“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, 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 himself see himself through the revelation of the other world.

In his 1903, The Souls
of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois, the preeminent African American intellectual
of the twentieth-century wrote: “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and
Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, 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 himself see himself through the
revelation of the other world. It is a
peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of 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. One ever feels his twoness,–an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals
in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder.” Write a 4-page, typewritten,
double-spaced essay that uses DuBois’s insights to shed light on Helga Crane,
the protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
(1928). In what ways is Helga “gifted
with second-sight”? In what ways does
she lack “true self-consciousness”? Does
Helga continually look at herself through the eyes of others? And in what ways is Helga afflicted by a
“twoness” or DuBoisian double-consciousness of being both an American and a
Negro?
Here is Nella Larson’s Quicksand https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015054061430&view=1up&seq=15