He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh.
In a foundational work on race in America, this passage describes a Black individual's awakening to the pervasive racial barrier known as the Veil and the realities of oppression.
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Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.
Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.
So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.