Double-consciousness is a concept in social philosophyreferring, originally, to a source of inward “twoness”putatively experienced by African-Americans because of theirracialized oppression and disvaluation in a white-dominated society.The concept is associated with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, whointroduced the term into social thought in his groundbreakingTheSouls of Black Folk (1903). Its source has been traced back fromthere, by recent commentators, to the development of clinicalpsychology in the nineteenth-century North Atlantic, and to trends inidealist philosophies of self – the transcendentalism of RalphWaldo Emerson and G.W.F. Hegel’sPhenomenology ofSpirit. It is thus indirectly related to other nineteenth- andtwentieth-century riffs on Hegelian themes, such as falseconsciousness and bad faith. In our day it continues to be used bynumerous commentators on racialized cultures, societies, andliteratures; by cultural and literary theorists; and by students andresearchers of Africana Philosophy. Recent philosophical debatescenter on the significance of the concept for Du Bois’s thoughtoverall, its theoretical coherence, and its relevance given currentsocial conditions.

• 1. The Trajectory of the Concept
• 2. Double-Consciousness inThe Souls of Black Folk
  • 2.1 Americanist Romantic Longing
  • 2.2 Color-Line Hegelianism
  • 2.3 A Deflationist Reading
  • 2.4 An Analytic Politico-Philosophic Reconstruction
  • 2.5 Rousseauian Self-Estrangement
  • 2.6 Uses and Extensions of the Concept
• 3. Double-Consciousness inSouls of Black Folk: Problems
• 4. Du Boisian Double-Consciousness afterSouls?
  • 4.1 “The Souls of White Folks” inDarkwater (1920)
  • 4.2 “On Being Ashamed of Oneself: An Essay on Race Pride” (1933)
  • 4.3Dusk of Dawn (1940)
• 5. Beyond the Black/White Binary, BeyondDouble Consciousness
  • 5.1 A ‘Post-Continental’ Turn
  • 5.2 White Double Consciousness
  • 5.3 Kaleidoscopic Consciousness
• 6. Conclusion
• Bibliography
  • Primary Literature: Works by W.E.B. Du Bois
  • Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. The Trajectory of the Concept

In an 1897Atlantic Monthly article and again in his 1903Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois innovated by using a termalready in currency – and with multiple associations in avariety of literary, philosophical, and scientific discourses –in a distinctive and original way to name a theretofore largelyunremarked phenomenon. The innovation was part of an account of thelife-experience he ascribed to “black folk” in Americagenerally in then-current social circumstances – Jim Crow in thesouth,de facto segregation in the North, and the threat andactuality of racist violence throughout the nation.

The term he used – “double-consciousness” –dropped entirely, after just these two uses, from his publishedwriting. Those uses nonetheless struck a chord; use of the term,interpreted in a number of ways, has frequently recurred as thecentury since its appearance has passed. While the disappearance ofthe term from Du Bois’s writing after 1903 has fueled questionsabout the significance of the concept in the overall assessment of hiswork, some commentators insist nonetheless on the centrality of theconcept for Du Bois’s legacy.

Du Bois was engaged throughout his long career in the attempt tounderstand both the socio-historic conditions facing “Blackfolk” in the American twentieth century, and the impacts ofthose conditions on the consciousness and “inner world” ofthe human beings subject to them. InSouls of Black Folk thatsecond concern was with capturing in words “the strange meaningof being black”, with describing the “spiritualworld” and the “spiritual strivings” of “theAmerican Negro”. Du Bois continued to articulate responses tothese concerns in his later works: one finds formulations addressingthem even in his posthumously publishedAutobiography (1968).As the contexts of Du Bois’s writing, research, and activismchanged, these responses shifted in focus, emphasis, and perspective.Broadly speaking, as his reflections on what he initially termed the“spiritual world” of Black folk came to be more richlyfilled out in the variety and extent of its details, Du Bois’saccount of the phenomena he originally identified with the term“double-consciousness” both overflowed the initialassociations of that term and became stratified under pressure fromhis shifts in perspective. In what follows, we trace the fate of DuBois’s 1903 account in his later work and then assess thereconstructed account on its own terms.

This article will, first, briefly survey some of the attempts toexplicate and contextualize the use of the concept by Du Bois inThe Souls of Black Folk of 1903 (hereafterSouls),and give a brief overview of controversies regarding the viability ofthe concept and its significance for contemporary Africana thought.After presenting suggestions concerning the development of DuBois’s understanding of the phenomenon afterSouls,we’ll look briefly at three recent distinctive uses of it‘beyond the black/white binary’. (The term Du Bois usedwas “double-consciousness”, with the hyphen intact; morerecent writers have generally abandoned the hyphen. In this articlethe hyphen is retained in discussing Du Bois’s 1903 term andconcept, and interpretive attempts to get at it. But “doubleconsciousness”simpliciter is used when discussing theterm more generally in relation to current debates.)

2. Double-Consciousness inThe Souls of Black Folk

Thelocus classicus for the Du Boisian conception occurs inthe third paragraph of “Of our Spiritual Strivings”, thefirst chapter of Du Bois’s 1903Souls (a slightlymodified version of “The Strivings of the Negro People”,published inThe AtlanticMonthly in August, 1897,where he first uses the term):

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton andMongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, andgifted with second-sight in this American world, – a world whichyields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himselfthrough the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation,this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’sself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by thetape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One everfeels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, twothoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one darkbody, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.(1997 [1903]: 38) [This passage henceforth referred to as the“Strivings” text.]

An inspection of the passage reveals the complexity of its object.Double-consciousness is identified as a “sensation”, aconsciousness of one’s self, but which falls short of a unified,“true” self-consciousness. It is part of a more complexfeeling of “two-ness”, of disparate and competing“thoughts”, “strivings”, and“ideals”. This is not an episodic or occasional sensation,but a persistent form of consciousness. Ascribed to “the Negro… in this American world”, it is a socio-culturalconstruct rather than a baldly bio-racial given, attributedspecifically to people of African descent in America. The“two-ness” of which it is a consciousness thus is notinherent, accidental, nor benign: the condition is presented here asboth imposed and fraught with psychic danger.

Double-consciousness is presented in conjunction with two otherphenomena, related to two other figures – the“veil”, and the “gift” of“second-sight”. Of these, “the veil” is themore insistent motif, recurring regularly throughoutSouls aswell as other of Du Bois’s writings. By contrast, the terms“double-consciousness” and “second-sight” seemnot to have been used in print by Du Bois after 1903. Still, thispassage has come to have a singular significance in the philosophicalinterpretation of Du Bois’s thought as well as for the influenceof his views. Only his oft-repeated claim at the very beginning ofSouls, that “the problem of the Twentieth Century isthe problem of the color line,” may be more widely known. Theparagraph immediately following makes clear that, for Du Bois, this isnot only a “sensation” but constitutes a crucial object of“striving” and political struggle for black folk in theUnited States:

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,– this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge hisdouble self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishesneither of the older selves to be lost.

The phenomenon is identified again – but without being so namedagain – in the tenth chapter ofSouls, “Of theFaith of the Fathers”, an essay on “Negro religiouslife”. Du Bois writes:

From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and asan American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yetstruggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century, – from thismust arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense ofpersonality, and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence.The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, andchanging rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; andthis must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar senseof doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts,double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to doublewords and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, tohypocrisy or radicalism. (1997 [1903]: 155–6) [This passagehenceforth referred to as the “Faith” text.]

Here double-consciousness, unnamed, is set in a more dynamic contextthan in the earlier, “Strivings” text. The two passages,parallel in form, are subtly different in tone. Here Du Bois clearlydistinguishes two social “worlds” and the “doublelives” that result. This text sweeps us along, showing acausality, a coming-into-being of consciousness. And it concludes bynoting, in its final twenty words, the social and politicalconsequences of this “painful” double-consciousness. Yet,oddly, the “Faith” text is largely neglected in criticaldiscussions.

The current relevance of double consciousness to an understanding ofBlack lives, and of contemporary American reality, is debated inrecent commentary and scholarship. In an interview, the late ToniMorrison recalled the Du Boisianmotif in characterizing theliterary work of Black men:

… African American male writers justifiably write books abouttheir oppression,

she says.

Confronting the oppressor who is white male or white woman. It’srace. And the person who defines you under those circumstances is awhite mind – tells you whether you’re worthy or what haveyou. And as long as that’s your preoccupation, you’redefending yourself against that. Reacting to it. Reacting to thedefinition – saying it’s not true.

Morrison contrasts this to her own approach, which is to “takeaway the gaze of the white male. Once you take that out, the wholeworld opens up”. (Morrison 2012)

Also, theNew York Times columnist Charles M. Blow has morethan once cited the “Strivings” text in commenting on thecontemporary paradoxes of black life brought into the open by some ofPresident Obama’s public statements in the wake of recentcriminal justice controversies (Blow 2013).

A number of academic writers have worked to contextualize andinterpret Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness – mostoften focusing on the “Strivings” text, and neglecting the“Faith” text – to identify sources and antecedentsthat influenced his conception, and to clarify the concerns he wasaddressing and his intentions in putting it forward. A brief resume ofthat interpretive record follows.

2.1 Americanist Romantic Longing

In his 1992 article “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Idea of DoubleConsciousness”, Dickson D. Bruce Jr. suggests a variety ofsources of the complex of meanings marshaled at the time by DuBois’s use of the term. The “double consciousness”figure stems from the European romantic opposition between an innatehuman affinity for the transcendent and a pragmatic“materialism” grounded in a utilitarian attitude, orientedto mundane need and commercial enterprise. Tracing this understandingof double consciousness back to the American philosopher Ralph WaldoEmerson (and before him to Goethe), who used the term in his essay,“The Transcendentalist” (1842), Bruce maintains that thisanti-bourgeois romanticism is a “figurative background” ofDu Bois’s use of the term, to which Du Bois brought the ideathat

the essence of a distinctive African consciousness was itsspirituality… revealed among African Americans in theirfolklore, their history of patient suffering, and their faith. (Bruce1999 [1992]: 238)

Bruce also briefly traces the trajectory of“double-consciousness” in the medical and psychologicalliterature of the nineteenth century. An early appearance of the termin theMedical Repository in 1817 (Mitchill 1817: 185) usedit to name the condition of one Mary Reynolds, who, for a period ofabout fifteen years beginning in her nineteenth, alternately lived twodistinct lives, with wholly different personalities,‘uncognizant of’ and inaccessible to each other. This useof the term had some currency throughout the nineteenth century;William James, one of Du Bois’s Harvard philosophy professors,described such cases as alternating between “primary andsecondary consciousnesses” in his considerable discussion ofthem in thePrinciples of Psychology (1890: see esp. Vol. I,379–393), published while Du Bois was at Harvard (although Jamesdoes not seem to have used the term“double-consciousness”) (Bruce 1999 [1992]: 240–1).Bruce comments that

…based on Du Bois’s use of“double-consciousness” in hisAtlantic essay hecertainly seems to have known the term’s psychologicalbackground, because he used it in ways quite consistent with thatbackground. (1999: 242)

[Bruce does not note the appearance of the term, in French –“double conscience” – in Josef Breuer andSigmund Freud’s “On the Psychical Mechanism of HystericalPhenomena” published in 1893 inNeurologischesCentralblatt, Nos. 1 and 2. This paper was later reprinted as thefirst chapter ofStudies on Hysteria, published in 1895.Breuer and Freud appear to use the French term in responding to anddeveloping its earlier use by Pierre Janet, relating it to“splitting of consciousness” and psychic“dissociation”. (For a discussion of theBreuer-Freud-Janet connection, see James Strachey’s introductiontoStudies on Hysteria.)]

