How does it feel to be a problem?

“If you get there before I do

Coming for to carry me home

Tell all my friends I’m coming too

Coming for to carry me home

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.“

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?

How does it feel to be a problem?

While I read the text, these two questions kept coming back to me. Throughout the chapters Of Our Spiritual Strivings, Of the Faith of the Fathers, Of the Passing of the First Born, Of Alexander Crummell and the Sorrow Songs, I saw DuBois attempt to chart out the depths of the Black soul. What was it? What plagues the Black soul? What makes the black soul indispensable to this nation that has declared it ‘half-man’? What is its beauty? Its suffering? And above all, its home?

That was it, it kept coming back to that question of home. Where was the black soul at home? And I think this was the most difficult part to read, that the problem of the twentieth century might have been the color line but what that meant was that the color line ensured that the black woman was never home. There is/was no place it could go where it was whole. For DuBois, home was allusive spiritually as much as it was physically.

What ensured this incompleteness was the Veil, a condition that DuBois believed struck every black citizen of America. “A world which yields him no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” The Veil split the black american ino two: it robbed the black soul the power of its own representation. For even in her head she mediated her own image by the ideas of the white man, white civilization. This contradiction permeated all institutions of black cultural life and Dubois explains this as the “wrenching of the soul.”. Where the black educator, priest, artist was struck with ‘double aims’. She knew that the values of her civilization that the White man needed were mockery to the modern world and that the values her race needed were incomprehensible to them for their incompatibility with their culture and reality. Church life, family life, art and even the body was thought of in terms of these contradictions. For Dubois this was perhaps the worst consequence of the Veil, for it meant that nothing was realised to its full potential or even wholly owned by black people.

“The history of the American Negro is the history of strife.” This question of struggle, begged the question: What would a journey to freedom look like? A life outside strife? Here, I could not help but think of Fanon. For Fanon, the creation of a new self, a free individual is of paramount importance and one that could only be found through struggle . DuBois does not go into detail on what the struggle needs to look like on a mass political scale, however I think the chapter on Alexander Crummell is insightful. Here, DuBois, charts what the struggle towards attaining that internal self looks like: a fight against hatred, doubt and despair while at the same time navigating the Valley of Humiliation and Valley of the Shadow of Death.