On the pale, white faces which the great billows whirl upward to my tower I see again and again, often and still more often, a writing of human hatred, a deep and passionate hatred, vast by the very vagueness of its expressions.
This quote reflects Du Bois's observation of the pervasive hatred that underlies racial tensions in society.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.
Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.