ABSTRACT
The exclusion of William Edward Burghardt DuBois can be explained with tolerable plausibility by reference to his two key concepts in Souls of Black Folk: the veil and the double-self. The pages of Souls of Black Folk tells of Du Bois's formative experience growing up among whites in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and of that first surprising moment when race difference dawned upon him. The veil was a fundamental figure of Du Bois's early social theory of race relations in the United States. The white, side of the veil, what is distinctive about Du Bois's self-theory is its defiantly historical foundation. Du Bois writes of the doubly conscious, double-self in specific historical reference to the Negro American. In An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal refers to Du Bois's twoness figure by saying that its "dual pull is the correspondence in the Negro world to what we for the white world have called the American Dilemma."
