win the race when it comes to achieving racial equality? Not necessarily. This is demonstrated extensively in the approaches Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois undertake to address and rectify racial discrimination. Both men are highly idealistic in regards to their strategies; both share the same goal: they strive to ameliorate racial discrimination against African Americans and improve the African American community’s situation as a whole. This, however, is where their similarities end. Washington believes change will occur if only patience and upright character are maintained, and Du Bois believes change will occur by going the whole nine yards from the get-go. As a result, history labels Washington as rather conservative…show more content… Washington projects—that equal opportunities for success and prosperity can be gained by all through hard work and noble character—is a naïve ideal; this is because in order for legitimate equality to prevail, the American institution itself needs to change in order for its people’s perceptions and society to change. Allowing the notion of African Americans being second-class citizens to persist at all is detrimental to the movement for racial equality. Even if African Americans do climb the ranks and gain economic success and security, the chances of white Americans smacking African Americans back down, saying that they are getting too pretentious for their actual statuses as citizens without true civic equality or suffrage, is too great. True equality cannot be achieved if one group is continuously conciliatory towards the other. Not only does this attitude wrongly make the aggressors who have built the institution of slavery and racial discrimination victims, it unrealistically denies the nation of any accountability for its actions. This is why Washington’s belief that hard work and economic achievement are the keys to solving racial inequality is not necessarily