3.7 - The Color Line and Double Consciousness in American Society
The Mask and the Veil
Two of the most influential works of Black literature at the turn of the twentieth century used powerful metaphors to capture the experience of being Black in America: Paul Laurence Dunbar's "the mask," from his poem "We Wear the Mask," and W.E.B. Du Bois's "the Veil," from The Souls of Black Folk. Both symbols point to the same underlying reality: African Americans' exclusion from full participation in American society, and the constant, exhausting struggle for self-improvement in the face of relentless discrimination.
Du Bois's Veil is the invisible barrier of race that separates Black and white Americans. He wrote that the Negro is born "with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world." The Veil keeps Black Americans from being fully seen or fully included, but it also gives them "second-sight," a clear view of America's contradictions that white Americans often miss.
Du Bois gave this broader condition a name that would become one of the most cited phrases in American intellectual history: the "color line." This metaphor referred to the racial discrimination and legalized segregation that persisted in the United States long after slavery had officially ended. Du Bois famously wrote that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," a statement that framed racial division not as a leftover issue from slavery, but as the defining challenge of the century ahead.
Double Consciousness
Du Bois also introduced the concept of "double consciousness," describing the internal conflict experienced by any subordinated group living within an oppressive society. For African Americans specifically, double consciousness offered a framework for understanding and examining the deeply unequal realities of American life, a way of naming an experience that had never been fully articulated before.
Du Bois described it in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" as "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." A Black American, he wrote, "ever feels his twoness," being both "an American, a Negro," with "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings" in one body. Black Americans had to see themselves as they really were and, at the same time, through the contempt of a white society that treated them as a "problem." Du Bois's goal was for African Americans to bring these two selves together without losing either one, so that a person could be "both a Negro and an American" without being shut out.
This double consciousness grew directly out of the social alienation caused by racism and discrimination. But importantly, it wasn't only a source of pain or division, it also became a source of real strength. Du Bois's concept captured how this same internal tension could foster agency, adaptation, and resistance, giving African Americans a unique, dual vantage point from which to navigate, critique, and ultimately push back against an unjust society.
Required Sources
"We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1895
This poem captures the idea of "the mask" directly, the performance of contentment or acceptance that Black Americans often had to maintain in public, while concealing the real pain and frustration underneath. Read alongside Du Bois's Veil, it shows two writers arriving at strikingly similar metaphors, both describing a barrier between an authentic Black interior life and the face that had to be presented to a hostile white society.
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 to 1906), the son of formerly enslaved parents from Kentucky, grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and became one of the first African American poets to win a national audience. He published "We Wear the Mask" in his 1895 collection Majors and Minors. The poem never names race, but its speaker describes wearing a mask "that grins and lies" and smiling "with torn and bleeding hearts" in front of a world that doesn't care to look deeper. Written during the nadir, it shows how racism pushed African Americans to hide their real feelings in public, the same split Du Bois would call double consciousness eight years later.
We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!
Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask" (1895). Source: Project Gutenberg, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar
Excerpts from The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903 (selections from "The Forethought," "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," "Of Alexander Crummell," and "The Afterthought")
Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk during an era marked by widespread lynching and racial violence, and the book was, in part, a direct effort to counter the prevailing myths of Black inferiority that were used to justify that violence. One distinctive feature worth noting: each chapter of the book opens with verses from spirituals, which Du Bois referred to as "Sorrow Songs," weaving African American musical and spiritual tradition directly into his intellectual argument. Reading these specific excerpts, covering his opening framing, his articulation of double consciousness, his reflection on fellow scholar Alexander Crummell, and his closing thoughts, shows how thoroughly Du Bois grounded his theoretical concepts in real, lived Black experience rather than abstract argument alone.
Here's what each selection covers:
- "The Forethought": Du Bois's short introduction. He says the book will show "the strange meaning of being black" at the start of the twentieth century and makes his famous claim that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line."
- "Of Our Spiritual Strivings": Chapter 1. It opens with the question white people never quite ask him directly, "How does it feel to be a problem?" and introduces the Veil and double consciousness.
- "Of Alexander Crummell": Chapter 12, a tribute to Alexander Crummell (1819 to 1898), a Black Episcopal priest and scholar who was turned away from the Episcopal Church's seminary because of his race, earned a degree from Cambridge University in England, worked for years in Liberia, and founded the American Negro Academy in 1897. Du Bois shows him overcoming "the temptation of Hate," "the temptation of Despair," and "the temptation of Doubt," and holds him up as a model of Black intellect and dignity that America refused to see.
- "The Afterthought": A brief closing prayer in which Du Bois asks that his book not be ignored and that it lead readers toward truth and justice.
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.
I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
[...]
Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other guise. For kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, The World's Work, the Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs, some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?
W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Forethought," The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Source: Project Gutenberg
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards, ten cents a package, and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. [...]
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other 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.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
W.E.B. Du Bois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (Chapter 1), The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Source: Project Gutenberg
This is the story of a human heart: the tale of a black boy who many long years ago began to struggle with life that he might know the world and know himself. Three temptations he met on those dark dunes that lay gray and dismal before the wonder-eyes of the child: the temptation of Hate, that stood out against the red dawn; the temptation of Despair, that darkened noonday; and the temptation of Doubt, that ever steals along with twilight. Above all, you must hear of the vales he crossed: the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
[...]
But Alexander Crummell it gave back. Out of the temptation of Hate, and burned by the fire of Despair, triumphant over Doubt, and steeled by Sacrifice against Humiliation, he turned at last home across the waters, humble and strong, gentle and determined. He bent to all the gibes and prejudices, to all hatred and discrimination, with that rare courtesy which is the armor of pure souls. He fought among his own, the low, the grasping, and the wicked, with that unbending righteousness which is the sword of the just. He never faltered, he seldom complained; he simply worked, inspiring the young, rebuking the old, helping the weak, guiding the strong.
So he grew, and brought within his wide influence all that was best of those who walk within the Veil. They who live without knew not nor dreamed of that full power within, that mighty inspiration which the dull gauze of caste decreed that most men should not know. And now that he is gone, I sweep the Veil away and cry, Lo! the soul to whose dear memory I bring this little tribute. I can see his face still, dark and heavy-lined beneath his snowy hair; lighting and shading, now with inspiration for the future, now in innocent pain at some human wickedness, now with sorrow at some hard memory from the past. The more I met Alexander Crummell, the more I felt how much that world was losing which knew so little of him. In another age he might have sat among the elders of the land in purple-bordered toga; in another country mothers might have sung him to the cradles.
W.E.B. Du Bois, "Of Alexander Crummell" (Chapter 12), The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Source: Project Gutenberg
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed THE END
W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Afterthought," The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Source: Project Gutenberg