The diverse associations of these senses of the term were crucial,Bruce argues, to the resonance and suggestiveness of Du Bois’sdistinctive use of the term: connotations of spiritual longing andunbridgeable opposition between two viewpoints, of the realdistinctiveness and moral parity of the twopersonae and thepossibility of their merging in a new synthetic unity signifying acure, a fact reported in a number of cases of the psychologicalmalady.

2.2 Color-Line Hegelianism

The first book-length study thematizing Du Boisiandouble-consciousness was Sandra Adell’sDouble-Consciousness/ Double Bind: Theoretical Issues inTwentieth-Century Black Literature (1994). Engaging debates overtheoretical approaches to Black literature, Adell argues for anintertextualism inspired by Derridean deconstruction, and aimed attranscending the “Afrocentric/ Eurocentric” divide. Thebook begins with a chapter on Du Bois’s “Strivings”text; Adell, following the lead of Joel Williamson’s earlierarticle, “W.E.B. Du Bois as a Hegelian” (1978), presentsDu Bois’s text as a reading and use of crucial passages inHegel. Du Boisian double-consciousness, she claims, “emergesfrom the philosophy of Hegel as it is articulated in thePhenomenology of Spirit” (1994: 8). She adduces asevidence for the Hegelian reading ofSouls Du Bois’sstudies with William James and Josiah Royce, references to Hegel in DuBois’s Philosophy IV notebook from his time at Harvard, as wellas his studies with von Trietschke in Berlin “(in the midst of a‘Hegelian revival’ when he arrived)” (1994: 12).

Adell identifies three “instances” of the “doublingof consciousness” in Hegel’s text (in the section on“Self-Consciousness”; in “Lordship andBondage”; and in “The Unhappy Consciousness”); it isthe third of these that, she claims, forms the basic pattern for the“Strivings” text:

Du Bois’s “double-consciousness” decontextualizesHegel’s “Unhappy Consciousness” … and opensit up to other contexts. In this case, the new context is one uponwhich is inscribed the problem of the twentieth century: the problemof the color line. (1994: 19)

Adell then sketches a reading of the entire text ofSouls asa detailed “sociological, psychological, andphilosophical” account of “the Negro’sbeing-in-the-world” (1994: 19). Her reading identifies otherborrowings from German Idealism, noting along the way that

the title of Du Bois’s text itself,The Souls of BlackFolk, remarks and reiterates the two concepts – soul andfolk (Volk) – that are central, not only toHerder’s aesthetics, but to that of Hegel as well. (1994: 23)

2.3 A Deflationist Reading

What I’ll call a “deflationist” interpretation of DuBois’s conception is pursued by Adolph Reed, Jr., in his 1997book on Du Bois’s political philosophy,W.E.B. Du Bois andAmerican Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line.Reed’s book offers a critique of what he dubs“vindicationist” approaches to Afro-American politicalthought – approaches attempting to show the significance ofAfrican-American theorists by tracing analogies and connectionsbetween their work and the “greats” of the (white)European tradition (1997: 12). The double polemical thrust ofReed’s text questions the alleged sources of influence on DuBois’s thinking, and rejects the claim that Du Boisiandouble-consciousness refers to a transhistorical feature of black lifein America. He points to the disappearance of the term from DuBois’s texts after 1903 to undercut the claims that it“was a definitive element, a key organizing principle of histhought” or “a moment in a distinctively blacksocial-theoretical discourse or tradition” (1997: 124). Reedconcludes that the claim

that millions of individuals experience a peculiar form of bifurcatedidentity, simply by virtue of common racial status… seemspreposterous on its face. (1997: 125)

Setting out a contextualizing account, Reed shows the considerablecachet of ideas of duality current when Du Bois wrote, and argues thatthe claims connecting Du Bois’s use of double-consciousness toEmerson, James or Hegel fail. Reed aligns Du Bois’s concept withevolutionary and Lamarckian social-scientific views instead. He arguesthat an emphasis on double-consciousness emerges in Du Boisinterpretation only after the 1960s, when it supplants criticalattention to the critique of Booker T. Washington’s strategy of“accommodation” in the third essay of the book. Reedattributes this shift in focus to “an ideological current withinthe post-segregation-era black petite bourgeoisie” (1997: 130)“centered on assertion of black presence within hermeticallyconstituted communities of academic discourse” (1997:94–5).

Ernest Allen Jr. presents a similarly deflationist case in hisarticle, “Du Boisian Double Consciousness: The UnsustainableArgument” (2002), arguing that the Du Boisian conception ofdouble-consciousness was a “tactical, political” attemptto gain support among sympathetic white philanthropists for theefforts of cultural uplift and organization on the part of a“Talented Tenth”, an “educated black elite”.The rhetorical construction of a model of double-consciousness inSouls involves for Allen a “double sleight ofhand” (2002: 25), requiring a slippage between a putativeconflict of ideals within the minds of the black elite and a moregeneral problem for African Americans “who could not help buthave internalized some of the negative sentiments that white societyheld towards them” (2002: 29).

The attribution of distinctive “American” and“Negro” ideals is empty, Allen argues: there are no clearexamples of “Negro” ideals in the offing in DuBois’s text. Though there is no conflict between“warring” ideals as claimed by Du Bois, thereisa conflict between white racial prejudice, intransigent hostility andexclusion of blacks, on the one hand, and the ideal of civic equalityfor all emblazoned on the ideological banners of the Americanrepublic, on the other. This – what Allen calls “theinstitutionalized as well as everyday double consciousness and doubledealings of white Americans” – is, he claims, “thesocial foundation” of the “African American ideologicalambivalence” (2002: 38) that Du Boisian double-consciousnessexpresses.

2.4 An Analytic Politico-Philosophic Reconstruction

Robert Gooding-Williams develops a tripartite account of the conceptof double-consciousness as a keystone in Du Bois’spolitical-philosophical project in hisIn the Shadow of Du Bois:Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (2009).Double-consciousness functions as part of an account of the subjectiveexperience of African-Americans in conditions dominated by Jim Crowand the “color line”; it serves as an essential componentof Du Bois’s critique of certain forms of black politicalleadership under those conditions; and it underwrites Du Bois’sown positive theory of “political expressivism”.Gooding-Williams, like Allen, distinguishes double-consciousness fromthe more general idea of “two-ness” that Du Bois connectsit to, arguing also that “second sight” is a distinctivefeature of Du Bois’s conception.

Gooding-Williams emphasizes that Du Bois presents the concept inSouls in a passage that begins with the question, “Howdoes it feel to be a problem?” – a question whichreferences the so-called “Negro problem”. This indicatesan inward approach to the “subjective” felt experience of“the Negro”, an approach relating double-consciousness to“second sight”, which Du Bois characterizes as a“gift” in this American world. Gooding-Williams finds twosources for the idea of second sight – one in African-Americanfolklore, and one in the nineteenth-century literature on animalmagnetism. Both these present it as a capacity for a sort ofextra-sensory perception (e.g., of ghosts) or a kind of vision intothe future – a capacity to see what is not generally visible.Gooding-Williams argues that Du Bois uses “second sight”to identify “the Negro’s” capacity to see himselfthrough the eyes of white Americans. Because white Americansconstitute what Du Bois refers to as “the other world”, asocial group distinct from that of black folk, whites’perceptions of and views about blacks would not “normally”be available to blacks, for Gooding-Williams; it is second sight thatgives such access. In “this American world”, however,whites’ perspectives on blacks are deeply distorted by racialprejudice. It is the “gift” of second sight, then, thatmakes blacks’ self-consciousness into a “falseself-consciousness”, Gooding-Williams claims, by fostering inthem a self-concept molded by contempt and a presumption ofinferiority.

Thus, Gooding-Williams presents double-consciousness as a “falseself-consciousness” arising through second sight exercised inconditions of a racially prejudiced dominant culture. This falseconsciousness can make way for a “true self-consciousness”only when those conditions have been transformed and whites no longerperceive blacks as “contemptible” or“inferior” (for only then will the Negro’s“second sight” reflect a perception of himself undistortedby prejudice). This eventuality, neither inevitable nor unattainable,requires the achievement of reciprocal recognition that has beendenied the Negro by the white “other world” throughoutAmerican history, and is a prime object of the Du Boisian politicalproject. That project’s broader object – indeed, the goalof the history of African-American striving – is for blackAmericans to be recognized as “co-workers in the kingdom ofculture”. Gooding-Williams concludes that the overcoming ofdouble-consciousness is a necessary and sufficient condition for theachievement of full equality: equality grounded in reciprocalrecognition cannot be won without eradicating the basis fordouble-consciousness.

Gooding-Williams argues that Du Bois was concerned withdouble-consciousness not only as a correlate of the disenfranchisedcondition that constitutes the so-called Negro problem, but also as acrucial test of the effectiveness of those leading the struggle toovercome that condition. In his discussions of Booker T. Washingtonand Alexander Crummell (in chapters III and XII ofSouls), DuBois makes a case that both fell victim to double-consciousness,vitiating their effectiveness as leaders of the freedom struggle.Specifically, Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” wasa strategy that undermined the struggle for recognition, reinforcingdouble-consciousness by failing to challenge the white perception ofNegro “inferiority”.

2.5 Rousseauian Self-Estrangement

Frank Kirkland notes Du Bois’s description ofdouble-consciousness as a “feeling”, and articulates thatfeeling through Rousseau’s notion ofamour-propre, theform of “civilized” self-love that is reflective,contrastive, and radically corrosive of social solidarity.(Rousseau’s account distinguishesamour-propre fromamour de soi, an instinctual urge to self-preservation;amour-propre is a purely social feeling.)

