Du Bois’s schoolyard rejection crystallized his concept of the racial veil

Evidence

Du Bois’s (1903) first experience with the slow death and erasure of self occurred in school. As a child, he presented a visiting card to a White girl in his class who “peremptorily” rejected this gift. At that moment it dawned upon him “with a certain suddenness that [he] was different from the others … [and] shut out from their world by a vast veil” (p. 2), a metaphor of the obstruction created by the racial divide. Within the concept of the veil, Du Bois introduced one of his most famous ideas—double consciousness, which describes an individual whose identity is fractured by society. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 266

Categorization

• CANDY: The visiting-card rejection is a vivid, quotable origin story for double consciousness worth telling lightly.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how the earliest school rejection experiences constitute the actual birthplace of critical-race concepts like the veil.
• XREF: connects to: Du Bois described the Negro as ‘born with a veil… always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.’ — Double Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)