  Du Bois and Hegel both saw the effort to be a self-conscious free individual as something that was enacted in historical time. Hegel, for instance, took masters and slaves to coordinate each other's achievement of self-consciousness, each seeing themselves in terms of what the other is capable of doing. Du Bois identifies a similar coordination between the “inner selves” of blacks, one African, the other American, both native and alien at the same time. Crummell sees blacks opposing themselves in a conflict that cannot be opted out of, since it is a constitutive part of the struggle for self-awareness that every people goes through. He thus moves the focus from where a casual observer might look—the action between blacks and whites, slaves and masters—to an internal struggle—between blacks and their own conflicted nature.