And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,--ugly, human.
Du Bois critiques the performative nature of white society, revealing their vulnerabilities beneath a facade.
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One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
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.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.