In the Library
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1897
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 3k words
£1.99
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Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question.
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About the book
A tall newcomer refuses to trade visiting-cards with a boy in a New England schoolroom, one small glance of dismissal, and a child understands for the first time that a vast veil shuts him out from the others' world. From that wound W.E.B. Du Bois built the truest account we have of what it costs to live behind the veil, the essay that opens The Souls of Black Folk. He names the strange doubleness of it, the sense of forever watching yourself through hostile eyes, measuring your own soul by the tape of a world that looks on in contempt and pity, until the self feels split in two. He calls it double consciousness, and once you have read the phrase you will not unsee it. Yet the essay refuses despair. Its longing is to be both Negro and American at once, neither self bleached nor buried, and that ache still sets the terms of how a nation speaks about race.