But, on the other hand, the ropes and myths and knots and hindrances; the thundering waves of the white world beyond beating us back; the scalding breakers of this inner world,--its currents and back eddies--its meanness and smallness--its sorrow and tragedy--its screaming farce!
Du Bois vividly illustrates the complexities and struggles faced by the Black community in contrast to the outside world.
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With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
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.
Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.