From this point forward, the treatment of freedmen was haphazard and inconsistent. During the Civil War, the Union armies were uncertain about how to deal with the fugitive slaves who increasingly sought shelter behind their ranks. The transition away from slavery was chaotic, violent, and laborious, and black people living at the turn of the century have not yet truly experienced freedom. When slavery was finally abolished, however, this ended up being far from the reality. This double consciousness leads black people to experience a tortured sense of internal conflict and confusion.ĭu Bois notes that before Emancipation, slaves dreamed that a single divine event would not only abolish slavery but also end all of the violence, pain, and injustice to which they were subjected. The Veil produces a distinctive kind of subjectivity that Du Bois calls double-consciousness, a term that refers to the way black people are forced to seem themselves both through their own eyes and through the hostile gaze of racism. Du Bois characterizes the force of racial prejudice and alienation as a Veil that separates black people from whites and from the broader society in which they live. He recalls the moment at which he first became aware of racism as a child, when a little white girl in his elementary school class refused to accept a greeting card he gave to her.

The first chapter opens with Du Bois noting that white people seem to be curious about what it is like to be considered “a problem” by society. He outlines the book, which features thirteen distinct chapters on issues ranging from Reconstruction to leadership to education to religion. Du Bois begins with the claim that the central problem of the 20th century is that of the color line, and that all readers will thus be interested in the issues raised in Souls, no matter their race.

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