Consequences of the Cloak

When someone dons a cloak, they are usually trying to hide from something. In the most literal sense, they are usually taking cover from the snow or wind of Mother Nature. However, there is also a more implicit and invisible cloak that nearly all of us wear every day of our lives. Many of us go our entire lives without even realizing this burden we are carrying. What we all carry is a cloak, or a shield, protecting us from mental harm that could occur if we were to let some truth slip. The “cloak” has become so fundamental to human life in the United States, it is hard to recognize. In the more figurative sense this “cloak” protects us from our community whilst, ironically, also protecting our communities.

One of the cloaks I wear, and many people wear more than one, is from the aftermath of a few traumatic situations that occurred in my community during my high school years.

In the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the cloaks he carries is the cloak of African American culture. Being such an abstract idea, it is hard to pinpoint a cloak’s characteristics. Does it even have a set of defined characteristics? Through the cloaks of Gates, Du Bois, and myself, we will discover in this essay the similarities and differences of how we all carry the cloak, where this cloak comes from, how long the cloak stays, and then the ultimate question of why we all carry a cloak.

Since the cloak is such a hidden feature, each individual may view it in a different way. While I view it more as a physical cloak, someone like Du Bois seems to carry it as a moral responsibility. With myself, I can foresee my cloak being fully shed one day. Even today, I have begun to reveal my cloak, showing the world just a few of the events that shaped my cloak. I cannot carry it around forever, the weight of it can be annoying, just as wearing a trench coat day in and day out would become bothersome.

Du Bois’ “cloak” is the moral responsibility to become one of the Talented Ten and to help raise the African American race. In the writing of Du Bois’ The Talented Tenth, he is shedding that cloak and revealing to the world the ideas he has carried with him for many years. His innermost idea is “education…[is] the method to uplift” the African American race from the low societal position they sat at in when Du Bois wrote his powerful essay in 1903 (Du Bois 156).

Alongside Du Bois, although many years later, Gates reached the point where he too began to shed the cloak that he had carried all throughout his childhood and undergraduate years at Yale. It was in his culminating work titled Parable of the Talents that we began to see Gates’ cloak unveiled. His cloak consisted also of a responsibility to the African American race. Having graduated from Yale, he could easily have been considered one of the more successful African American men of his times, and with this distinction the “cloak” he carried was to find a way to make the general race more successful.

Differently than Dubois, we can see that Gates was much more hesitant to reveal his cloak. For him, this cloak served a dual purpose of protecting himself and his community from being forced to act. By not immediately bringing the issue of the great stratification of race to the forefront, he was allowing himself a few more moments of bliss. For with his reveal would follow the arduous task of creating a solution to the problems he had just unveiled. Also, by revealing that “even as the numbers of the affluent have swollen, the hopefulness…has plunged,” he is making himself and his community more vulnerable (Gates 21). It is a difficult act to willingly become vulnerable, even if it is in the hope of bettering one’s community.

Perspective is the key to understanding how we all carry our cloaks differently. To understand how one dons or sheds a cloak, you must not only understand the person, but also the societal pressures they face every day and the ones they will face if they decide to reveal to the world what their community is experiencing. Du Bois, Gates, and I represent three totally separate stages with our cloaks.

Du Bois is brash in his writing, beginning with “the negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by exceptional men” (Du Bois 133). Soon after, he openly declares the problems he finds within African American society to be the lack of an education which would help to breed “quick minds and pure hearts” (Du Bois 140).

Gates is middle ground between myself and Du Bois. He is shedding his cloak, but only recently and in a more hesitant manner. His writing is bringing light upon the problems of racial tensions faced by America, the increasing stratification of not only blacks versus whites, but also the idea that

Gates’ hesitancy shows through in his less forward diction, and his slow reveal of the cloak he’s been carrying.

Finally, there is my cloak. This class and then this digitized piece have been the first step in revealing it by encouraging me to write on my cloak’s role and purpose, but unlike these two essayists, I have not even come close to fully shedding my cloak. Like most Americans, the idea of placing themselves in such a vulnerable situation is paralyzing, and it takes a full commitment to bettering your community to be able to reveal that cloak. I am still puzzled over whether revealing my own burdens and my cloak would be best for myself and my community. Will I feel like an outsider when I talk about how I felt during those still unrevealed traumatic moments? Who will I help when I let the world know about our communities’ feelings? Who will I hurt? Until these questions are answered, and that sureness Du Bois and Gates had appears, I will not be able to drop my cloak.

There seems to be no consensus on where a cloak comes from other than some sort of trauma a person has dealt with. For me, this trauma came from the mental stresses and criminal indictments accumulating over time to form a cloak heavy enough for me to recognize just a few months ago. On the other hand, the cloaks Gates and Du Bois carried with them seem to have been something they carried since childhood. Their cloaks stemmed from the racial inequalities they grew up with. Being African American, they most likely carried their cloaks their whole lives, but they really began to feel their weight when they reached a point of awareness. Gates’ point of awareness manifested at Exeter, a bit like the “knock on the door” from the “dean, red-faced, angry, and a bit disappointed” (Gate 15). Similar to the dean, Gates felt angry and disappointed as he began to see the cloak he carried. It is soon after these points of awareness that Du Bois and Gates realized they were at a crossroads on whether or not to continue wearing that cloak. Gates encountered this crossroads while he was at Yale. He was struck by the particularly difficult decision on whether to protect his community by staying silent, or by speaking out against racial injustices. For Du Bois, it is evident he found his cloak many years before he wrote his The Talented Tenth essay because he is so sure in his assertions. In brief terms, the cloak each person carries manifests at different times. Sometimes one develops their cloak at a very young age from their surrounding culture, and sometimes, one will develop it in their teenage and adult lives. Nonetheless, the donning of a cloak is never a positive experience, and it usually stems from an injustice or fearful times in one’s life.

