## 1. The Trajectory of the Concept



In an 1897 *Atlantic Monthly* article and again in his 1903
*Souls of Black Folk*, Du Bois innovated by using a term
already in currency - and with multiple associations in a
variety of literary, philosophical, and scientific discourses -
in a distinctive and original way to name a theretofore largely
unremarked phenomenon. The innovation was part of an account of the
life-experience he ascribed to "black folk" in America
generally in then-current social circumstances - Jim Crow in the
south, *de facto* segregation in the North, and the threat and
actuality of racist violence throughout the nation.



The term he used - "double-consciousness" -
dropped entirely, after just these two uses, from his published
writing. Those uses nonetheless struck a chord; use of the term,
interpreted in a number of ways, has frequently recurred as the
century since its appearance has passed. While the disappearance of
the term from Du Bois's writing after 1903 has fueled questions
about the significance of the concept in the overall assessment of his
work, some commentators insist nonetheless on the centrality of the
concept for Du Bois's legacy.



Du Bois was engaged throughout his long career in the attempt to
understand both the socio-historic conditions facing "Black
folk" in the American twentieth century, and the impacts of
those conditions on the consciousness and "inner world" of
the human beings subject to them. In *Souls of Black Folk* that
second concern was with capturing in words "the strange meaning
of being black", with describing the "spiritual
world" and the "spiritual strivings" of "the
American Negro". Du Bois continued to articulate responses to
these concerns in his later works: one finds formulations addressing
them even in his posthumously published *Autobiography* (1968).
As the contexts of Du Bois's writing, research, and activism
changed, 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 richly
filled out in the variety and extent of its details, Du Bois's
account of the phenomena he originally identified with the term
"double-consciousness" both overflowed the initial
associations of that term and became stratified under pressure from
his shifts in perspective. In what follows, we trace the fate of Du
Bois's 1903 account in his later work and then assess the
reconstructed account on its own terms.



This article will, first, briefly survey some of the attempts to
explicate and contextualize the use of the concept by Du Bois in
*The Souls of Black Folk* of 1903 (hereafter *Souls*),
and give a brief overview of controversies regarding the viability of
the concept and its significance for contemporary Africana thought.
After presenting suggestions concerning the development of Du
Bois's understanding of the phenomenon after *Souls*,
we'll look briefly at three recent distinctive uses of it
'beyond the black/white binary'. (The term Du Bois used
was "double-consciousness", with the hyphen intact; more
recent writers have generally abandoned the hyphen. In this article
the hyphen is retained in discussing Du Bois's 1903 term and
concept, and interpretive attempts to get at it. But "double
consciousness" *simpliciter* is used when discussing the
term more generally in relation to current debates.)


## 2. Double-Consciousness in *The Souls of Black Folk*



The *locus classicus* for the Du Boisian conception occurs in
the third paragraph of "Of our Spiritual Strivings", the
first chapter of Du Bois's 1903 *Souls* (a slightly
modified version of "The Strivings of the Negro People",
published in *The Atlantic* *Monthly* in August, 1897,
where he first uses the term):



> 
> After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
> Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and
> gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which
> yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself
> through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation,
> this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's
> self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the
> tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever
> feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two
> thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark
> body, 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", a
consciousness of one's self, but which falls short of a unified,
"true" self-consciousness. It is part of a more complex
feeling 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-cultural
construct rather than a baldly bio-racial given, attributed
specifically to people of African descent in America. The
"two-ness" of which it is a consciousness thus is not
inherent, accidental, nor benign: the condition is presented here as
both imposed and fraught with psychic danger.



Double-consciousness is presented in conjunction with two other
phenomena, related to two other figures - the
"veil", and the "gift" of
"second-sight". Of these, "the veil" is the
more insistent motif, recurring regularly throughout *Souls* as
well as other of Du Bois's writings. By contrast, the terms
"double-consciousness" and "second-sight" seem
not to have been used in print by Du Bois after 1903. Still, this
passage has come to have a singular significance in the philosophical
interpretation of Du Bois's thought as well as for the influence
of his views. Only his oft-repeated claim at the very beginning of
*Souls*, that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is
the problem of the color line," may be more widely known. The
paragraph immediately following makes clear that, for Du Bois, this is
not only a "sensation" but constitutes a crucial object of
"striving" and political struggle for black folk in the
United States:



> 
> The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,
> - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his
> double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes
> neither of the older selves to be lost.
> 



The phenomenon is identified again - but without being so named
again - in the tenth chapter of *Souls*, "Of the
Faith of the Fathers", an essay on "Negro religious
life". Du Bois writes:



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



Here double-consciousness, unnamed, is set in a more dynamic context
than in the earlier, "Strivings" text. The two passages,
parallel in form, are subtly different in tone. Here Du Bois clearly
distinguishes two social "worlds" and the "double
lives" that result. This text sweeps us along, showing a
causality, a coming-into-being of consciousness. And it concludes by
noting, in its final twenty words, the social and political
consequences of this "painful" double-consciousness. Yet,
oddly, the "Faith" text is largely neglected in critical
discussions.



