A man in the European sixteenth century was born not simply in the valley of the Thames or Seine, but in a certain social class and the environment of that class Line made and limited his world. He was then, consciously 5 or not, not fully a man; he was an artisan and until he complied with the limitations of that class he was continually knocking his hands, head and heart against an environment, composed of other classes, which limited what he could and could not do and 10 what he must do; and this greater group environment was not a matter of mere ideas and thought; it was embodied in muscles and armed men, in scowling faces, in the majesty of judge and police and in human law which became divine. 15 Much as I knew of this class structure of the world, I should never have realized it vividly and fully if I had not been born into its modem counterpart, racial segregation; first into a world composed of people with colored skins who remembered slavery and 20 endured discrimination; and who had to a degree their own habits, customs, and ideals; but in addition to this I lived in an environment which I came to call the white world. I was not an American; I was not a man; I was by long education and continual compulsion 25 and daily reminder, a colored man in a white world; and that white world often existed primarily, so far as I was concerned, to see with sleepless vigilance that I was kept within bounds. All this made me limited in physical movement and provincial in thought and 30 dream. I could not stir, I could not act, I could not live, without taking into careful daily account the reaction of my white environing world. How I traveled and where, what work I did, what income I received, where I ate, where I slept, with whom I 35 talked, where I sought recreation, where I studied, what I wrote and what I could get published-all this depended and depended primarily upon an overwhelming mass of my fellow citizens in the United States, from whose society I was largely 40 excluded. Of course, there was no real wall between us. I knew from the days of my childhood and in the elementary school, on through my walks in the Harvard yard and my lectures in Germany, that in 45 all things in general, white people were just the same as I: their physical possibilities, their mental processes were no different from mine; even the difference in skin color was vastly overemphasized and intrinsically trivial. And yet this fact of racial 50 distinction based on color was the greatest thing in my life and absolutely determined it, because this surrounding group, in alliance and agreement with the white European world, was settled and determined 12 upon the fact that I was and must be a thing apart. 55 It was impossible to gainsay this. It was impossible for any time and to any distance to withdraw myself and look down upon these absurd assumptions with philosophical calm and humorous self-control. If, as happened to a friend of mine, a lady in a Pullman car 60 ordered me to bring her a glass of water, mistaking me for a porter, the incident in its essence was a joke to be chuckled over; but in its hard, cruel significance and its unending inescapable sign of slavery, it was something to drive a man mad.
The speaker’s primary purpose in the passage is to
A. justify the need for class structures in hte modern world
B. seek restitution for wrongs committed against him
C. establish the major distinctions between rae issues ane class issues
D. convey the psychological impact of a system of segregation
E. condemn physical force as a means of maintaining segregation