W.E.B. Du Bois: “Then the world changed; then civilization, built for culture, rebuilt itself for wilful murder in Europe, Asia, America…”

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.

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.

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.