Du Bois’ “double consciousness” refers to a blackperson’s felt awareness of the harmfully comparative measures ofothers on her character and self-esteem, by which s⁄he takesherself to be a problem in and of a social arrangement permitting suchmeasures or obliging them. (2013: 144)

For Kirkland, Du Bois’ conception of double-consciousness isinherently comparative, the consequence ofamour-propre inconditions of the color line. Du Bois, according to Kirkland, beganfrom the “inflamedamour-propre of others”:

those (of the darker races) have their own respect and esteem …denied or underestimated by others (of the lighter races), therebyagitating and worsening the color line. (2013: 140)

For Kirklandamour-propre is not the cause of the color-line,but it does spread its reach and intensify its effects. Kirkland alsostresses the element of awareness within double-consciousness, inkeeping with the Rousseauian analogy:

[F]or Du Bois, this comparison gone awry is a matter about which blackpeople are, at least, sentient, awake to, even if they have notgrasped it conceptually,

writes Kirkland, adding that this is “their sentience to thecomparison by which they are made a problem” (2013: 140).

Kirkland follows the “Faith” text in identifying two formsof the danger double-consciousness poses for African-Americans: a“dual/duelist” threat of internally conflicted aspirationsand expectations, and a “duplicitous” hypocritical stance.Both these arise from the felt need to maintain self-esteem givenhostility to one’s ideals. Notably, Kirkland also identifies athird, “dyadic” form of double-consciousness which

would reflect, via education, the result of an individual coming to atrue, non-estranged comprehension of the position s⁄he deservesin comparison to others as both a citizen and a person of color withcertain talents and competences. (2013: 142)

This “non-estranged” mode of double-consciousness is a“solution to the hazards” of the other two forms,according to Kirkland.

2.6 Uses and Extensions of the Concept

Cornel West extends the analytic grasp of the concept as part of acritical discussion of double-consciousness in his first book,Prophecy Deliverance! (1982). In the first chapter, Westsuggests an ingredient missing from Du Bois’s analysis of theself-consciousness of Africans in America, claiming that

Du Bois overlooked the broader dialectic of being American yet feelingEuropean, of being provincial but yearning for Britishcosmopolitanism, of being at once incompletely civilized andmaterially prosperous, a genteel Brahmin amid uncouth conditions.Black Americans labored rather under the burden of a triple crisis ofself-consciousness. Their cultural predicament was comprised ofAfrican appearance and unconscious cultural mores, involuntarydisplacement to America without American status, and Americanalienation from the European ethos complicated through domination byincompletely European Americans. (1982: 30–1)

West further complicates his own enumeration of the tangled elementsof the African-American cultural dialectic, referring to the“anxiety-ridden provinciality” of Protestant-Americanself-identity, and the “distinctly antimodern values andsensibilities” dominant in the southern states, the“geographic cradle of black America” (1982: 31).

West’s formulations do not unmake but add refinements on DuBois’s basic claim. It’s worth noting that, near the endof West’s discussion, he acknowledges that, in the firstattempts to shape their own self-identity, “Black people wererelatively uninformed about British culture…”. This seemsto minimize the significance of “British cosmopolitanism”and “alienation from the European ethos” as issues forblack folk in America generally.

InThe Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness(1993) Paul Gilroy extends Du Boisian double-consciousness both beyondthe American context and at odds with an essentialist understanding ofrace. Gilroy claims double consciousness as an overriding thematicelement in Du Bois’s thought and writing, both in and beyondSouls, part of Du Bois’s attempt to subvert rigidlyfixed racial identities as imposed categories keyed to the oppressivesocial structures of white supremacy. The “Strivings” textis taken as one early expression of Du Bois’s own ambivalencetoward modernity – an ambivalence shared widely in diasporicblack cultures and political debates – and as prefiguring theincreasingly transnational and pan-racial scope of Du Bois’sevolving concerns.

In a reading ofSouls that is central to his book, Gilroyhighlights the

nagging anxiety over the inner contradictions of modernity and aradical scepticism towards the ideology of progress with which it isassociated (1993: 117)

he finds there in germ form. Elements of an implicit global-diasporic– hence “Black Atlantic” – perspective on“the meaning of being black” in that text are in tensionwith, and textually submerged under, the “smooth flow ofAfrican-American exceptionalisms” (1993: 120). These elementswithin the discourse ofSouls point to the wider significanceof double consciousness, according to Gilroy. He claims thisglobal-diasporic theme would, subsequent toSouls, come“to illuminate the experience of post-slave populations ingeneral” and to “animate a dream of global co-operationamong people of color which came to full fruition only in [DuBois’] later work” (1993: 126).

Paget Henry’s phenomenological treatment of Du Bois’sconception in his “Africana Phenomenology: Its PhilosophicalImplications” (2005) identifies a “theory” of doubleconsciousness as part of a “comprehensive phenomenology ofAfricana self-consciousness” (2005: 85). Henry distinguishes DuBoisian double-consciousness from the double consciousness found inHegel’s discussion of lordship and bondage in thePhenomenology by its focus on ‘the Africanasubject’ Hegel neglected entirely. Henry offers furtheran explication of Du Boisian “second sight”: on his view,it is

the ability of the racialized Africana subject to see him/herself as“a negro”, that is, through the eyes of the white other.(2005: 89)

Henry characterizes this as a “categoric form of self-blindness… a classic case of false consciousness” (2005: 90). ButHenry claims a further, ethically propitious form of second sight ispossible – what he calls “potentiated second sight”.This is a “very special access and insight into the dehumanizing‘will to power’ of the European imperial subject”.This “potentiating” of second sight can occur, accordingto Henry, when an Africana subject is able to uproot the“blackface” stereotype from her consciousness andreconceive herself as “an African” by operating“within the creative codes of African discourses andsymbols” (2005: 91). Henry cites the Rastafarians as an exampleof this route to potentiated second sight. An alternate route isthrough an individually acquired standpoint on the world, independentof white supremacy: Du Bois himself is an exemplar.

Henry sees a close relation between Du Boisian double-consciousnessand Frantz Fanon’s existential-psychoanalytic account of blackself-consciousness, found in Fanon’sBlack Skin, WhiteMasks (1967). Noting the Freudian and Sartrean idiom in whichFanon carries through his analyses in that text, Henry writes that“there is no finer or more detailed account of the state ofracial double consciousness” (2005: 95). In the very first pagesof that text, Fanon makes clear his psychoanalytic orientation,writing of the black’s “inferiority complex” –a term first appearing in the book in an epigraph from AiméCésaire’sDiscourse on Colonialism. Fanonobserves that

The effective disalienation of the black man entails an immediaterecognition of social and economic realities. If there is aninferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: primarily,economic; subsequently, the internalization – or better, theepidermalization – of this inferiority. (1967: 10–11)

Henry details a process he dubs “negrification”, to whichthe black is subject in the confines of the West. In that process,“colonized Africana people lost their earlier culturalidentities and became identified by the color of their skin”(2005: 96). The white colonizer projects the most reprehensible andforbidden aspects of himself onto the black man, thereby bringingabout the stereotype of “the Negro”. Fanon also borrowsJungian formulations for his account, writing of the “collectiveunconscious ofhomo occidentalis”, in which the blackman “symbolizes evil, sin, wretchedness, death, war,famine”. Referring to his native land, Fanon writes

[i]n Martinique, whose collective unconscious makes it a Europeancountry, when a “blue” Negro – a coal-black one– comes to visit, one reacts at once: “What bad luck is hebringing?” (1967: 191)

In an earlier text,Caliban’s Reason (2000), Henry usesthe Shakespearean motif, fromThe Tempest, of the clash ofthe European colonizer Prospero with the native Caliban. He cites the“Calibanization” of the Africans imported by Europeanslavers to the Caribbean:

[C]olor eclipsed culture. … Africans were transformed intonegroes and niggers in the minds of Europeans. This racial violenceshattered the cultural foundations of the African self…. Racebecame the primary signifier of Europeans and Africans and of thedifferences between them. Consequently, the identities of these twogroups were rigidly inscribed in a set of binary oppositions thatlinked the binary black/white to other binaries such asprimitive/civilized, irrational/rational, body/mind,prelogical/logical, flesh/spirit. (2000: 11–2)

Henry sees Calibanization – the imposition of a racializedidentity based on a set of insidiously contrastive binaries on top ofan original and native cultural identity grounded in African ways oflife – as the production of a form of double consciousness.

Lewis Gordon touches on double consciousness in hisIntroductionto Africana Philosophy (2008). Gordon starts from Du Bois’s‘unasked’ question, “How does it feel to be aproblem?” For Gordon, this question presupposes thesubjectivity, and the humanity, of the black person being addressed.And yet, the ascription of the status of a “problem” tothat person involves at the same time adenial of thehumanity of that black addressee. Gordon notes that “[t]heappeal to blacks as problem-people is an assertion of their ultimatelocation outside the system of order and rationality” (2008:76). This outsider status, Gordon suggests, is crucial to theformation of double consciousness, leading as it does to “thesplitting of worlds and consciousness itself according to the norms ofU.S. society and its contradictions”. Those norms instantiatethe fact that “‘American’ was persistently definedas ‘white’ in North America and the rest of theAmericas” (2008: 77).

Gordon takes the “negative version” of doubleconsciousness to result when the self-image of the black person iswholly determined by how racial others view her – her view ofherself is a “white point of view” (2008: 78), relegatingher to the status of noncitizen or second class citizen. Itsepistemological significance is that one of the two perspectivesimplicit in it – that of the white world – is necessarilypartial, yet positions itself as universal, and so, is “a formof consciousness that hides itself” (2008: 79). But thisdominant white self-concept brings into being a“subaltern” consciousness, a consciousness of thecontradictions of that dominant self-concept. This, Gordon claims, isthe second, doubling consciousness in its affirmative, fully realizedmanifestation.

3. Double-Consciousness inSouls of Black Folk: Problems

The preceding survey yields several points of contention: issuesconcerning the source(s) of Du Bois’s conception andterminology, of its putative Rousseauian, Hegelian and/or Americanphilosophical connections; the scope of the conception, that is, howwidely and to whom Du Bois thought it applied; the relation betweendouble-consciousness and the psychic duality he associated it with;the nature of “second sight”, and its relation todouble-consciousness; double-consciousness’s relation to alleged“pathology,” and to critical awareness or critique; theconception’s usefulness for an understanding of the situation ofblack folk, both at the turn of the twentieth century when Du Bois putit forward, and today. Here we briefly recapitulate several ofthese.

