He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh.
In a foundational work on race in America, this passage describes a Black individual's awakening to the pervasive racial barrier known as the Veil and the realities of oppression.
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