Or if sunk below feeling or comprehension or complaint, he does not even know that he is hurt, God help his country, for it not only lacks knowledge, but has destroyed the sources of knowledge.
Du Bois warns that a nation lacking awareness of its citizens' suffering is in dire straits.
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The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.