The first question, one Gooding-Williams identifies as a paradox,concerns Du Bois’s own invulnerability to double-consciousness.If double-consciousness is indeed endemic to “Negroes”– if it was, in a sense, a structural problem foranyNegro consciousness under conditions of Jim Crow – then howcould Du Bois himself write as if transcending it, as having“true self-conscious manhood”? Although Du Bois neverexplicitly makes the claim that he himself is free fromdouble-consciousness, his text hints at no such internalsoul-struggle. And yet, his conception of double-consciousness isintroduced as part of an account of his own personal experience and asbased on that experience.

Gooding-Williams tries to overcome this paradox by distinguishing thenarrative authority ofSouls from the historical author ofthe text. It is the narrator ofSouls, and not Du Boishimself, who has escaped double-consciousness. This may saveSouls as a literary text, but it doesn’t rescue theidea of black political leadership, implying that no actual blackpolitical leader is immune from double-consciousness. Another possibleresolution to the paradox involves the notion of a second sight awaketo the contradictions of the dominant white cultural milieu, allowinga rejection of its biased assumption about black folk (what Henrycalls “potentiated second sight”).

Du Bois often insisted that his accounting of “the Negroproblem” – or, alternatively, of “the raceconcept” – involves leading his readers “within theVeil” – making it possible for his (presumably mostlywhite) readers to gain some sense of the experience of “beingblack”. This involves, as he puts it inDusk of Dawn(1940), “elucidating the inner meaning and significance of thatrace problem by explaining it in terms of the one human life that Iknow best” (1968 [1940]: viii). But that one life was one livedat the top of “the upper layers of educated and ambitiousNegroes” (1968 [1940]: 185), and so, it was exceptional. Thisreturns us to the question of the scope of double-consciousness.

While Du Bois presents double-consciousness in the 1903 texts as aproblem for black folks generally given conditions of segregation andhistorically persisting inequality, a closer inspection of the textsuggests that the phenomenon might be specific to black leadership orthose who are most fully caughtbetween the white world andthe world of color, who have deliberately undertaken the “moral uplift” of the “backward” black masses, andwho stand as “representatives” of these“worlds” to each other. The “Strivings”passage cites as illustrative examples only educated,“better” Negroes: the ‘black artisan’, theNegro minister or doctor, the “would be blacksavant” and the black artist. Du Bois also devotesseveral further chapters inSouls to detailedcharacterizations of the inner struggles of actual or fictionalleaders – Washington, Crummell, and the fictional John Jones.Yet much of the force of the claim for double-consciousness in the“Strivings” text is its universal attribution to“the Negro in this American world”.

Some recent commentators have rejected the claim thatdouble-consciousness, in the sense of a self-perception ofinferiority, has been a universal feature of black life. Molefi KeteAsante, discussing his own experience growing up in Valdosta, Georgia,in the 1950s, writes that

[t]he tightly knit community of Africans who lived on the dirt roadsof Valdosta never saw themselves as intellectually or physicallyinferior to whites. There existed no reference points outside ofourselves despite the economic and psychological poverty of oursituation. (1993: 133)

Several pages later Asante states flat-out, “I was neveraffected by the Du Boisian double-consciousness” (1993: 136). Hedoes go on to acknowledge his distinct circumstances

It might have been another matter if I had gone to school and tochurch with whites when I was younger. I might have sufferedconfusion, double-consciousness, but I did not. (1993: 137)

A third issue for Du Bois’s conception of double-consciousnessconcerns its putative relation to the “two-ness” of theNegro psyche, which he never clarifies. Du Bois was concerned early onto establish a distinct contribution of “the Negro” toworld culture and civilization, since lynch law and the backlashagainst Reconstruction raised the specter of genocidal exterminationof black folk in America. A distinctly “Negro” culturalcontribution seems to require distinctive Negro “ideals”.Allen and others have argued that Du Bois presents vague, seeminglyempty, or contradictory accounts of just what the conflicting Americanand Negro “ideals” are. The question, then, is whether DuBois’s reference to such ideals can be sustained as anindependent source of the “two-ness” which Du Boisconnects to double-consciousness. If there are indeed such (non-empty)ideals, and they are an independent source of conflictual two-ness,then double-consciousness might turn out to be a more complexphenomenon yet.

The Du Boisian conception has been criticized as well foroversimplifying the complex multidimensionality of contemporaryselves, harboring a nostalgia for a unitary, integral self that neverexisted, an unachievable ideal. Thus Darlene Clark Hine asserts:

had Du Bois specifically included the experiences and lives of blackwomen in his lament, … instead of writing, “One everfeels his twoness”, he would have mused about how one ever feelsher “fiveness”: Negro, American, woman, poor, black woman.(Hines 1993: 338)

Critiques of Du Bois’s conception along these lines have becomewidespread, but, it might be argued, they are in one sense beside thepoint. That the 1903 text is masculinist seems undeniable. Butit’s also true that Du Bois’s“double-consciousness” was not proposed as a comprehensiveaccount of the reality of human being, was not addressed to thevariety of sources of human social identityper se. Hisconception was an attempt to capture the lived experience of blackfolkas black folk in the United States under conditions ofJim Crow. So it would be wholly consistent with his conception if,added to the doubling of consciousness due to racial oppression, otherforms of psychic doubling or fragmentation, responses to other formsof inequality, might exist.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. addresses the normative thrust of DuBois’s conception in noting that

cultural multiplicity is no longer seen as the problem, but as asolution – a solution to the confines of identity itself. Doubleconsciousness, once a disorder, is now the cure. (2006: xv)

This remark depends on confusing a general duality or psychic“two-ness” with Du Bois’s double-consciousnessconception itself. Surely even if “cultural multiplicity”has come to be valuable in itself, as Gates has it, the “amusedcontempt and pity” directed against oneself, crucial to DuBois’s formulation, cannot be part of any“cure”.

Finally, a question might be raised about the relation of DuBois’s double-consciousness conception and the sorts ofself-doubts, troubled feelings, and “identity issues” thathave been linked to biracial or mixed-race appearance or identity inour persisting, harshly racialized American social world. Whitesupremacy has presented particular difficulties for persons ofambivalent racial descent, visibly marked as brought into being by“race mixing”. Mixed-race persons have encounteredhostility from “both sides”, and are often deemed weak orinferiorjust because they are mixed, as Naomi Zack documentsin herRace and Mixed-Race (1993: chapters 11, 12). Indeed,Du Bois was personally familiar with this issue. His “mostinteresting” professor during his university days in Berlin wasHeinrich von Trietschke;

[o]ne day he startled me by suddenly declaring during a lecture onAmerica: “Die Mulattin sind niedrig! Sie fuhlen sichniedrig!” [Mulattoes are inferior; they feel themselvesinferior.] I felt as if he were pointing me out; but I presume he wasquite unaware of my presence. However my presence or absence wouldhave made no difference to him. … My fellow students gave noevidence of connecting what he said with me. (Du Bois 1968: 165)

Yet when Du Bois formulated “double-consciousness” inSouls, mixed-race and skin-color discriminations within theblack racial designation were not topics he addressed in print. Theduality posited in the texts of 1903 is one between“Negro” – an identity then typically keyed to ametaphysically conceived racial designation – and“American” – one based on a putative citizenshipstatus. Racial designation at that time was determined primarilythrough hypodescent, and the citizenship status of black folk hadrecently been impugned byPlessy v. Ferguson (1896).

4. Du Boisian Double-Consciousness afterSouls?

Commentators are agreed that while Du Bois names“double-consciousness” and uses the concept in his own wayin that 1903 text, the term does not reappear in any of his subsequenttexts. That does not mean he abandons the concept, of course, yet mostof the commentary on the concept focuses on the“Strivings” text inSouls. There have been someattempts to interpret various of his other works in terms of theconception, but these tend to focus on his fictional writings, and theuse made of these is not primarily to develop the conception butrather to show its uses by Du Bois in other contexts. This isundoubtedly due both to the canonical status of that 1903 text inAfrican-American literature and social criticism and to the fact ofits very singular use there. More than one writer has asserted thatthe passage in which Du Bois presents the term is the most-referencedtext in all African-American letters.

It seems problematic, however, to pin a full-blown account of andtheoretical reconstruction on one passage in one work, however seminalor influential it may have been. So it may be useful to examineseveral later texts of Du Bois’s to see if the claim somecommentators have made that Du Bois abandons the conception after 1903can be substantiated or rejected. There are discussions in later textsthat seem to involve aspects, at least, of the 1903 conception.

4.1 “The Souls of White Folks” inDarkwater (1920)

While Du Bois does not present the “double-consciousness”concept in so many words inDarkwater, published in 1920, thesecond chapter of that text, “The Souls of White Folks”,seems to invoke it. There, Du Bois characterizes the development ofwhat he calls “the religion of whiteness” and discussesits impact on social relations in the nineteenth and the earlytwentieth centuries. Du Bois makes a claim for a special kind ofknowledge of the psychology of white people. He writes of himselfthat, about them, “I am singularly clairvoyant”. Afterspecifying that his knowledge is not that of the foreigner, nor of theservant or the worker, he writes:

I see these souls undressed and from the back and sides. I see theworking of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that Iknow. (Du Bois 1920: 17)

Du Bois here claims an insight into the psyches of whites that dependsin part on an awareness of their beliefs and attitudes concerningrace, of their falseness. This insight is of the kind thatdouble-consciousness makes possible. But what Du Bois claims here alsoseems to go beyond the 1903 conception, since that conception did notspecifically and explicitly refer toknowledge of the soulsof white folks. Several pages into the “Souls of WhiteFolks” chapter, after identifying the “discovery ofpersonal whiteness” as an historically recent phenomenonassociated with “this new religion of whiteness”, Du Boisindicates that it is black folk generally – “we”– who have such powers of “clairvoyance”:

We whose shame, humiliation and deep insult [the white man’s]aggrandizement so often involved were never deceived. We looked at himclearly, with world-old eyes, and saw simply a human being, weak andpitiable and cruel, even as we are and were. (1920: 20)

Here is a condition of consciousness that allows “thehumiliated” to see more clearly the reality of the lives ofthose who humiliate than the humiliators themselves do. While suchknowledge does not involve “know[ing] the thoughts” of thehumiliatorsin detail, it does require that one know somepatterns of what and how they think and feel. Du Bois is hereconsidering the ideology of white supremacy, tracing out thehistorical conditions of its development and some of the psychologicalconsequences it has for whites who accept it and live in and on thebasis of it. To the extent that whites accept the premises of whitesupremacy, and live and act upon them, they are deceivedaboutthemselves and act out a deception that the blacks who aresubject to the consequences of those premises are in a position to seethrough. This is not the core of double-consciousness, though it seemsto be the sort of thing Du Bois had in mind when he referred in 1903to “second sight”, a key adjunct to double-consciousness,in the “Strivings” passage. This matches the reading foundin Henry, Gordon, and Kirkland as well.

