This, Gordon writes, is the second, doubling consciousness in its affirmative, fully realized manifestation. Here we briefly recapitulate several of those questions. And if not, how can the account he presents be taken as veridical? Although Du Bois never explicitly makes the claim that he himself is free from double-consciousness, he does seem to have written as though his theoretical vision was relatively unclouded by an internal soul-struggle.
And yet Du Bois also clearly introduces his conception of double-consciousness in the context of an account of his own personal experience and as, in part, based on that experience. Gooding-Williams argues that this paradox can be overcome by distinguishing the narrative authority of Souls from the historical author of the text. It is the narrator of Souls , and not Du Bois himself, who has escaped double-consciousness.
This returns us to the question of the scope of double-consciousness, a question raised most insistently by Allen. Du Bois also devotes several chapters in Souls to detailed characterizations of the inner soul struggles of those, both actual and fictional, who would be or were in fact leaders of their people—Washington, Crummell, and the fictional John Jones.
Some recent commentators have rejected the claim that double-consciousness, in the sense of internalized disparagement or a self-perception of inferiority, has been a universal feature of black life in America. Molefi Kete Asante, discussing his own experience growing up in and around the small town of Valdosta, Georgia, in the s, writes that.
There existed no reference points outside of ourselves despite the economic and psychological poverty of our situation. He does go on to acknowledge the special circumstances of his experience:.
It might have been another matter if I had gone to school and to church with whites when I was younger. I might have suffered confusion, double-consciousness, but I did not. Du Bois never explicitly clarifies the relation between double-consciousness and two-ness in his texts. The Du Boisian conception has been criticized as well for oversimplifying the complexity and multidimensionality of contemporary selves, for expressing a nostalgia for a unitary and integral self that may never have existed, is an illusion, an unachievable ideal.
Thus Darlene Clark Hine suggests that. Hines That the text is masculinist seems undeniable. His conception was an attempt to capture something about the lived experience of black folk as black folk in the United States under conditions of Jim Crow and white supremacy. 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. The double-consciousness that ensues from being both an African-American and an American provides the basis for deeper insights into the social realm and the possibility for more effective actions against the systems of domination in place. As a recent recipient of the graduate school certificate in African studies at ASU, my final drew from or focused in part on the settler narrative movement of the antebellum era.
Despite the discovery of over burials from this era that came to light recently, it was all treated in a quite troubing manner. Settler Colonial mentality was pervasive. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes—foolishly, perhaps, but fervently—that Negro blood has yet a message for the world.
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development. This is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, and to husband and use his best powers.
These powers, of body and of mind, have in the past been so wasted and dispersed as to lose all effectiveness, and to seem like absence of all power, like weakness. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan, on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde, could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause.
By the poverty and ignorance of his people the Negro lawyer or doctor was pushed toward quackery and demagogism, and by the criticism of the other world toward an elaborate preparation that overfitted him for his lowly tasks. The would-be black-savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood.
The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing, a-singing, and a-laughing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of eight thousand people, has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and has even at times seemed destined to make them ashamed of themselves.
In the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; eighteenth-century Rousseauism never worshiped freedom with half the unquestioning faith that the American Negro did for two centuries. To him slavery was, indeed, the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites.
In his songs and exhortations swelled one refrain, liberty; in his tears and curses the god he implored had freedom in his right hand. At last it came, — suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences: —. Years have passed away, ten, twenty, thirty. Thirty years of national life, thirty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy ghost of Banquo sits in its old place at the national feast.
In vain does the nation cry to its vastest problem, —. The freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of lesser good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people, — a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly folk.
The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Kuklux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom.
As the decade closed, however, he began to grasp a new idea. Du Bois defines double consciousness as the struggle African Americans face to remain true to black culture while at the same time conforming to the dominant white society.
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.
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