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What Is The Relationship Between Veils And Slavery

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What Is The Relationship Between Veils And Slavery
Black Americans were coerced to only see themselves from a perception of whiteness. W.E.B. Du Bois’s, The Souls of Black Folks, states, “…the American Negro, ‘born with a veil…’ can achieve ‘no true self-consciousness’ but can only ‘see himself through the revelation of the other [i.e. white] world’” ( DuBois 410). Morrison herself notes “…that slaves narrators, ‘shaping the experience to make it palatable’ for white readers, dropped a ‘veil’ over ‘their interior life’” (Rody 97). This “veil” represents obdurate ideals of white oppression exercised before and subsequently after the period of slavery. In Beloved, Morrison posits an erroneous assertion in the relationship between veils and slavery:
And if she thought anything, it was No. No.
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