But there is a bit more here, and other than, “secondsight”. For what Du Bois presents in this chapter is a criticalanalysis of the American ideology of white supremacy that is informedby sociological analysis and backed up by historical andsocial-scientific understanding. Du Bois both begins and ends thechapter by noting his own position “high in the tower”.This presumably refers both to his distanced, observer status, and,relatedly, to his own achieved position as an academically trainedsocial scientist – indeed, one of the most highly trained mindsin America at the time – bringing his powers of analysis to bearon the “souls of white folk”. Du Bois gives ascientifically-informed, nuanced historical analysis built on a“clairvoyant” insight into the psyche of the white person“under the influence” of white supremacist ideology, onepredicated on both the second sight and a kind ofideology-critique.

4.2 “On Being Ashamed of Oneself: An Essay on Race Pride” (1933)

Du Bois begins the essay, published inCrisis in September,1933, with a story about his grandfather, who indignantly rejected aninvitation to a “Negro” picnic:

[i]t meant close association with poverty, ignorance and suppressedand disadvantaged people, dirty and with bad manners. (Du Bois 1933:199)

He then succinctly captures the whole dilemma of those in the Negro‘upper crust’:

because the upper colored group is desperately afraid of beingrepresented before American whites by this lower group, or beingmistaken for them, or being treated as though they were part of it,they are pushed to the extreme of effort to avoid contact with thepoorest classes of Negroes. This exaggerates, at once, the secretshame of being identified with such people and the anomaly ofinsisting that the physical characteristics of these folk which theupper class shares, are not the stigmata of degradation. (1933: 199)

Here Du Bois draws out the intra-racial implications and grounds ofthis aspect of double consciousness – what he identifies as“being ashamed” of members of one’s group, and, so,indirectly and implicitly, of oneself. He also reiterates a themearising from the first in his thinking about double-consciousness– its close connection to divergent personal and politicalstrategies for managing, and working to transform, its socialconditions. He identified these especially in the 1903“Faith” text, where he speaks both of “doubleclasses” and of “pretense or revolt”,“hypocrisy or radicalism”. In the 1920 text, Du Bois notesthat such feelings of shame can motivate the strategy of “racesuicide” – “the attempt to escape fromourselves”, as he describes assimilation. This attempt involves– and also is grounded in – “a drawing of classlines inside the Negro race” and “the emergence of acertain social aristocracy” defined by “looks”– by which Du Bois presumably means complexion – as wellas education, income, cultivation, and aspiration.

But this sense of shame is both impediment and adjunct of any strategybased on race pride and solidarity, as well, since it can undermineany concerted political action, which demands racial unity in commoncause, and under the leadership of the “talented tenth” ofrace aristocrats, to be successful. While calling for efforts“to build up a racial ethos”, Du Bois thus warns againsttoo extreme a version of such “propaganda for race pride”,counseling Blacks to avoid reproducing what he describes as a“superiority complex among the white and the yellowrace”.

4.3Dusk of Dawn (1940)

There is a discussion of something like double-consciousness in DuBois’s bookDusk of Dawn, published in 1940, two yearsafter Du Bois turned seventy. Indeed, sinceDusk of Dawn ismore nearly autobiographical in design thanSouls (itssubtitle isAn Essay Toward an Autobiography of a RaceConcept) it’s not surprising that Du Bois writes moreexpansively there of black life in conditions of segregation and whitesupremacy, even though he doesn’t use the term employed inSouls. But also, by this time, his conception of race itselfhas opened up even further beyond that of any linear historicaldevelopment. As he writes at the end of the central chapter of thatbook, “The Concept of Race”,

It had as I have tried to show all kinds of illogical trends andirreconcilable tendencies. Perhaps it is wrong to speak of it at allas “a concept” rather than as a group of contradictoryforces, facts, and tendencies. (1940: 133)

A number of things change in the account given by Du Bois inDuskof Dawn of the phenomena that, inSouls, are broughtunder the sign of double-consciousness.

The first is that theDusk of Dawn treatment of the issues issubsumed much more fully under a thematics of“environment”, articulated as socio-political,geographical, and cultural in its dimensions, and both dynamic andrelatively stable in historical terms. Writing about “the factsof the Negro’s double environment”, Du Bois explains:

The Negro American has for his environment not only the whitesurrounding world, but also, and touching him usually much more nearlyand compellingly, is the environment furnished by his own coloredgroup. There are exceptions, of course, but this is the rule. TheAmerican Negro, therefore, is surrounded and conditioned by theconcept which he has of white people and he is treated in accordancewith the concept they have of him. On the other hand, so far as hisown people are concerned, he is in direct contact with individuals andfacts. (1940: 173)

This way of putting it is prefigured in the “Faith” textofSouls, in which Du Bois writes of the “doublelife” of Black folk and of the “worlds within and withoutthe Veil of Color”. Note also the claim that, while theinhabitants of the “white world” and the “coloredworld” look at one other each through “the concept”they have of one another, individuals within the “coloredworld” know each other through “direct contact”.This is the impact of the veil, the color line. Writing of his ownpersonal experience, Du Bois details the effect of this environingwhite world on him:

I was by long education and continual compulsion and daily reminder, acolored man in a white world; and that white world often existedprimarily, so far as I was concerned, to see with sleepless vigilancethat I was kept within bounds. All this made me limited in physicalmovement and provincial in thought and dream. I could not stir, Icould not act, I could not live, without taking into careful dailyaccount the reaction of my white environing world. (1940: 135–6)

There is in this account, in addition to the definite limitation ofpossibilities imposed by the veil – and consequent to it –an active appropriation, and employment in strategic thinking by DuBois, of the understanding he has of the white world. This suggestsanother, practical mode in which double consciousness – which iswhat we are dealing with here – can operate. If doubleconsciousness also ispractical consciousness, “takinginto careful daily account” whites’ reactions –tinged as they are by prejudice, by expectations grounded in thatprejudice – in one’s plans, one’s own expectations,that would not necessarily involve internalizing the prejudicialracist viewpoint itself, though it might nonetheless produce profounddisturbance of the soul. Double consciousness would then also yield apractical, and affective, rather than a strictly cognitive, impact ofthe environing conditions on the black soul.

There is also, on theDusk of Dawn account, a further, moretelling and insidious effect of the white world on the black soul,here exemplified by Du Bois:

… this fact of racial distinction based on color was thegreatest thing in my life and absolutely determined it, because thissurrounding group, in alliance and agreement with the white Europeanworld, was settled and determined upon the fact that I was and must bea thing apart. It was impossible to gainsay this. It was impossiblefor any time and to any distance to withdraw myself and look down uponthese absurd assumptions with philosophical calm and humorousself-control. (1940: 136)

The “absurd assumptions” can and do infiltrate theNegro’s psyche, affecting how she thinks and feels about herselfin ways that stubbornly resist her own efforts to override or ignorethem. More rarely, perhaps, they elicit fierce and abiding anger, evenrage. Writing in a less autobiographical vein, Du Bois notes thatdespair of racial progress “too often” results from theNegro’s “lack of faith in essential Negro possibilitiesparallel to similar attitudes on the part of the whites”. Thisattitude itself is, he continues, “a natural phenomenon”,since Negroes share “average American culture and currentAmerican prejudices”. Because of this, it is

almost impossible for a Negro boy trained in a white Northern highschool and a white college to come out with any high idea of his ownpeople or any abiding faith in what they can do. (1940: 191)

This, arguably, is Du Boisian double-consciousness as set out inSouls.

But the 1940 text never asserts a basic inner duality within theNegro: missing entirely from theDusk of Dawn account is anymention of inward two-ness, of the psychic splitting that was socrucial to the account given inSouls. In the 1940 text theissue is characterized in the terminology of “Negroself-criticism” (1940: 179), a “lack of faith in essentialNegro possibilities” (1940: 191), and the “innercontradiction and frustration which [segregation and white racistintransigence] involves” (1940: 187) – a terminology thatconveys the ambivalence and complexity of the earlier text, but fallsfar short of asserting an overriding psychic duality. And this is notbecause the text does not address the “felt experience” ofbeing black in America: the central, longest, chapter inDusk ofDawn is “The Colored World Within”.

There are, ‘naturally’, problems with the unitaryconsciousness of a soul within the double environment Du Bois depicts,but these fall short of causing a split in the psyche itself. There isresentment, frustration, and anger; there is a faithlessness, and,often, consequent despair; there are the temptations to turningone’s back on ‘the folk’; and also temptations toreject absolutely anything the “environing” white worldoffers or proposes. And there is what Du Bois calls

that bitter inner criticism of Negroes directed in upon themselves,which is widespread. It tends often to fierce, angry, contemptuousjudgment of nearly all that Negroes do, say, and believe….(1940: 179)

What two-ness there is in theDusk of Dawn account has beenrelocated from the inwardness of souls to the “environing”world.

There are two other ways theDusk of Dawn account divergessignificantly from that ofSouls. First, the brute facticityof what Du Bois calls the “inferiority” of the coloredworld is asserted in this text explicitly, and its effect upon theattitudes of Negroes described tellingly. Du Bois presents this starkreality as undeniable, while at the same time rejecting the relatedclaims made by racist prejudice:

It is true, as I have argued, that Negroes are not inherently ugly norcongenitally stupid. They are not naturally criminal and their povertyand ignorance today have clear and well-known and remediable causes.All this is true: and yet what every colored man living today knows isthat by practical present measurements Negroes today are inferior towhites. The white folk of the world are richer and more intelligent;they live better; have better government; have better legal systems;have built more impressive cities; larger systems of communication andthey control a larger part of the earth than all the colored peoplestogether. (1940: 173–4)

By invoking these facts, Du Bois is citing historically contingent yetpalpably certain realities that, he claims, “every colored manliving today knows”. Consequently, “Negroself-criticism” is, in part, grounded in “a perfectlyobvious fact” (1940: 179), “that most Negroes in theUnited States today occupy a low cultural status” and a“low social condition” (1940: 180). Among these, hediscusses “Negro ignorance”, death rate, “criminaltendencies”, poverty, and “social degradation”. DuBois lists these not as representations of white prejudice but inacknowledgment of patent observable realities. Though their causes,present and past, count against the prejudiced conclusions often drawnin the white world, these causes are less visible, less obvious.

