Developing Double Consciousness in the Work of W.E.B. Du Bois
in folkways and custom. Intelligent propaganda, legal enactment and reasoned action must attack the conditioned reflexes of race hate and change them. 13 Thus, we see that Du Bois has posited a theory of unconscious workings in relation to prejudice, specifically white racial prejudice, and how it may be addressed and altered for the sake of bringing about racial justice in America. This project is not only social, but, as we have taken time to lay out, individual— addressing problems within individual’s deep, unconscious thoughts is part of the project of addressing “the problem of the color line,” and is, in fact, according to Du Bois, one of the most important parts of this project. So, how does Du Bois’ theory of unconscious thought affect his theory of double consciousness? I believe that the answer to this question lies in Du Bois’ theory of race as it relates to the unconscious. In “The Plot” chapter of Dusk , Du Bois sets forward a theory of race in America as developing as a result of unconscious prejudices developed towards Black Americans especially during and after chattel slavery. Du Bois writes, But the mind clung desperately to the idea that basic racial differences between human beings had suffered no change; and it clung to this idea not simply from inertia and unconscious action but from the fact that because of the modem African slave trade a tremendous economic structure and eventually an industrial revolution had been based upon racial differences between men; and this racial difference had now been rationalized into a difference mainly of skin color. Thus in the latter part of the nineteenth century… color had become an abiding unchangeable fact chiefly because a mass of self-conscious instincts and unconscious prejudices had arranged themselves rank on rank in its defense. Government, work, religion and education became based upon and determined by the color line. The future of mankind was implicit in the race and color of men. 14 Race’s social construction, thus, has to do with the workings of the unconscious. Thus, the very same grounds on which race developed as a social
13 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn , 151. 14 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn , 2.
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