W. E. B. Du Bois · Politics
In 1903 Du Bois named the inner experience of being Black in America - the sense of seeing yourself forever through hostile eyes, of carrying two warring identities in a single body.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, a scholar trained in Berlin under the founders of modern sociology, and the most important Black intellectual America has produced. But his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), is not a dry treatise. It is a strange and beautiful book - part sociology, part history, part autobiography, part lament - that set out to answer a single haunting question that, Du Bois said, white Americans were forever asking him without ever asking it aloud: How does it feel to be a problem?
To be Black in America, Du Bois argued, was to live one’s whole life as the answer to that unspoken question - to be perpetually regarded not as a person but as a difficulty, a thing to be discussed and managed. From this condition he drew the book’s central concept, the one that has shaped a century of thought about race, identity, and the self: double consciousness. The book opens by announcing the theme that would define the age.
Double consciousness is the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others - of measuring one’s own soul by the standard of a world that looks on in contempt. The Black American, Du Bois writes, is gifted with no true self-consciousness, but is forced to see himself only as the white world reflects him: as a problem, an inferior, a stereotype. To know yourself only through a distorting mirror held up by people who despise you is to be split in two.
From this comes the famous image of twoness. The African American is both African and American, and feels the pull of two identities that the surrounding society insists are at war. He wants to be both, to merge his double self into a better and truer self without losing either - to be a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spat upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face. The tragedy is that America forces him to choose, or rather forces the choice to feel impossible. The strength it takes simply to hold the two together, unreconciled, in a single body is, Du Bois says, what keeps the self from being torn apart.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Du Bois described a divided self produced by living behind the veil of race. In your own words, explain what ‘always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ does to a person, and why Du Bois called it a gift as well as a burden.
Leads to G. W. F. Hegel.
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