Of Our Spiritual Strivings WEB Dubois Analysis Essay

In Of Our Spiritual Strivings, the two main messages that sack up DuBois has to share are of the dangers of double-consciousness and the humor that a Veil exists between innocence America and African America. He first realized this when he was at school and they were passing around visiting cards and one miss refused to give him a card, simply because of his skin color. He realized at that moment that there was a vast veil between purity and black America. However I found it interesting that he had no desire to attempt to remove that veil.Instead his desire was for African Americans to bridle close to their roots, only at the same time without assimilating into clear market-gardening. He also expresses this when he says After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the total darkness is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but however lets him see himself through the revelation of the some other world. The African American is pause from White America, but yet is still American.DuBois desired that African Americans should non try to compromise with white america, but be proud of their inheritance and yet still be recognized as Americans and not second-class citizens. This quote also leads into his second idea which is the idea that there should be a self-consciousness from African Americans. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of forever looking at ones self through the look of others, of measuring ones soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.This continues on his idea that African-Americans should strive to be themselves and not something else, and not measure themselves by those that do not value them. In this next quote DuBois states that manhood is achieve threw one state of mind, or self-consciousness, which is the viewing of oneself through their own electron lens and not thru the lens of others. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,this disposition to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a soften and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a overindulge of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be twain a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows Double-consciousness should be discarded in favor of self-consciousness, because self-consciousness in the eyes of DuBois offered African Americans the chance to prove themselves to the world and show the world their abilities.America should not be set in the view as Africans would have it, but rather that America should be a land of incorpo ration, rather than assimilation. DuBois desire a land comprised of various cultures all equal to each other but no culture striving to be like another, because that would effect a culture that would be dominant. He believed that every culture, African culture especially, had something to offer to America.