Forty-five years he had labored on this farm, beginning with nothing, and still having nothing.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “Forty-five years he had labored on this farm, beginning with nothing, and still having nothing.”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois recounts the life of a Black farmer who, despite decades of labor, remained in poverty, illustrating the systemic economic injustice.
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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.
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.
The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…
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.