Dubois what is double consciousness

Over one hundred years later, double consciousness is no longer limited to the lives of African Americans. Various ethnic Americans experience this split in consciousness while attempting to merge their specific cultural heritages with the values of dominant white society.

By providing a representation of society through its characters and their interactions with the world around them, literature has been an important tool in the exploration of double consciousness. This essay explores the ways in which American Indian Stories displays the shift in race-thinking that has taken place over the past years. Ethnic Studies. Thank you. Your email address will not be published. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. Concepts Thinkers Topics. It would be wholly consistent with the point of his conception if, added to the doubling of consciousness consequent upon racially oppressive social conditions, other forms of psychic doubling or fragmentation, responses to other forms of inequality, might arise.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Double consciousness, once a disorder, is now the cure. Sometimes they are deemed weak or inferior just because they are mixed , as Naomi Zack documents in her Race and Mixed-Race chapters 11, Indeed, Du Bois was himself personally deeply familiar with this issue, as he relates, for instance, from his university days in Berlin.

Sie fuhlen sich niedrig! However my presence or absence would have made no difference to him. He was given to making extraordinary assertions out of a clear sky and evidently believing just what he said. My fellow students gave no evidence of connecting what he said with me. Du Bois There is virtually no consideration of such issues in Souls.

Racial designation at that time was determined primarily through hypodescent, and the citizenship status of black folk was impugned by Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow. That does not mean he abandons the concept, of course, but most of the commentary on his employment of the concept focuses on the treatment of the issues it names in Souls. There have been some attempts to interpret various of his other works in terms of the conception, but these tend to focus on his fictional writings, and the use made of these is not primarily to develop the conception but rather to show its uses by Du Bois in other contexts.

More than one writer has asserted that the passage in which Du Bois presents the term is the most-referenced text in all African-American letters. It seems problematic, however, to pin a full-blown account of and theoretical reconstruction on one passage in one work, however seminal or influential it may have been. There are discussions in later texts that seem to involve aspects, at least, of the conception. Du Bois seems to make a claim for a special kind of knowledge of the psychology of white people.

After specifying that his knowledge is not that of the foreigner, nor of the servant or the worker, he writes:. I see these souls undressed and from the back and sides. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. But what Du Bois claims here also seems to go beyond the conception, since that conception did not specifically and explicitly refer to knowledge of the souls of white folks.

We looked at him clearly, with world-old eyes, and saw simply a human being, weak and pitiable and cruel, even as we are and were. Du Bois is here considering the ideology of white supremacy, tracing out the historical conditions of its development and some of the psychological consequences it has for whites who accept it and live in and on the basis of it. To the extent that whites accept the premises of white supremacy, and live and act upon them, they are deceived about themselves and act out a deception that the blacks who are subject to them are in a position to see through.

This interpretation is brought out in Henry, Gordon, and Kirkland as well. For what Du Bois presents in this chapter is a critical analysis of the American ideology of white supremacy that is informed by historical understanding and backed up by social-scientific data.

There is another passage later in Darkwater that bears, if somewhat indirectly, on the notion of double-consciousness:. Pessimism is cowardice. And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither can be denied. This passage is surely aimed against the debilitating effects of the facts of life for Black folk in the Jim-Crow south. And that is resistance to the pernicious double consciousness that would bury our intimate self-understanding under a dominant white supremacist rationalization of racial inequality.

This exaggerates, at once, the secret shame of being identified with such people and the anomaly of insisting that the physical characteristics of these folk which the upper class shares, are not the stigmata of degradation.

He also reiterates a theme that was apparent from the very beginning of his thinking about double-consciousness—its close connection to divergent personal as well as political strategies for managing, and working to transform, the conditions giving rise to it.

But also, by this time, his conception of race itself has opened up even further beyond that of any linear historical development. It had as I have tried to show all kinds of illogical trends and irreconcilable tendencies.

A number of things change in the account given by Du Bois in Dusk of Dawn of the phenomena that, in Souls , are brought under the sign of double-consciousness. The Negro American has for his environment not only the white surrounding world, but also, and touching him usually much more nearly and compellingly, is the environment furnished by his own colored group.

There are exceptions, of course, but this is the rule. The American Negro, therefore, is surrounded and conditioned by the concept which he has of white people and he is treated in accordance with the concept they have of him. On the other hand, so far as his own people are concerned, he is in direct contact with individuals and facts.

He fits into this environment more or less willingly. It gives him a social world and mental peace. This double environment is the basic reality, overwhelmingly, of the Negro in the text.

What is only once formulated explicitly in Souls is given extensive treatment in Dusk of Dawn. This is the impact of the veil, the color line. Writing of his own personal experience, Du Bois details the effect of this environing white world on him:. I was by long education and continual compulsion 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 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. Note here that in addition to the definite limitation of possibilities by this white world, there is also an active appropriation, and employment in strategic thinking by Du Bois, of the understanding he has of the white world. This suggests another mode in which double consciousness—that seems to be what we are dealing with here—can operate.

The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away.

If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself, — darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission.

He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance, — not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet.

Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of filth from white whoremongers and adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home. A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems.

But alas! To which the Negro cries Amen! The ideals of physical freedom, of political power, of school training, as separate all-sufficient panaceas for social ills, became in the third decade dim and overcast. They were the vain dreams of credulous race childhood; not wrong, but incomplete and over-simple. The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever, — the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds.

The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defense, and as a guarantee of good faith. We may misuse it, but we can scarce do worse in this respect than our whilom masters. Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek, — the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think. Work, culture, and liberty—all these we need, not singly, but together; for to-day these ideals among the Negro people are gradually coalescing, and finding a higher meaning in the unifying ideal of race, — the ideal of fostering the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to, but in conformity with, the greater ideals of the American republic, in order that some day, on American soil, two world races may give each to each those characteristics which both so sadly lack.

Already we come not altogether empty-handed: there is to-day no true American music but the sweet wild melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales are Indian and African; we are the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.