Du Bois framed being black as being a problem in American public view

Evidence

HOW DOES IT FEEL to be a problem? Just over a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois asked that very question in his American classic The Souls of Black Folk, and he offered an answer. “Being a problem is a strange experience,” he wrote, “peculiar even,” no doubt evoking the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Du Bois composed his text during Jim Crow, a time of official racial segregation that deliberately obscured to the wider world the human details of African-American life. Determined to pull back “the veil” separating populations, he showed his readers a fuller picture of the black experience, including “the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.” — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 39

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the book’s titular concept - borrowing Du Bois’s framing of ‘being a problem’ as a historically situated experience of being perceived as a threat rather than a person.
• XREF: Connects to James Baldwin’s ‘The problem of the Negro problem’ and to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me which extends this lineage.