Once the colored child understands the white world's attitude and the shameful wrong of it, you have furnished it with a great life motive,--a power and impulse toward good which is the mightiest thing man has.
Du Bois asserts that understanding the injustices of the world can empower children to strive for goodness.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.
He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.