W.E.B. Du Bois, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The seventh son, born with a veil — that is the figure I reached for when I tried to name what the color line had made of the Negro in America.1 The veil is not chosen; it descends at birth, or rather it descends the moment the world makes plain that you are a problem. I remember the moment precisely: a schoolhouse in the New England hills, a visiting-card refused with a glance, and the sudden knowledge that I was shut out from their world by something I had not made and could not unmake.2
From that moment forward, you see yourself twice — once as you are, and once as the white world sees you, measuring your soul by its tape of amused contempt and pity.3 That doubled seeing is what I called second-sight. It is not mystical in the spiritualist sense. It is the structural consequence of subjection: because the Negro must always reckon with how he appears to the other world, he develops a sight the unsubjected do not need and therefore do not have.
He sees the machinery of the color line from inside it. He sees what the white world's self-presentation conceals. I put this plainly in Darkwater — that from my position high above the loud complaining of the human sea, I am singularly clairvoyant about the souls of white folk.4 Not as a foreigner, not as a servant watching a master, but as one who is native to their thought and language and yet stands outside the charmed circle of whiteness — and therefore sees them undressed, from the back and side, the working of their entrails.5
That is second-sight made explicit: the position of exclusion becomes the position of analytical clarity. The wound and the gift are not separable. The same veil that denies true self-consciousness — that yields only the self seen through the revelation of the other world — is what makes the doubled vision possible.6 The longing the condition produces is not to destroy either self but to merge the two into something better and truer, without losing what either carries.7 Second-sight is what you carry out of the ordeal, if you do not break under it.
the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American worldThe Souls of Black Folk, pp. 36–37
I remember well when the shadow swept across me... one girl, a tall new-comer, 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.The Souls of Black Folk, p. 36
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 pityThe Souls of Black Folk, pp. 36–37
High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant.Darkwater - Voices From Within the Veil, pp. 37–38
Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language... Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails.Darkwater - Voices From Within the Veil, pp. 37–38
a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other worldThe Souls of Black Folk, pp. 36–37
In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... 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 fellowsThe Souls of Black Folk, pp. 36–37