W.E.B. Du Bois: “Can we teach Revolution to the inexperienced in hope that they may discern progress?”

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.