the problem with veils.

Edit: I am going off on a tangent. I saw the prompt after I wrote this, so I will write another response - the following is not my BP4.

This is in response to the comment in class last Thursday about the "hypocrisy" in W.E.B Dubois' "Souls of Black Folk" and "The Conservation of the Races" by affiliating with and writing about one's ethnic identity or race, while arguing for the end of racism.

For the question of affiliation, I will refer to DuBois’ “How does it feel like to be a problem?"

I think it is very difficult not to (& to be) associate with his or her ethnic or racial identity, when there has been an inconsistency in how “Americans” treated people who are not white. In my observations of American History, first race and ethnicity was a way of dehumanizing a person, then two, ignorance of these “categories” equated to invisibility – not recognizing a group on the census, for example, suggests that they do not exist. With a history of being treated horribly and indifferently, DuBois addresses these issues by shedding light to them. In doing so, he gives VOICE to the people who have been forcefully silenced through violence, maltreatment, and “shut out from their world by a vast veil” (DuBois). By writing about issues and associating himself as an “African American” (loosely; by referring to his Negro identity, and American identity) man, he brings up questions of:

Can we ignore these categories and expect racism to disappear? Is it possible not to categorize people based on their race or ethnicities? Can a person be American even if he or she is NOT white?

As a colored man, DuBois uses the “veil” as a dichotomous material that blinds and hides a person from revealing (and revealed to) his or her identity:

[The] Negro 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 only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

By associating himself with an “African American” identity, he uses a concept that was used to “dehumanize” people as an empowering tool to uplift himself as an individual. He appropriates a word--formerly used to dehumanize people by blood--to remove the “veil” that blinds a people from seeing their greatness, free them from hiding, and to strengthen them. It is important to recognize that he is a product of the Reconstruction era, the U.S. was fresh off the Civil War, which tore the country apart because of many reasons, the disagreement on slavery was one of these.

Has time really changed in the present? Have we moved on from the issues DuBois (“Souls of Black Folk” – 1903) wrote about a century ago? Is it possible to say that associating/writing about one’s ethnic or racial identity has become pointless? What about the “South Korean” who gunned down students in VT? Even now in the news, race and ethnicity is still being used to associate the Other. Why is that?