To make here in human education that ever necessary combination of the permanent and the contingent—of the ideal and the practical in workable equilibrium—has been there, as it ever must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite experiment and frequent mistakes.
Du Bois reflects on the universal and ongoing challenge of balancing theoretical ideals with practical realities in the pursuit of human education.
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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.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.
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.
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.