And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps…”
Editor's note · Context
This quote reflects on the unique and constant experience of being perceived as a "problem" due to one's race in America.
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Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.
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.