Developing Double Consciousness in the Work of W.E.B. Du Bois
How, then, might Black Americans escape measuring their souls by the tape of the white, American world? To this problem, and in the wake of Emancipation, Du Bois writes that Black Americans must come into a process of self-realization and respect. Du Bois writes that post-Emancipation, the struggle to find place within society 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. 6 Escaping the mental burden of discrimination thus involves both action and mental fortitude. Part of the development of mental fortitude for Black Americans, as explained by Du Bois, is “self-realization”; seeing oneself “darkly as through a veil.” This is not mere self-realization, but realizing oneself as Black , and more specifically, as Black in America —this realization is necessary in order to prepare for the “mission” of addressing the problem of the color line and to understand where identities place one in terms of the social landscape. Thus, we can here interpret Du Bois as arguing that acknowledging one’s own double consciousness is necessary in the larger project of fighting against racial oppression. Of course, this process is not easy. Du Bois later writes, in Souls , that, From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,––from this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self- confidence.… Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretense or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism. 7 In this way, double consciousness also describes a psychological struggle undergone by Black people in America.
6 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk , 11. 7 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk , 135.
Volume VII (2024) 24
Made with FlippingBook Annual report maker