Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation

Abstract

"The history of the American Negro is the history of strife....The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps one of the greatest intellectuals in American history, wrote this famous passage nearly a century ago in his classic book, The Souls of Black Folk. It still remains the most timely, the most quoted, and, in some ways, the most misunderstood appraisal ever written of the tenuous psychological position of the black in America

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