“Blacks and other people of color could not write […] it was a violation of the law.”

• Henry Louis Gates Jr.

It is my responsibility to believe the voices of people of color, of women and those in a minority subject position and, for the present age, it is through communication, often writing, that I can hear these words and stories, using my education to expand my perception of the world and understand the weight of oppression on these souls in the most productive and effective ways that I can. For this reason, it is clear why, as Gates observes, economic and legal punishment was levied against those who would dare to teach slaves to write. Gates documents the legal construction of oppression, the repressive state apparatus which leads directly to physical punishment carried out by labeled positions of authority that physically prevent these stories from flourishing, from leaking out (Gates 9). Du Bois, however, speaks to the ideological state apparatus which forces people of color to be “shut out,” and pushed behind “a vast veil” through cultural perspectives and gestural mechanisms which construct a dimension of repression like that of Marilyn Frye’s patriarchal bird cage (Du Bois). Without Du Bois’ writing, it is hard to understand what the “glance” is, the “swarthy spectre” which outlasts the legislative victory of emancipation (Du Bois). It is through this medium of writing that we can understand the plight of “the freedman [who] has not yet found in freedom his promised land” and can begin to see the ways in which generationally devastating mechanisms of exclusion can culminate in the “suicide of a race,” leaving a people with nothing more than “the power of the ballot” to hopefully avoid “a second slavery” (Du Bois).

I find The Souls of Black Folk to be a strong reminder of what harm has been done in the clever lie believed by whites and those in ruling positions that oppression is history’s problem—that the “old cry for freedom” has been answered (Du Bois). The right to vote has been given, the laws which prevented slaves from learning to read and write have been repealed (though in our current era, these are being reinstated through mass incarceration, gentrification and gerrymandering among other apparatuses), but what remains is a cultural barrier which makes it impossible “for a man to be both a Negro and an American” (Du Bois). This is the construction of the Veil, the place where “the kingdom of culture” is inaccessible; we see the reinforcement of the Veil through the inability for whites to directly describe the “problem” people of color are presented with by a racist society, choosing to use soft language to ask about “Southern” problems and to speak of “excellent colored [men]” instead of speaking to the actual needs of the oppressed, willingly or unwillingly (Du Bois); without writing of the kind seen in Du Bois, how does this voice get through? There is a gravity that writing like this displaces into society, a transferable weight which may be invisible to those who cannot directly understand it, but can believe and create a brighter, unshackled space necessary for the eradication of the punishing “shadow” Du Bois describes (Du Bois).

Du Bois writing reminds me of an animated short created as a tie-in to science fiction universe of The Matrix films. “World Record,” a piece in the greater collection of The Animatrix, tells the story of Dan, a black athlete who, under the stress of an attempt to discredit his achievements, and through his own physical exertion in a final race to prove himself—to “be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture”—begins to see the constructed reality which imprisons him—the Veil (Du Bois). He races under the gaze of nameless figures of white supremacy desperate to use their authority prevent him from literally “waking up” and realizing a path to freedom. Alone and without the support of his only white “ally,” Dan reaches a kind of different freedom, a recorded, numerical victory which, for all its glory and visibility, now resides in the shadow of his physical, and likely drug induced, imprisonment at the end of the story. The Veil remains.