Dubois also notes that music serves as a raw testament to the struggles of the black community.

The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which,
despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life
and longing yet born on American soilunder the stress of law and whip, it became the one true
expression of a peoples sorrows, despair, and hope.

The worlds withink and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at
the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar
sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double
social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or
revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism. (145)
The impediment of the veil as well as the existence of the color line serves not only an obstacle
for the oppressed, but also for the whites, the originators of this divide. DuBois notes the disparity in the
understanding of one another caused by the structure of American society:
One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes
almost never live in anything like close proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every Southern
town and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each otherthe settled belief
of the mass of Negroes that he Southern white people do not have the black mans best
interests at heart has been intensified in the later years by this continual contact of the better
class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white race. (121)
This divide and misconception is detrimental to the white man as well because it produces an
inefficiency that holds back progress within society. By distancing themselves from the other because of
their concocted and exaggerated images of the brutishness of the African American, they isolate the
black folk, using their economic and political dominance in order to position them at the bottom of
society; surrounded and isolated with the worst representatives of the white race. In this way, the
black folk are forsaken from higher education because they are not situated within an environment that
values rationalism. Furthermore, the black folk, distracted by the society that they experience
empirically within their closest proximity, frictional forces between the better class of blacks and the
worst representatives of the white race fester freely and the black folk are no closer to finding their
identity, rather they become more and more confused as they too begin to find themselves oppressed
at the hands of a somewhat inaccurate concocted villain that they associate with white society and
hence also the foundations of the American society in which they find themselves participant.