Du Bois, Double-Consciousness, and a Lingering Problem

W. E. B. Du Bois gave eloquent expression to a personal and socio-cultural tension at the beginning of the twentieth century that is simultaneously a reality that many of us have felt at one time or another, or perhaps even constantly.  When Du Bois described the central problem of the new century for black Americans as being that of the color-line, he also articulated the challenge of negotiating different worlds, allegiances, and identities as that of double-consciousness:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (The Souls of Black Folk, p. 5)

Du Bois has in mind a particular historical struggle.  For Du Bois, this double-consciousness was the distinct self-perception, or group perception, of being on the one hand black and on the other hand Americans.  If we can frame the tension that he identifies more generally, we might describe it as the unsettling difficulty of standing at the same time in more than one tradition.

1.  Du Bois and the Lingering Problem of Race

The Souls of Black Folk, published as a collection in 1903 although some pieces had appeared earlier, straddles more than two centuries.  Janus-faced at this temporal bridge, Du Bois looks backward and forward, and he cannot look ahead without turning around to see that the past remains present.  The matter of race lingers now and if not addressed squarely and constructively it will haunt the future as potently as it has the past.  For black Americans, the task is complicated by the two spheres that they inhabit, their racial heritage and their national home, which remain in tension:

          The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.  In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has 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 having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
          This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. (The Souls of Black Folk, p. 6)

Du Bois emphasizes here not only the duality of identity that he seeks to be blended in a unity for black Americans, but also, from that unity, the cooperation that he believes is inherent in and will flow from the mingling of selves into a new self, fully integrated into the society in which he is "both a Negro and an American."  Envisioned is peaceful, harmonious progress among those whose different heritages may blend together into a single heartland, "co-workers in the kingdom of culture," a realm in which cooperation replaces domination:

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to 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 both so sadly lack.  (The Souls of Black Folk, p. 13)

The dimensions of the color-line have shifted since Du Bois published his riveting and suggestive collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, but the color-line has not been erased.  Recent eruptions in contemporary race relations will disabuse anyone who thinks otherwise.  Incidents are not restricted to excessive, lethal force by police toward blacks, or targeted assassinations of white police. They include "mere" profiling and prejudice demonstrated regularly toward a black U.S. Senator (see here and here).

2. The Race Prejudice Debate

One of the remarkable contributions of Du Bois's essays is the elegant way in which he describes the economic oppression that followed emancipation.  Liberty in its fullness did not begin with the end of slavery.  Even now more than a century after The Souls of Black Folk appeared, theorists are still debating the contours of this racial prejudice in economic form.  For instance, William Julius Wilson has sustained an extended and fruitful dialogue with Charles Vert Willie in which each presses the other to fine-tune their respective positions.  In one essay, Wilson clarifies his position that the shift he identifies from economic oppression to economic subordination does not mean that there is no longer discrimination in the form of extensive poverty among black Americans:

“When I argue that ‘the black experience has moved historically from economic racial oppression experienced by virtually all blacks to economic subordination for the black under-class,’ ” Wilson writes, “Willie complains that I cancel ‘out racial discrimination as a key cause of poverty among blacks’ thereby making it difficult to explain the greater proportion of black families in poverty and the higher unemployment rate for younger blacks.” [Wilson objects that this is not the case.] “Once again Willie overlooks or chooses to ignore one of my key arguments, ... namely that ‘one of the legacies of the racial oppression in previous years is the continued disproportionate black representation in the under-class.’ ” (W. J. Wilson, “The Declining Significance of Race: Revisited but Not Revised,” in The Caste and Class Controversy on Race and Poverty; quoted in Berberoglu, p. 135)

Wilson's point is in part that the legacy of racial discrimination manifests itself in economic terms, largely through class structures.  These differences in class structure preserve in society disharmony, tensions, and the latent seeds of conflict.  This is a nuanced theory of race divisions in the United States, but it is one in keeping with both the advancement and integration into white economic culture that Du Bois advocated and his simultaneous warnings about massive economic disparity and structures that hinder the parity of economic assimilation by blacks.  Berch Berberoglu helpfully summarizes Wilson's theory:

Wilson argues that although racial antagonisms and tensions continue to characterize the American social landscape, class divisions among African Americans yield differential results in advancing one’s class interests. Thus, as the black class structure increasingly resembles the white class structure, middle-class blacks will more and more identify their interests with those of middle-class whites, as opposed to poor blacks, notwithstanding the fact that they will continue to experience racial tensions and conflict within the middle class itself for as long as racism in its various forms continues to exist in the United States. The point is that increasing class differentiation within the African American community will make uniform, racially oriented policies obsolete as the class nature of such policies becomes increasingly transparent. (Berberoglu, An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Social Theory, p. 137)

This is, to be sure, a problem for many black Americans in particular, and that is a problem that needs continued attention.  To underscore those structural challenges is one reason for mentioning them here.  It bears pointing out also, however, that as much as race and class remain lenses through which one can understand the friction among citizens in the contemporary social scene in the United States, family structure must also be included among them.  (See my previous "Conjugal Haves and Have-Nots" here and the even earlier posts on class, wealth, and ethics linked to therein.)

