" The author characterizes the obsession with whiteness and the immorality that it inspires in the treatment of blacks as being (ironically) responsible for the "shriveling and dying" of white souls. He also describes how as a black person, he has an unfiltered view into the naked truth of the character of many white people. Since white people regard blacks as completely inconsequential, they routinely suspend their normal efforts to compose themselves as they wish others to see them. Because blacks are not worth the effort of manners, or courtesy, or conversation, white people actually reveal more about who (and what) they really are underneath the usual veil of social politeness or conventions in the presence of blacks.

The author goes on to explain how the preoccupation with white supremacy also succeeded in undermining the integrity of modern science in the effort to justify the differential treatment of the races in scientific principles by suppressing evidence, lying, misquoting authority, and deliberately distorting facts. Similarly, while America "should shine" in the area of social study, the world of American academia (presumably) "has done nothing" to refute the patently absurd and thoroughly immoral lies that support racial inequality, prejudice, persecution, and abuse.

Perhaps the most dramatic point in that regard is the manner in which DuBois raises the incompatibility of racial prejudice and its social consequences and concepts of...

He concludes (correctly) that the two are fundamentally incompatible: one must necessarily either abandon the claim to respect, value, and uphold the so-called Christian ideal or one must abandon racist sentiments. The only other option (and the one obviously in favor in DuBois's time) is complete hypocrisy. To obscure that hypocrisy, the members of white society had simply asserted that "religion does not enter here" meaning in the distinction between the races. As DuBois points out, abandoning religion and admitting to imposing racial oppression through "barbarism" would at least be more honest than trying to reconcile Christian moral values with racial oppression. .
DuBois's essay remains one of the most dramatic and illustrative accounts of the degree to which all the other accomplishments and advances of a relatively modern American society were tarnished and cheapened by the persistence of racial inequality that persisted long after the Emancipation Proclamation that ended American Slavery at the conclusion of the Civil War. In retrospect, it causes readers to wonder how such a concept could ever have dominated what was (otherwise) the most highly advanced society in the history of human existence. That very same question would be asked again only a few decades later in connection with the culturally sophisticated German people and their treatment of ethnic minorities and other peoples.