In W.E.B. Du Bois’ first paragraph of his book The Souls of Black Folk, he mentions the problem of the 20th century, which is the problem of the color line. Du Bois wants for his reader, specifically the white reader, to know the strife of the Black Folk in his writing. The strive that whites can’t see because of a “veil”, a “veil” that separates the blacks and the whites. Unlike the whites, the blacks are able to see through the “veil”, and they can see how the whites perceive them. Unfortunately, the whites perceive the black folk as a problem. The problem is that the whites don’t accept the blacks as part of their “species”. The problem is that white Americans don’t see the black American as being part of the Nation. A nation that has been created by the free labor of blacks during slavery, and are continually building through a “second slavery”. Black Americans have been subordinated by a “veil” which has been created by the white people.
Du Bois states: “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (Du Bois). Du Bois is indicating that the black folk have not yet gained true freedom, even after emancipation. To Du Bois, the Nation has not found peace from its sins, probably because the black folk are in a “second slavery” that renders black people without a voice via institutions in law and education. In Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it Makes”, he states: “Learning to read and to write, then, was not only difficult, it was a violation of a law” (Gates 9). Gates, let us know that Blacks weren’t allowed to learn and write since it was against the law. How are blacks going to express themselves when speaking is not enough, since “most Europeans privileged writing” (Gates 9)? Whites have created laws in order to keep the black people silenced in any way possible. The same white people who created slavery, and laws of segregation.
The problem is that the black folk have not been given the opportunity to represent themselves, they have been represented by others. Du Bois states: “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” (Du Bois). Unfortunately the “other world”, the white world, sees the black body as a “problem”, and inferior. Gates lets us know that Africans were perceived as inferior because the ability to read and write was viewed as a human quality that Africans lacked, and the lack of writing meant that Africans lacked “reason”. Gates indicates: “Blacks were most commonly represented on the chain either as the lowest of the human races or as first cousin to the ape. Because writing, according to Hume, was the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human” (Gates 12). The “other world”, or the world of the whites, would represent blacks as a human race that is closely related to animals. Gates and Du Bois would agree that white philosophers such as Hegel, Hume, and Kant are the ones that are part of the problem, since they provided the world with pseudoscience of why Africans are inferior. These philosopher have marked the black body as a “problem”.
When Du Bois is being asked “How does it feel to be a problem?” (Du Bois), he is being viewed as a marked body. The white people who ask him that question are assuming that he is problem, but don’t realize that the problem is their prejudice. They, the white people, don’t realize that the problem has been rooted by them through pseudoscience, slavery, segregation, and racism.
