Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
construct are the ones that lead to the emergence of double consciousness. Above, I discussed how double consciousness was socially constructed as a result of interactions. This same process is that which, historically and over time, led to define race—and continues to, as the boundaries shift and change. In this way, unconscious processes affect the processes of double consciousness. To conclude our discussion of Du Bois and double consciousness, we may come back to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s introduction to Dusk . Appiah discusses how double consciousness may go both ways, mirroring within American society, drawing on the writing of Carl Jung to expound upon his thought: Like all powerful metaphors, DuBois's metaphor of double consciousness came to have a life of its own. … “Since the Negro lives within your cities and even within your houses,” Jung [wrote], “he also lives within your skin, subconsciously.” It wasn't just that the Negro was an American, as Du Bois would note, again and again, but that the American was, inevitably and inescapably, a Negro.” 15 This sort of societal collective consciousness is one that Du Bois actively advocated for in his writing, especially in his theories of race. Du Bois advocates race as a sort of uniting aspect of many individual consciousnesses, through the unconscious, and, for Black Americans, through double consciousness. For example, when Du Bois speaks of “whiteness” in general, and uses fabled individuals such as his second aforementioned white friend in Darkwater who is “twenty, nay, fifty” to stand in for many—or any—white individual/s, he is getting at a universalizing feature of all white individuals that comes from a specific consistent social experience. And, this universal feature is not the only missing link in his writings on double consciousness. Appiah essentially retires Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness on account of the contemporary world’s rejection of a desire to make things whole (in favor of embracing cultural multiplicity), as Du Bois did with the state of double consciousness. In doing so, Appiah pushes the bounds of what Du Bois started with imagining double consciousness, a world in
15 Kwame Appiah, Introduction to Dusk of Dawn, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) , xv.
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