Another important departure ofDusk of Dawn fromSouls is an explicit recognition in the later text that thepsychic phenomena attributed to Negro Americans are not distinctive oftheir experience alone. Du Bois writes,

[s]imilar phenomena may be noticed always among undeveloped orsuppressed peoples or groups undergoing extraordinary experience. Nonehave more pitilessly castigated the Jews than the Jewish prophets,ancient and modern. (1940: 179)

He goes on to cite as further cases the Irish and the Germans of theSturm und Drang period. In 1940 Du Bois makes a broaderhistorical claim, that “the imprisoning of a human group withchains in the hands of an environing group” was not “asingularly unusual characteristic of the Negro in the United States inthe nineteenth century”, but, rather, “the majority ofmankind has struggled through this inner spiritualslavery…” (1940: 137).

5. Beyond the Black/White Binary, BeyondDouble Consciousness

So far we have considered applications and extensions of the originaldouble consciousness notion to encompass the experiences of persons ofAfrican heritage, within the United States, and more broadly in theAfrican diaspora. There have been other recent deployments of theconcept that extend its reach to the other side of, and then beyond,what’s been called the ‘black/white binary.’ We notethree of them here.

One recent inquiry – Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s 2006article, “Post-continental Philosophy: Its Definition, Contours,and Fundamental Sources” – explores a version of doubleconsciousness of normative subjects of ‘dominant (white)European’ cultures, citing theoeuvre of J-P Sartre asa case study. The increasing diversity of evolving U.S. society, andthe approaching ‘tipping point’ into a‘majority-minority’ ‘non-white’ population,have shifted theoretical interest onto the decline of‘whiteness’ and issues related to double consciousness butin a pluralist rather than a racial-binary context. Linda Alcoff, whohas argued for the need to get beyond a binary conception of U.S.racial dynamics, considers the rise of ‘white doubleconsciousness’. Finally, José Medina advocates for arelated ‘kaleidoscopic consciousness’ as a personal tacticfor resisting epistemic injustice in conditions of the fight forpluralist democracy.

5.1 A ‘Post-Continental’ Turn

A distinctive application of ‘double consciousness’ comesout of ‘decolonial’ theory. Of and from non-dominantcultures and social groupings, these theorists’ commitment tosocial struggles at the ‘borderlands,’ in geopoliticallyliminal spaces, yields arguments from doubled perspectives, bothwithin and outside the dominant, ‘North Atlantic’ system.Thinkers like Gloria Anzaldúa, Sylvia Wynter, and WalterMignolo, among others, came to constitute this movement, featuringdistinctive styles of inquiry and writing, advocating a’decolonial turn’ in humanistic research. A philosophicalargument associated with this group, making explicit use of the notionof double consciousness, is Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s account of‘Post-Continental Philosophy’.

One guiding purpose of the de-colonial project is simply to make thecharge of Eurocentrism stick against the dominant modern‘Western’ intellectual tradition initiated at the time ofDescartes. Maldonado-Torres’ use of double consciousness takesit in its original bivalent Du Boisian form – as a source ofboth potentially deleterious illusion and of veridical insights; heemploys it as an interpretive strategy for critiquing the20^th-century Continental tradition in philosophy, andthrough it the entire modern European tradition. He does so bysituating that philosophical tradition in global anti-systemicstruggles originating and developing in Western-hemispheric societies.In this connection the term ‘post-Continental’ alludes notonly to the commonly accepted name of the primarily French- andGerman-speaking European phenomenological tradition.‘Post-Continental’ also signifies its rejection of theprevailing ‘geography of power,’ the largely implicitnotion that the (European) continent is the locus of all significantmodern philosophical production.

Of the canonical figures in that continental tradition, it is Sartrewho Maldonado-Torres sees as expressing the double consciousness ofEuropean modernity, its intellectual guilty conscience. Doubleconsciousness serves as an interpretive schema for reevaluating themeaning of both Sartre’s overall intellectual activity as wellas the Sartrean conception of bad faith. This is now read as animplicit critique of the complicity of the intellectual culture ofmodernity in domination, with particular reference to the colonialistentanglements of its dominant philosophical traditions. Developing thepolitical argument and its philosophical critique involves arguingthat for Sartre, bad faith should be understood not only in anindividual, but also in a social, collective sense, cutting againstits standard, individualist interpretation. “For Sartre,European modernity is a project of bad faith” (2006, 13).

Maldonado-Torres distinguishes the double consciousness of the‘normative subject,’ privileged member of the dominantsocial order, from that of the ‘damned’ – a termtaken from Fanon’sLes Damnés de la Terre (1961)(translated asThe Wretched of the Earth, for which Sartrewrote a preface) referring to those peopling the‘underworld’ at the bottom of the world-system. The doubleconsciousness of the oppressed arises in their direct experience withthe system in which their very being and daily existence confront themwith the lies and willed ignorance – the falsehoods, the‘looking away’ and complicity of those who benefit –on which that system depends for its reproduction. The contradictionbetween the purported ideals of the oppressive system and the realityof their lives is, for them, starkly apparent.

For the normative subjects, however, the lie is, in a sense, withinthem, insofar as they are complicit with the regime; theirconfrontation with that lie demands self-scrutiny and self-critique.This complicity with oppression and the lies it involves, and theself’s confrontation with its own duplicity, can be understoodin terms of Sartre’s account of bad faith. As Maldonado-Torresputs it, there is within the normative subject a struggle whether totake on fully the dominant culture’s “demand … tooccupy the center of the world.” This demand represents arequirement that the self, “with the help of an impressivecultural, symbolic, material, and epistemological arsenal, positsitself as normative,” and thereby accedes to playing a part inthe “dehumanization of Europe’s racialized and colonizedpopulations.” Bad faith, which, in Sartre’s terms, is thesubject’s refusal of its own freedom, a flight fromresponsibility and into conformism, finds a political expression inthe dominant culture’s demand for normative subjects’conformity.

Bad faith is the conceptual hinge of Sartre’s entire criticalresponse to the situation of European ‘civilization’ as hefound it already at the inception of his philosophical career. Theculmination of European anti-Semitism in the Holocaust and the waragainst fascism –Maldonado-Torres calls this the ‘crisisof genocidal Europe’ – fueled by the active participationor silent complacence of much of the intellectual middle classes, wasthe original condition for Sartre’s political-philosophicalauthorship. Sartre’s engagement with the global anti-colonialstruggle that followed the allied victory, and particularly theAlgerian revolution, confirmed and focused Sartre’s increasinglypolitical opposition to the policies of the dominant Europeanpowers.

His engagement with the work of the Afro-Caribbean theoristsAimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon pushed him further, addingenergy to his sometimes explicitly anti-racist critical reflection.Sartre’s engagement with their thought make him, forMaldonado-Torres, a ‘border subject’ as well, grounded inthe split allegiances of a kind of ‘double life,’ itself aproduct of this basic rift at the heart of Europe’s empire.Maldonado-Torres quotes a passage from Sartre’s“Preface” to Fanon’sThe Wretched of theEarth, in which Sartre addresses the book’s [presumablywhite] French reader. The quotation reads, in part:

This fat and pallid continent has ended up lapsing into what Fanonrightly calls ‘narcissism.’ Cocteau was irritated byParis, ‘the city which is always thinking about itself.’What else is Europe doing? Or that super-European monster, NorthAmerica? What empty chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love,honour, country, and who knows what else? That did not prevent us fromholding forth at the same time in racist language: filthy n***er,filthy Jew, filthy North Africans. Enlightened, liberal and sensitivesouls – in short, neocolonialists – claimed to be shockedby this inconsistency; that is an error or bad faith. Nothing is moreconsistent, among us, than racist humanism, since Europeans have onlybeen able to make themselves human beings by creating slaves andmonsters.

Here, then, through Sartre, double consciousness takes the form ofboth a confession and a self-critique, an admission and a renunciationof duplicity. Maldonado-Torres’s use of double consciousness asa lens through which to read Sartre’s conception of bad faithsharpens Sartre’s account of European culture’s willingracial ignorance, its foundational self-deception, and shows hisambivalence toward Europe’s oppressive civilizationalhierarchies. It is what Maldonado-Torres calls Sartre’s‘potentiated’ double consciousness that, he claims, yieldsSartre’s critical relation to the colonialist complicity of thecontinental tradition. Sartre’s focus on the self-deceptiveaspects of the modern European tradition’s intellectualidentity, taken as the historical work of double consciousness, bothreveals and subverts the hypocritical complicity of the philosophicalmainstream with the geopolitics of colonialism.

5.2 White Double Consciousness

A similar argument about the applicability of Du Bois’s notionto ‘white folk’, in the American vortex, is presented byLinda Alcoff. InThe Future of Whiteness (2015), she claimsthat many white Americans are subject to ‘white doubleconsciousness’ due in part to recent social changes. Thebook’s argument – part of an anti-racist ‘project torearticulate whiteness’ – describes what she calls the‘crisis of white hegemony’ and the pressure exerted bythis crisis on white individuals’ racial identity andself-understanding. Her account specifically addresses thedisaffection of many ‘progressive’ whites from thedominant, mainstream cultural form of whiteness, and from itsjustification by what she calls ‘white vanguardism,’ afalse historical narrative of a decidedly racist cast. (Alcoff notesthe existence, but foregoes the analysis, of a reactionary, right-wingwhite double consciousness, claiming it lacks any significantfact-based theoretical basis for critical argument.) White doubleconsciousness is a specific kind of disaffection with whiteness, analienation from whiteness as norm, “a turmoil in whitesubjectivity” (174).

The crisis of white hegemony results partly from demographic changesunder way that will transform the U.S. into a‘minority-majority’ society by mid-century, and anacknowledgment of these impending changes by white Americans stillable and willing to face social reality. These demographic shiftsportend a shifting spectrum of political contestation. Citing the workof historian Nell Irvin Painter charting the historic formation ofwhiteness, Alcoff’s argument identifies other broader social andpolitical changes to U.S. society that track what might be called‘the declining significance of whiteness’. These include adiminished capacity of white identity to secure for its possessors thedifferential advantages once available to them; an increasingcontestation in the terms of public discourse on race, given changesin the federal government’s identification and counting of racecategories, and recent theoretical uncertainties in academic andjournalistic writing about race categories; a declining possibility ofliving in whites-only communities and for restricting one’sdaily life to segregated spaces; the end of state-sanctioned racialhierarchy, enabling the increasing openness of new generations ofwhites to interracial contact, interaction, relationships, families,and multiracial community.

