Grant all its ugliness and sin--the petty, horrible snarl of its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often than I--notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to be denied.
Du Bois acknowledges the world's ugliness but insists on recognizing its inherent beauty.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
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.
Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
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.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.