 Du Bois often insisted that his accounting of “the Negro problem”—or, alternatively, of “the race concept”—involves leading his readers “within the Veil”—making it possible for his (presumably mostly white) readers to gain some sense of the experience of “being black”. This involves, as he puts it in Dusk of Dawn (1940), “elucidating the inner meaning and significance of that race problem by explaining it in terms of the one human life that I know best” (1968 [1940]: viii). But that life, by any measure, was one lived at the top of “the upper layers of educated and ambitious Negroes” (1968 [1940]: 185). This returns us to the question of the scope of double-consciousness, a question raised most insistently by Allen.