Sublime

In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity. And despite the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures sporadically until t

This conceptual duple reflected what W.E.B. Du Bois indelibly voiced in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” Du Bois wrote. He would neither “Africanize America” nor “bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism.”

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

But I returned to an America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up. It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker. And this wasn’t just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated people’s attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting hard

You try to feel like a native, not a foreigner; you progress from grammar to idioms in an attempt to talk as if you belonged. Still, you never succeed in feeling at home. You remain a visitor, perhaps only a tourist. There was always something else, something more, another even larger adjustment to be made.

Frank Norris’s ungainly naturalist novel McTeague in the former and to T. S. Eliot’s cryptic “The Waste Land” in the latter.

She had become white only because everyone thought she was.

typically position White people as the superior standard. “Do Americans ever stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood…who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is it Christian…to belittle such aspiration?” Du Bois asked in 1903.