Themes: Identity, double consciousness, race, dignity, resistance, belonging, the African American experience, collective memory, justice.

Du Bois opens with one of the most searching questions in all of literature: how does it feel to be a problem? He is not asking about difficulty or failure. He is asking about the particular experience of moving through a world that regards your very existence as something to be managed, explained or overcome. His answer spans history, sociology, memoir and poetry, weaving between the personal and the political in a way that no single genre could contain alone. He gives us the concept of double consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, which remains one of the most precise and powerful descriptions of the Black experience ever written. More than a century after its publication, this book still names things that many people feel but have never found the language for. For anyone who has ever had to translate themselves for a world not designed with them in mind, this is essential reading.