  In his essay, “The Souls of White Folks,” Du Bois considered the effects of a perpetually reinforced idea of natural superiority and dominance on white subjectivity (Du Bois 1940 [1986c]). His concern was the “conditioned reflexes” and “long followed habits” built into customs and folkways (Du Bois 1940 [1986c], 679). The fact that the white poor and white workers were promised well more than they ever received had a profound effect on their resentments as well as their illusions. Du Bois was also interested in how a generic self-regard could be attached to such an insignificant fact as white skin color: what does it do to a man, he asks, to believe that his skin entitles him to ownership of the world? Du Bois claimed an epistemic advantage as a non-white person who can discern the pathological identity complex that afflicts whites. He describes himself as a non-foreigner who lives among them and can view them from an “unusual vantage” so that, as he put it, “I see in and through them.” (Du Bois 1910 [1986b, 923]). This knowledge is terrifying for white people and animates their antipathy: no Emperor wants to share table with those who know he is naked. The habitual practices that ensure white self-regard are largely unconscious, Du Bois suggested, and whites often vigorously resist being made conscious of them.