We make it finite by choking back the mass of men, by attempting to speak for others, to interpret and act for them, and we end by acting for ourselves and using the world as our private property.
Du Bois warns against the dangers of elitism and the tendency to monopolize power at the expense of the masses.
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Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.
But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
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.