 Lawrie Balfour, in discussing what she calls James Baldwin’s “race conscious” approach to American race relations (1998), measures its similarities to and differences from Du Boisian double consciousness. Balfour argues that Baldwin’s approach “goes to the core of the post-civil rights predicament” (1998: 246) since the basic reality of the color line has not been decisively effaced. Most recently, the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow has more than once cited the “Strivings” text in commenting on the contemporary paradoxes of black life brought into the open by some of President Obama’s public statements in the wake of recent criminal justice controversies (Blow 2013). 