Du Bois's overarching concern in this book is, of course, racism and the state of race relations in America at the time of writing. He believes the world to be divided by a "color-line" or "Veil" that hangs between Black and white people, and he is keen to emphasize that, because of the legacy of enslavement in the United States, this veil continues to prevent Black Americans from achieving true freedom, no matter what echelon of society they inhabit. In Du Bois's view, the Emancipation Proclamation offered only an illusion of freedom, which in some ways could be said to have hampered the progress of Black rights. For some white people, the fact that Black people had been "freed" made them feel that Black people no longer had anything to complain about—and fail to recognize that the situation in which many Southern Blacks, in particular, then found themselves was simply a different form of indentured servitude. Meanwhile, other Black people, satisfied that they were now free, set themselves to the task of accruing as much material wealth as they possibly could and did not consider the ways in which this actually distanced them from their own communities without furthering integration with rich white people.

Du Bois, controversially, suggests in this book that the approach of Booker T. Washington, the famous Black educator, actually worked against the cause of true freedom. Washington became extremely popular among Black and white people alike, but Du Bois notes that many of the Black arguments against him and his segregationist ideals were silenced, while many white people liked Washington because he was seemingly willing to accept the idea of Black people as a "secondary" race to white people. While Du Bois does not suggest that all Black people should go to college, or should seek to eradicate their Blackness and become the same as white people, he does imply that Washington's encouragement of industrial schools and his willingness to accept segregation simply furthered a status quo that was only a pretense of freedom, while the "Veil" in fact continued to divide society. Black people were free from the fear of being sold into enslavement but not free from prejudice, even from within their own communities and their own minds, as long as America believed in the inferiority of Black people.