dubios' history

            Dubois starts off one of his greatest works by describing the difficulty people have in asking him a particular question. In Souls of Black Folk Dubois writes about the awareness and consciousness that black people experience in America. The question he describes is how people ask, what it feels like, to him, to be a social problem. They tell him they fought for blacks in the civil war, or they now a nice black man in town. This is how Dubois frames his work for describing Double consciousness and "the veil". .
             "The negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in the American world- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness." Dubois writes how growing up black in a white world produces one with no real identity. He describes it as "always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," always "measuring one's should by the tape of a world that looks in on amused contempt and pity." The Negro has always been forced to look and compare themselves with the eyes of white America. The accomplishments they make and the undertakings delve into, are weighed as worthy and commendable only so far as the white man approves of them. This is also the same concept when talking about the person of a Negro man. The veil is a separation, a different person on the inside than is measured on the outside. .
             Dubois looks at the history of the Negro in America as a history of "strife." The Negro, he says, is constantly trying to merge his double self into one "truer" self. The freedoms promised by America have not been given to the Negro race. Receiving the rights to vote, to educate, and to live without bondage is a type of mask almost deepening the fallacy of true liberty for the black man. Seeking a true liberty, a true brotherhood of race, is the way to really achieve what the American Republic stands for. .
             In The Spirit of Modern Europe Dubois lays out ideals to which European nations proclaim to adhere to.