Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?
W.E.B. Du Bois: “Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois challenges America, asking if the nation begrudges Black people the intellectual and social freedom he describes experiencing in the realm of thought and art.
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Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.
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…
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.