W.E.B. Dubois, speaking of his experience of being a black man in North America in 1903, wrote:
Between me and the other world 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 it 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.
For Dubois, the greatest injustice that African-Americans faced was not the outright malevolence of the ignorant, but the general tendency of even the enlightened to assume that blacks, by virtue of their being physically different from the majority of those in the dominant ethos, posed some kind of problem that needed to be addressed. Even those who “accepted” Dubois and treated him respectfully caused him to wonder why he needed to be “accepted” in the first place, and why he could not assume the respect of others. Dubois realized that the oppression and injustice he experienced was deeply rooted in the very presumption that his physical distinctiveness outweighed the immense commonality he shared with others and called into question his status not only in this culture but in the human community.