Alcoff’s focus on these and other actual social conditionsforming the matrix for white double consciousness resembles DuBois’s own increasing attention to the ‘environingconditions’ materially grounding changes in double consciousnessin the developing century of his life. Whiteness is not an ideologyfor Alcoff, but an ‘organically emergent’ social reality.Alcoff takes as a given both the fluidity of all such racialdeterminations of identity and the relative stability of the lived,material reality of whiteness. Her broader account is aimed to counterrecent arguments that whiteness is too closely tied to white supremacyin its origins and motivations to be freed from its racist past, onthe one hand, and, on the other, that it is an ideological formationwhich can be simply given up and left behind as part of the struggleto overcome that historic legacy. Rejecting these claims, she argueswhiteness may well be de-linked from racism and white supremacy, apossibility that white double consciousness prefigures in itsspecific, binary form.

The ideology of ‘white vanguardism,’ which Alcoffcharacterizes as the “illusion … that has configuredEuropean whites as the scientific, technological, moral, artistic, andpolitical leader of the human race” (24), has increasingly lostplausibility to significant numbers of whites themselves. This‘illusion,’ which once supplied some sense of dignity andsocial standing to the many whites without other cultural or economicresources, has been increasingly contested both in the academy and thepublic forum, and is at odds with changing social realities. Thus,white double consciousness is a growing reflection in significantsections of the population of the deep crisis of whiteness. At thesame time, Alcoff argues, whites affected with double consciousnessare living out their disillusion with their own previous whitevanguardist assumptions.

Alcoff relies on a variety of sources to support her account. Theseinclude, in addition to philosophical critiques of the racialformation and of whiteness, ethnographic studies of local whitecommunities, narrative accounts of anti-racist and anti-klan activistsin the South and episodes from her own life and experience. Shepresents as a paradigmatic case the ‘Beat’ writer JackKerouac – who exemplified the anxiety about whiteness in theform of a lived creative artistic rebellion, one nonethelessidentified by the culture as racially white. Alcoff characterizesKerouac as exhibiting such white double consciousness in hisdeportment and self-presentation, saying that his ‘alienatedconsciousness’ “manifested as discomfort with his embodiedidentity.” She adds that:

Jack Kerouac expressed a poignant alienation from his white identityand the general normative whiteness of heterosexual suburbia, and heemphatically identified with the more intense existential registers ofnonwhite affect that he took to be common among African Americans andMexicans. (169)

Another noteworthy example is the description by Simone de Beauvoir ofher own experience, during a visit with Richard Wright in New York, asa white person walking through Harlem and experiencing a measure ofdiscomfort on confronting the accusatory glances of theneighborhood’s residents. “Beauvoir notes the hostileglances and feels herself ‘stiffen with a badconscience’” (139). This provides Alcoff with an exampleillustrating the role that reactive emotions such as guilt and shamecan have in triggering the formation of white double consciousness.Such encounters with racialized others in conditions of daily life canprod whites into seeing the disparity between how they view themselvesand how they are seen outside of their own segregated communities, asthey begin to “intuit how they are viewed by nonwhiteothers” (170). For many whites, Alcoff argues, the guilt anddiscomfort with whiteness which results provokes a critical rethinkingand attempt to reshape their identity even as, for others, it drives adesire to escape the attribution of racial whiteness altogether, anultimately dead-end path.

A growing disaffection with the mainstream condition of whiteness– and with its dependence on the ideology of ‘whitevanguardism’ – is the core of white double consciousnessfor Alcoff. It is linked, for many whites, with a close daily livedassociation with communities of brown and black people. Nonetheless,an honest, fact-based and realistic approach to their lives requirestheir acknowledging the actuality of whiteness as their own personalracial identity and their understanding it as an historically shiftingsocial construct. Acknowledging whiteness as a social constructinvolves both accepting its connection with historical and ongoingbrutal racial oppression and questioning its core ideology of whitevanguardism. The double consciousness this acceptance/suspicionelicits involves, to some extent, a self-ascription of whiteness asidentity, a critical distance from it as a form of life, and arejection of its ‘white vanguardist’ ideology as false,and falsely justifying continued white supremacy.

White double consciousness can lead whites to a deeper understandingof the realities of U.S. social conditions and the history shapingthem. It thus represents a resource and potentially a trigger forworking through their false views about race and moving towardanti-racism. Unlike the case of black double consciousness –which is the native understanding of their own lives, achieved throughintraracial communal cultural associations and solidarities, thatmakes possible blacks’ understanding of the lies upholding whitedomination – whites’ double consciousness “involvescoming to see themselves through both the dominant and non-dominantlens and recognizing the latter as a critical corrective truth”(140).

5.3 Kaleidoscopic Consciousness

Alcoff’s reflections on whiteness and white double consciousnesscome in the wake of her arguments for transcending the black/whitebinary inVisible Identities. José Medina does Alcoffone better, in a sense, by opening up the possibility of amultiplicitous version of double consciousness as an epistemic tacticin the struggle for a more expansive democratic society.

Medina discusses double consciousness – and its hypotheticalmultiplicitous twin – in relation to his core argument, inEpistemic Resistance (2013), about the epistemic conditionsof democratic citizenship and participation, that “a crucialpart of th[e] perfectionist ongoing struggle toward democracy is theresistance against epistemic injustices” (4). ‘Epistemicinjustice’ is the term Medina takes from Miranda Fricker’snaming and analysis of that phenomenon, referring most broadly to a‘credibility deficit’ – the discrediting of thetestimony or epistemic contributions of persons on the basis of theirracial, gender, or other elements of ‘visible identity’.Medina’s project is to develop methods to resist the dominationof such oppressive epistemic circumstances.

Addressing Du Bois’s 1903 formulation, Medina argues that doubleconsciousness is inadequate for addressing the diverse forms ofracialization of experience in the contemporary U.S., in which amultiplicity of racially oppressed groups exist, as well as othergroups facing various other oppressions, on the basis of gender,sexuality, and other aspects of identity. The theory of democraticresistant consciousness Medina develops is also expansive in aiming toencompass the epistemic effects of not only racial but also gender,class, sexual, and other forms of oppression, and the forms ofepistemic injustice related to these, and so it necessarily transcendsDu Bois’ binary conception. Medina thus invokes a multiplicitousconsciousness – he actually dubs it ‘kaleidoscopic’– instead, but one that shares crucial similarities in profilewith Du Bois’s original conception.

Medina’s conceptualizations emerge out of a pragmatist approachto democratic political theory. He assumes that the achievement ofprogressive democratic socio-political objectives involves prolongedperiods of struggle, in which oppressive ideologies continue to exerttheir influence on social agents. Democratic activists – and,indeed, all moral agents in such circumstances – must thereforedevelop and use strategies of epistemic resistance to the deleteriouseffects of oppressive structures on their own internal patterns ofresponse to racialized and ‘othered’ social actorsgenerally. These forms of structural silencing and social ignorancefoster internalized blockages impeding agents’ self-awareness,blockages which not only impair cognition but also impact thesensibilities, feelings, and imaginations of those agents as well.Because he, as theorist, pragmatically adopts as well an activistperspective, Medina’s concerns are not only diagnostic. Hedevelops normative proposals for democratic forms of‘resistant’ epistemic practices.

Medina interprets Du Bois’s account of double consciousness asan indication of how oppressed subjects can utilize their socialposition to achieve a kind of clarity about both their own position– as having internalized the false dominant viewpoint about them– as well as about the position of those beneficiaries ofoppression – the ignorance and lack of self-knowledge of thosein the dominant group itself. This is because those who are subject tooppression have, as a function of double consciousness, access to bothsocial viewpoints, and also are compelled by their situation toquestion the basis of their social standing and theirself-understanding in a way those in the dominant positions are not.Indeed, according to Medina, those situated in the position ofoppressors, or who benefit from the oppressive regime, are often‘actively ignorant’ – that is, ignorant in a waytheir own mode of life and activity helps to maintain and reproduce– of the basis and consequences of their standing and the socialcontext of their own lives.

To bring about the epistemic resistance required, Medina argues for anepistemic stance he terms “kaleidoscopic consciousness”.This is Medina’s expanded version of Du Boisian doubleconsciousness, now explicitly presented as a norm of epistemicpractice rather than an account of a pre-given social reality.Kaleidoscopic consciousness involves an open, always anticipatorystance toward the possibility of new forms of oppressive socialrelations and their related modes of ‘active ignorance.’Since forms of active ignorance as Medina calls them are in a senseself-fulfilling, blinding one to their own existence, and producingwhat he calls ‘meta-blindness’ – it is alwayspossible – in some cases likely – that there are forms ofblindness one suffers from without even knowing that fact.

This counter-hegemonic project is not confined to a reform of theindividual’s consciousness alone: it involves a correspondingrecognition of and commitment to open, exploratory, and consciousinteractions with diverse social ‘others.’ Virtuousepistemic agents must be guided by what Medina calls an‘imperative of epistemic interaction,’ of attunement toand reliance on regular encounters with those who are‘othered,’ in various ways, by the system. This set ofextended and socially distributed interactions is aimed at producingepistemic friction as a necessary condition for an adequate epistemicorientation to the diversity of agents’ viewpoints, and toresisting the diverse forms of socially functional blindness to theperspectives of socially ‘othered’ persons. Suchunderstanding is a key component of a successful democratic politicalproject, according to Medina, and can only be achieved through what isitself a form of socially transformative epistemic practice.

6. Conclusion

Any account of double consciousness rooted in the sweep of DuBois’s writings must acknowledge his taking it as both a stateof consciousness of individual African-Americans as members of anoppressed group and also as a form of social recognition of the statusof that group in the wider culture. Such an account must also confrontthe glaringly peculiar fact of the singular use of the term by Du Boisdespite his revisiting in his writing, on various occasions indifferent contexts of publication, what seems to be an increasinglyexpansive repertoire of similar or closely related phenomena.

Du Bois gave up the moniker “double-consciousness”,arguably, for a variety of reasons, but in part to resist theimpression that this is simply and only a problemofconsciousness, a problemonly of and for black folk,unconnected with any palpable social facts. Also, as we have seen, theclose association of some of the original senses of“double-consciousness” with pathological psychic states,may have given Du Bois pause after his initial use of the term. Healso increasingly wanted to distance himself from the idea –explicitly rejected inDusk of Dawn – thatcollectivities are entities with their own consciousnesses, reified inwhat he came to regard as mistaken idealist overreach. Finally, DuBois seems to have opened up and expanded the range of phenomenarelated to double consciousness beyond the exemplar in the 1903texts.

