From Behind the Veil

From Behind the Veil

While living in the 1800’s black people had a very difficult life. They were the last people to get any respect from the white people living in the south. Not often was there a person to expose what people who are black were thinking when they were treated this way. Du Bois refers to the view that black people have is as if they were looking through a veil. “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. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.” (Du Bois, 6) He is relating the lives of black folk to living behind a veil because of the restrictions they had in their life. Living as a black person meant that you had almost no freedom to live in the world as a normal person. They always had the restriction of slavery in the time of Du Bois.

When Du Bois brings the veil into the story he has a very intense and dark idea behind it. “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,