We have a right to assume that hundreds and thousands of boys and girls today are missing the chance of developing unusual talents because the chances have been against them; and that indeed the majority of the children of the world are not being systematically fitted for their life work and for life itself.
Du Bois highlights the missed opportunities for children to develop their talents due to systemic barriers.
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Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…
The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.
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.