But Du Bois did not characterize the matter succinctly in one place soas to embrace both all its effects on consciousness and affectand the correlative reality of an ‘environing’condition. Rather, he employs, alternately, two strategies of writingto capture its fullness. He presents first- and third-personalaccounts of “what it is like”, “spiritually”,to live subject to double consciousness, through autobiographicalwriting or by personifying the feelings, attitudes, and thoughtsassociated with double consciousness in fictional or compositecharacters. And he describes social environments along with the“customs” and “irrational”,“subconscious” attitudes and modes of being typical ofsocial groups living in those environments.

Near the end of his life, in the posthumously publishedAutobiography, Du Bois revisited his original formulation of“two-ness”:

I began to feel that dichotomy which all my life has characterized mythought: how far can love for my oppressed race accord with love forthe oppressing country? And when these loyalties diverge, where shallmy soul find refuge? (1968: 169)

This passage relates the feelings triggered in young Du Bois whileobserving “the pageantry and patriotism of Germany in1892”. This plainly autobiographical formulation in no waysuggests anything like a basic psychic split; it reflects anambivalence, a conflict of affections and loyalties within an integralself.

All previous critical attention has been fixed steadily on thespiritual aspect of the phenomena of double consciousness, virtuallynone on the environing conditions Du Bois saw as giving rise to it.Those environing conditions might be summed up thus:

a social and political regime grounded in oppression and themaintenance of vastly unequal and segregated living conditions ofsocial groups ideologically and culturally identified as raciallydistinct and unequal, creating a “double environment”inimical to members of the subordinate racial group.

Thespiritual correlate of these environing conditions wouldinclude some combination of at least some of these sorts of emergentaspects:

• harboring a view of oneself premised on false, demeaning, orderogatory estimations of one’s capabilities, preferences,aptitudes and desires – estimations made primarily orexclusively due to one’s racial identity – and aconsequent determination of a life course and practical orientation toone’s goals and to others based upon those estimations;
• a tendency to confuse two distinct sets of attitudes, feelings,and beliefs about oneself and one’s disfavored racial group, tobeing “all mixed up” and/or in a state ofdouble-mindedness, ambivalence, inner turmoil or indecision inrelation to conflicting or opposed views and feelings about oneselfand/or one’s social situation;
• an awareness of oneself as characterized by others in anunfavorable or demeaning way in keeping with disparaging descriptorsassociated with one’s racial identity;
• a reflective confrontation with a stable social situationcharacterized by consistent disparities in the life-prospects,achievements, social station, power, wealth, and cultural recognitiontypically available to members of one’s race relative to adominant race;
• a consciousness of and feelings related to a tension associatedwith being taken for, or acting as, a member or representative of adevalued race to members of the dominant race, in either a cultural,social, or a political capacity;
• a practical attitude or orientation, for strategic purposesrelated to the pursuit of socially recognized goods or personal goals,involving the ascription to others of beliefs, intentions,expectations or reactions to one’s acts or words predicated on afalsely degrading, fearful, or dismissive judgment of who or what oneis, on the basis of one’s race, and revision or adjustment ofone’s plans on the basis of such ascriptions;
• a pervasive sense of uncertainty regarding the reception ofoneself, one’s activities and projects by others, under theweight of inappropriate, prejudicial, false and/or demeaninggeneralizations based on one’s race;
• the experience of a feeling or feelings of despair, rage, anger,frustration, distress, or some combination of these, arising from andin keeping with recognition or awareness of any of the sorts ofexperiences listed above.

This list, while including the sense of“double-consciousness” as Du Bois develops the idea inSouls (particularly the first three items), also expands thesense of “double consciousness” to include more active,practical, and critical appropriations of the situation established bythe color line. Finally, and in this practical spirit, Medina has put‘kaleidoscopic consciousness’ forward as an activist,resistant form of epistemic sensitivity to the socially corrosiveeffects of the multiplicitous oppressive structures in modernsocieties.

Bibliography

Primary Literature: Works by W.E.B. Du Bois

These works cited in this article (listed chronologically by originalpublication date)

• 1897, “The Strivings of the Negro People”,TheAtlantic Monthly, August: 194–197. [Du Bois 1897 available online]
• 1903,The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago: A.C. McClurg& Co., page numbers from the version edited by David W. Blight andRobert Gooding-Williams, Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.
• 1920, “The Souls of White Folks”, inDarkwater:Voices from Within the Veil, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.,page numbers from the Dover Thrift Edition, 1999.
• 1933, “On Being Ashamed of Oneself: An Essay on RacePride”, inCrisis, 40(9, Sept.): 199–200.
• 1940,Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a RaceConcept, New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., page numbers fromthe Schocken Books edition, New York, 1968.
• 1968,The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy onViewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, H.Aptheker (ed.), New York: International Publishers.

Secondary Literature

• Adell, Sandra, 1994,Double-Consciousness/ Double Bind:Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature, Urbana:Illinois University Press.
• Alcoff, Linda Martín, 2006, “Latinos, AsianAmericans, and the Black-White Binary” inVisibleIdentities: Race, Gender, and the Self, Oxford UniversityPress.
• –––, 2015,The Future of Whiteness,Malden MA: Polity Press.
• Allen, Ernest Jr., 2002, “Du Boisian Double Consciousness:The Unsustainable Argument”,Massachusetts Review,43(2, Summer): 217–253.
• Asante, Molefi Kete, 1993, “Racism, Consciousness, andAfrocentricity”, in Early 1993: 127–143.
• Blow, Charles M., 2013, “Barack and Trayvon”,NewYork Times, July 19, 2013. [Blow 2013 available online].
• Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud, 1893, “On the PsychicalMechanism of Hysterical Phenomena”,NeurologischesCentralblatt, Nos. 1 and 2; reprinted as the first chapter oftheirStudien über Hysterie (Studies onHysteria), 1895.
• Bruce, Dickson D., Jr., 1992 [1999], “W.E.B. Du Bois and theIdea of Double Consciousness”,American Literature: AJournal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 64(2):299–309; page numbers as reprinted inThe Souls of BlackFolk (Norton Critical Edition), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and TerriHume Oliver (eds.), New York: W.W. Norton, 1999, pp.236–244.
• Early, Gerald (ed.), 1993,Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race,Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation, New York: PenguinBooks.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1842, “The Transcedentalist”, ALecture read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842 printed inNature; Addresses and Lectures, 1849, Boston and Cambridge:James Munroe and Company, pp. 316–348. [Emerson 1842 available online]
• Fanon, Frantz, 1967,Black Skin, White Masks (FrenchoriginalPeau noire, masques blancs, 1952), New York: GrovePress.
• Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 2006, “The Black Letters on theSign: W E B Du Bois and the Canon”, Oxford University Press(this is the Series Editor’s introduction to the “OxfordW.E.B. Du Bois”, Oxford University Press’s uniform editionof the major works of Du Bois), page numbers from the version inDusk of Dawn, Kwame Anthony Appiah (ed.), Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007, pp. xi–xxiv.
• Gilroy, Paul, 1993,The Black Atlantic: Modernity and DoubleConsciousness, Harvard: Harvard University Press.
• Gooding-Williams, Robert, 2009,In the Shadow of Du Bois:Afro-Modern Political Thought in America, Harvard UniversityPress.
• Gordon, Lewis, 2008,Introduction to Africana Philosophy,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Henry, Paget, 2000,Caliban’s Reason: IntroducingAfro-Caribbean Philosophy, (Africana Thought), New York:Routledge.
• –––, 2005, “Africana Phenomenology: ItsPhilosophical Implications”,C.L.R. James Journal,11(1): 79–112.
• Hine, Darlene Clark, 1993, “‘In the Kingdom ofCulture’: Black Women and the Intersection of Race, Gender, andClass”, in Early 1993: 337–351.
• James, William, 1890,Principles of Psychology, New York:Henry Holt and Company.
• Kirkland, Frank M., 2013, “On Du Bois’s Notion ofDouble Consciousness”,Philosophy Compass, 8(2):137–148.
• Lewis, David Levering, 2000, “Du Bois and Garvey: Two‘Pan-Africas’”, inW.E.B. Du Bois, Vol. II,The Fight for Equality and the American Century,1919–1963, New York: Henry Holt and Company, esp. pp63–84.
• Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 2006, “Post-continentalPhilosophy: Its Definition, Contours, and Fundamental Sources,”Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. [Maldonado-Torres 2006 available online (in PDF)]
• Medina, José, 2013,The Epistemology of Resistance:Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and ResistantImaginations, Oxford University Press.
• Mitchill, [Samuel Latham], 1817, “A double consciousness, ora duality of person in the same individual: from a communication ofDr. Mitchill to the Reverend Dr. Nott, President of Union College,dated January 16, 1816”,The Medical Repository, (NewYork, new series), 3: 185–186. [Mitchill 1817 available online]
• Morrison, Toni, 2012, [quoted in an article by Ariel Leve]“Toni Morrison on Love, Loss, and Modernity”,TheTelegraph [UK], 17 July, 2012. [Morrison 2012 available online]
• Reed, Adolph, Jr., 1997,W.E.B. Du Bois and American PoliticalThought: Fabianism and the Color Line, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.
• Strachey, James, 1996, “Editor’s Introduction”,in Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud,Studies on Hysteria,James Strachey (trans. and ed.), New York: Basic Books, pp.ix–xxviii.
• West, Cornel, 1982,Prophecy Deliverance! An Afro-AmericanRevolutionary Christianity, Philadelphia, PA: The WestminsterPress.
• Williamson, Joel, 1978, “W.E.B. Du Bois as aHegelian”, in David G. Sansing (ed.),What WasFreedom’s Price, Jackson, MS: University Press ofMississippi, pp. 21–50.
• Zack, Naomi, 1993,Race and Mixed-Race, Philadelphia, PA:Temple University Press.

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Other Internet Resources

• W.E.B. Du Bois, webpages on Du Bois, created and curated by Robert W. Williams,Political Science Department, Bennett College.
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Africana Philosophy |consciousness |Du Bois, W.E.B. |Fanon, Frantz |race race: and Black identity

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Tommie Shelby, who originally commissioned this article,discussed it with me, and steadily, patiently encouraged itsproduction. Thanks also to Martha Bragin. Shout out to JonathanBuchsbaum, whose ‘hard reading’ and suggestions made thisversion considerably more readable and coherent than it would havebeen. And thanks to Shelly Botuck, whose encouragement and supporthave been sustaining and indispensable throughout.