Title: The Souls of Black Folk
Author: W.E.B. Du Bois

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrank into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

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 him 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.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of double aims.

Erwartungshorizont

1. Zusammenfassung der Hauptereignisse im Auszug aus Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

• Geburtsort und Unkenntnis des Alters:

  • Geboren in Tuckahoe, Nähe Hillsborough, Talbot County, Maryland.
  • Keine genaue Kenntnis des eigenen Alters.
  • Allgemeine Unwissenheit der Sklaven über ihre Geburtstage.

• Ursprung der Sklaverei und Leiden:

  • Kurze Darstellung der Umstände der Sklaverei.
  • Hoffnung auf Freiheit und der Entschluss, weiterzukämpfen.

• Leben als Haussklave unter Mr. und Mrs. Auld:

  • Abführung von der Mutter im Alter von etwa sieben Jahren.
  • Beschreibung von Mrs. Aulds freundlichem Charakter und ihrer bisher fehlenden Sklavereierfahrung.
  • Anzahl der zu Beginn vorhandenen Diener (Douglass und ein weiterer Junge).

• Tod von Thomas Auld und die Heirat mit Hugh Auld:

  • Tod von Thomas Auld nach etwa drei Monaten.
  • Heirat von Mrs. Auld mit Hugh Auld, dessen Charakter und Einstellungen.
  • Veränderungen im Verhalten und in der Haltung der Aulds gegenüber Douglass.

2. Analyse der Beziehungen zwischen Frederick Douglass und den Mitgliedern der Familie Auld

• Beziehung zu Mrs. Auld vor dem Tod von Thomas Auld:

  • Freundlicher und mitfühlender Umgang.
  • Mrs. Aulds bislang keine Erfahrung als Sklavenhalterin.

• Änderungen nach der Heirat mit Hugh Auld:

  • Einführung von Hugh Auld als neuer Hausherr mit Vorurteilen.
  • Veränderungen in der Behandlung durch die Familie Auld.
  • Wechsel in der Wahrnehmung von Mrs. Auld:
  • Möglicher Einfluss von Hugh Aulds Einstellungen auf ihr Verhalten.
  • Vergleich zwischen früherer Freundlichkeit und späterer Strenge.

• Persönliche Wahrnehmung und Erfahrungen Douglass':

  • Beschreibung von Douglass' Behandlung unter Hugh Auld.
  • Einfluss der neuen Hausherrschaft auf Douglass' Lebensbedingungen und Hoffnung auf Freiheit.

3. Bewertung der Effektivität von Frederick Douglass' Darstellung der Härten der Sklaverei zur Erzeugung von Empathie und Verständnis

• Beschreibung der physischen und emotionalen Leiden:

  • Darstellung der Unkenntnis des Alters als Symbol der Entmenschlichung.
  • Schilderung der Trennung von der Mutter und Kindheitserfahrungen.

• Verwendung von persönlichen Erfahrungen zur Verstärkung der Wirkung:

  • Konkrete Beispiele aus Douglass' Leben als Haussklave.
  • Darstellung der Veränderungen im Haus Auld nach dem Tod von Thomas Auld.

• Sprachliche Mittel und narrative Techniken:

  • Einsatz von emotional geladenen Begriffen und Beschreibungen.
  • Aufbau der Erzählung zur Maximierung der emotionalen Wirkung auf den Leser.

• Beispiele aus dem Text zur Unterstützung der Bewertung:

  • Zitate, die die Brutalität und den emotionalen Schmerz der Sklaverei verdeutlichen.
  • Kontraste zwischen verschiedenen Familienmitgliedern und deren Behandlung von Douglass.

• Schlussfolgerung zur Gesamtwirksamkeit:

  • Zusammenfassung, wie die dargestellten Aspekte zur Empathie und zum Verständnis des Lesers beitragen.