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

Du Bois doesn’t describe identity as a mosaic; he stages it as a civil war. “Twoness” lands like a diagnosis, not a metaphor, and the syntax does the work of pressure: the repeated “two… two… two…” sounds like a hammer, forcing the reader to feel division as rhythm. The phrase “unreconciled strivings” makes the conflict active and exhausting. These aren’t abstract categories; they are competing directives about how to live, how to be seen, how to survive.

The intent is not to romanticize complexity but to indict a nation that demands it. Du Bois’s “American, a Negro” is deliberately blunt, refusing the comforting lie that citizenship automatically resolves racial hierarchy. The subtext is that “America” has been defined against Blackness, so a Black American is made to experience belonging and exclusion simultaneously. That tension isn’t psychological fragility; it’s structural violence internalized as daily self-management.

Context matters: The Souls of Black Folk (1903) arrives after Reconstruction’s collapse, amid disfranchisement, segregation, and racial terror. Du Bois is arguing against the era’s popular “accommodation” politics that asked Black people to mute their claims for justice in exchange for tenuous economic footholds. “One dark body” is a pointed reminder that the conflict is fought on the terrain of the visible; the body is where ideology becomes policing, employment, schooling, and safety.

Then the sting: “dogged strength” is both praise and accusation. Resilience keeps you “from being torn asunder,” but it’s also the cruel expectation America has placed on Black life - endure the split, call it character, and keep moving.