Politics & Power Quote by W. E. B. Du Bois

Du Bois loads a single sentence with the psychic violence of American democracy. The line is built on doubles - two souls, two thoughts, two strivings - a drumbeat that makes “double consciousness” feel less like an idea than a lived fracture. He doesn’t present identity as a neat hyphen (African-American) but as a battlefield: “unreconciled,” “warring,” “torn asunder.” The syntax refuses ease because the life it describes is refused ease.

The specific intent is diagnostic and political. Du Bois is naming the internal split forced on Black Americans who are asked to see themselves through a nation that denies them full personhood. “An American” arrives first, then is interrupted by the era’s degrading label, “a Negro,” not as self-description but as the social verdict that rearranges everything. The subtext is cruelly modern: oppression doesn’t only police bodies; it colonizes perception. To survive, you learn to monitor yourself from the outside, to anticipate dismissal, to translate your humanity into terms the dominant culture might recognize.

Context matters: this comes out of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in the wake of Reconstruction’s collapse and the hardening architecture of Jim Crow. Du Bois is arguing against the comforting fiction that citizenship alone heals racial contradiction. “Dogged strength” is both tribute and indictment. It honors endurance, but it also implies an obscene burden: the country’s “ideals” are so inconsistent that the person most committed to holding them together is the one least protected by them.