3. The General Tension

Contemporary race relations are still a problem in the United States, and not just because black Americans suffer from double-consciousness.  It is not just that the double-consciousness may have shifted, or multiplied, from the color-line to the class-line.  The general tension is something always present, although perhaps particularly so in the contemporary moment, in the more fundamental problem of identity:  a multiple-consciousness.  By this I mean the challenge of negotiating differing worlds and whims, varying allegiances and identities, both natural and socially constructed, and not only by people of various non-European descent.  Du Bois articulates the friction of overlapping narrative components of one's identity, none of which may be jettisoned permanently in pursuit of one or more of the other narrative arcs because each is integral to one's person and one's community.

Chris Charles, Self-portrait

Often these components come into seeming conflict when one tradition or more comes to compete with others as the sense-making thread to one's life in more than one area. This general double-consciousness, this multi-consciousness, this unsettling difficulty of standing at the same time in more than one tradition, as I have phrased it, is experientially unsettling, as Du Bois keenly knew, precisely because it points to a lack of integrity in one's identity. Integrity is not meant in a moral sense but in terms of coherence.  The person who feels a connection to the land and people and linguistic rhythms where she was reared also wants to participate in a land or with a people or to use, at times, different linguistic rhythms. It becomes difficult in such a circumstance to explain one's relationship to the old and the new, or (if not a temporal sequence because each domain has long accompanied the other) one's relationship to the one and the other.  Social, relational, cultural, philosophical, geographical integrity -- understood as coherence or unity -- is pressured.  The question, then, is how do I make sense of myself and my world and my place in it.

When external and internal tensions run high, or grievances run deep, or oppression evolves, when change threatens my dearest and most basic sense of my self and my world -- when these things occur there is always violence.  It may be the traditional, bloody form.  But violence is also often unseen.  It is there in the multi-consciousness, even when someone makes peace with one's identity nexus.  It may be, at least possibly, that this social sense of personal and communal division, what Du Bois describes as "warring ideals," always keeps warm, like fire under a simmering teapot, the human potential to lash out when we feel that one of our sources of identity, that one of our narrative threads, is overly threatened.  Is this not, after all, what could explain the large-scale social unrest in the United States over race?

Yet the tensions and threats consist not only in the mere fact of difference and pockets of potential prejudice.  They inform our individual struggles in our daily interactions with others.  Is this not what could explain why one friend verbally attacks another just because the first had innocently asked whether she could help prepare a meal but that question was taken as somehow assigning blame or finding fault?  It may lead to relational conflict because the question threatened to shatter the one's narrative self-conception of self-sufficiency and competency.  One is both a friend, which implies accepted reciprocity, and an individual, which too often assumes impeccability.  However, as important as dependence and reciprocity are for core elements of our identity in relationship to others, in this example the friend who felt threatened did so because she viscerally also identified with a cultural tradition, deeply internalized, that one's worth stems from what one can do unaided.  The tradition of proper friendship and the tradition of autonomous independence clashed when she felt the pull of the latter more than the former.


The tension of double-consciousness that Du Bois eloquently and rightly voiced about race relations is generally -- that is, more basically -- a human tension.  It is a human tension that reflects the fact that we all, each of us, participates in various relationships and spheres that both command our allegiance and inform our identity.  What is more, these relationships and spheres each uniquely provide explanatory power that helps us to comprehend ourselves and to give meaning to our place in this world.

Perhaps one way to diffuse and diminish the tension involved in race relations is to recognize that we all daily must negotiate competing claims, both outside of and within ourselves.  Each of these claims may, from their perspectives, make plausible demands on us.  They each have a point, in other words.  And if we can reconcile these competing parties in ourselves, if we can integrate them into a coherent narrative in our lives (maybe not perfectly but at least passably), then we may harbor some hope that we can succeed, however haltingly at first, in reconciling other parties in conflict in the social and political spheres in which we live.  What may have initially seemed like difference, a group's historical double-consciousness, may turn out to be a point of contact for social healing.