We carry our cloaks because we are unaware of our cloaks. There’s no way to shed something if you don’t know you’re carrying it. But once we become aware of our cloaks, why do some of us continue to carry it around? The cloak is a hard idea to pinpoint and thus, it is hard to figure out why each person continues to carry it. In the end, once we move past each person’s individual perspective, people continue to carry their cloaks because of fear, naivete, or selfishness. I have fear of judgement, and Gates had a fear of not knowing whether it was the right thing to show the hidden complacency of the African American community. To reveal the cloak is to show a side of yourself that you have never shown anyone before.

Being vulnerable is difficult, and it takes great fortitude to be able to handle the feelings of helplessness. I believe Gates took a long time to build up this fortitude in order to sustain the fear he would carry. I am still in the process of building this fortitude. After you drop your cloak, the community will not instantaneously become better. It will take time, and in this time, I believe the burden will be even greater than the cloak you had carried before. It is only when the community starts to turn for the better, is one relieved of the agony of waiting to see if your decision to shed light upon a community situation was the correct thing to do.

Whilst finding your vulnerability involves a lot of personal reflection and thought, there are two other reasons that someone carries a cloak, both of which require much less self-reflection. One is that people carry their cloaks because they are not aware. It takes great personal reflection to realize that you are trying to hide some idea, and many people in today’s age are enraptured with their physical environment and neglect the more figurative and mental side. I was in this position until a few months earlier when I began to think about the cloak as I wrote a response to Gates’ Parable of the Talents. Most unfortunate of all the reasons someone carries a cloak is because they place their personal well-being above their community’s and this leads them to stay static and not reveal their ideas to the world. Near the end of Gates’ essay, some of these people are discussed. This section of the African American community, having forgotten what they “called each other when no one else was around,” were ignoring their duty to reveal to the world their inner workings and culture because they too had forgotten what culture they were a part of (Gates 50). There are varying reasons for why someone carries their cloak but when one strips away the details, nearly everyone can be labeled as carrying the cloak because of vulnerability, naivete, or selfishness.

The ideas within every person’s cloak are unique to their perspectives and experiences. Du Bois’ ideas, revealed when he dropped the cloak, push against the lack of education in the African American race. Gates’ cloak protests against the increasing stratification of the rich and the poor. And my cloak fights against what is the right amount of personal emotion to show the world. Between all of our cloaks there really is only one big similarity. All cloaks form from one sort of trauma or accumulation of negative events in our lives. Besides that, there are different levels of awareness we have about the cloaks, how long we carry the cloaks, and in when we reveal our cloak (depending on if one is vulnerable, naive, or selfish). As the world continues to spin, there will be many more cloaks formed and some shed. Du Bois wrote his essay more than 100 years before, yet he too carried a cloak. This stands as a testament to the fact that cloaks have been around and will be around for many more years to come. As history has shown, many of these cloaks are kept hidden from the eye of the public. If society is to grow and realize great change, we need to start approaching cloaks differently. Too many cloaks and too many great ideas go unshed and if we, as society, want to grow and change, we need to find a way to be more like Gates and Du Bois. We need to be less fearful of shedding our cloaks.

First and foremost, I would like to thank Ryan, Maya, Emily, and Sohan for being very helpful workshop group members. Thanks to their constructive criticism my essay’s sentence structure and flow was improved, and I was pushed to think more critically about why cloaks are formed. I would also like to extend my gratitude towards Professor Harris who introduced me to The Parable of Talents, where I first discovered the idea of the cloak. Further, he helped in editing my essay, encouraging the addition of the epigraph and shaping of my conclusion. Finally, I would like to thank all my friends and family who read over portions of my essay for clarity throughout the entire essay writing process. This essay would not have been half as good without the contributions from all of these people.

2017. “Md. school community mourns death of pregnant teacher Laura Wallen.” WUSA9.

Blain, Keisha. 2018. “I lifted up mine eyes to Ghana.” Jacobin Magazine.

Cole, Jim. 2018. “11 former New Hampshire prep school staffers accused of abuse.” CBSNews.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. “The Talented Tenth”, The Future of the Race. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Duncan, Ian. 2016. “Former Columbia Track Star Charged with Abduction and Murder of Virginia Teen.” The Baltimore Sun.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis. 1996. “Parable of the Talents”, The Future of the Race. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Ioniblaze. 2015. “The Responsibility of Black Intellectuals in the Age of Crack — Bell Hooks.” YouTube.

Kuser, Tom. Lopez, Ann. 2015. “May Day at Yale, 1970: Recollections.” WSHU.

Underwood, Tina. 2017. “Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to Speak.” Furman University.

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