Imagine spending your life looking for insults or for hiding places from them--shrinking (instinctively and despite desperate bolsterings of courage) from blows that are not always but ever; not each day, but each week, each month, each year.
Du Bois poignantly describes the psychological toll of constantly facing racism and discrimination.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.
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 history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.