The current relevance of double consciousness to an understanding of
Black lives, and of contemporary American reality, is debated in
recent commentary and scholarship. In an interview, the late Toni
Morrison recalled the Du Boisian *motif* in characterizing the
literary work of Black men:



> 
> ... African American male writers justifiably write books about
> their oppression,
> 



she says.



> 
> Confronting the oppressor who is white male or white woman. It's
> race. And the person who defines you under those circumstances is a
> white mind - tells you whether you're worthy or what have
> you. And as long as that's your preoccupation, you're
> defending yourself against that. Reacting to it. Reacting to the
> definition - saying it's not true.
> 



Morrison contrasts this to her own approach, which is to "take
away the gaze of the white male. Once you take that out, the whole
world opens up". (Morrison 2012)



Also, the *New York Times* columnist Charles M. Blow has more
than once cited the "Strivings" text in commenting on the
contemporary paradoxes of black life brought into the open by some of
President Obama's public statements in the wake of recent
criminal justice controversies (Blow 2013).



A number of academic writers have worked to contextualize and
interpret Du Bois's notion of double-consciousness - most
often focusing on the "Strivings" text, and neglecting the
"Faith" text - to identify sources and antecedents
that influenced his conception, and to clarify the concerns he was
addressing and his intentions in putting it forward. A brief resume of
that interpretive record follows.


### 2.1 Americanist Romantic Longing



In his 1992 article "W.E.B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double
Consciousness", Dickson D. Bruce Jr. suggests a variety of
sources of the complex of meanings marshaled at the time by Du
Bois's use of the term. The "double consciousness"
figure stems from the European romantic opposition between an innate
human affinity for the transcendent and a pragmatic
"materialism" grounded in a utilitarian attitude, oriented
to mundane need and commercial enterprise. Tracing this understanding
of double consciousness back to the American philosopher Ralph Waldo
Emerson (and before him to Goethe), who used the term in his essay,
"The Transcendentalist" (1842), Bruce maintains that this
anti-bourgeois romanticism is a "figurative background" of
Du Bois's use of the term, to which Du Bois brought the idea
that



> 
> the essence of a distinctive African consciousness was its
> spirituality... revealed among African Americans in their
> folklore, their history of patient suffering, and their faith. (Bruce
> 1999 [1992]: 238)
> 



Bruce also briefly traces the trajectory of
"double-consciousness" in the medical and psychological
literature of the nineteenth century. An early appearance of the term
in the *Medical Repository* in 1817 (Mitchill 1817: 185) used
it to name the condition of one Mary Reynolds, who, for a period of
about fifteen years beginning in her nineteenth, alternately lived two
distinct lives, with wholly different personalities,
'uncognizant of' and inaccessible to each other. This use
of 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 and
secondary consciousnesses" in his considerable discussion of
them in the *Principles of Psychology* (1890: see esp. Vol. I,
379-393), published while Du Bois was at Harvard (although James
does 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 his *Atlantic* essay he
> certainly seems to have known the term's psychological
> background, because he used it in ways quite consistent with that
> background. (1999: 242)
> 



[Bruce does not note the appearance of the term, in French -
*"double conscience"* - in Josef Breuer and
Sigmund Freud's "On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical
Phenomena" published in 1893 in *Neurologisches
Centralblatt*, Nos. 1 and 2. This paper was later reprinted as the
first chapter of *Studies on Hysteria*, published in 1895.
Breuer and Freud appear to use the French term in responding to and
developing its earlier use by Pierre Janet, relating it to
"splitting of consciousness" and psychic
"dissociation". (For a discussion of the
Breuer-Freud-Janet connection, see James Strachey's introduction
to *Studies on Hysteria*.)]



The diverse associations of these senses of the term were crucial,
Bruce argues, to the resonance and suggestiveness of Du Bois's
distinctive use of the term: connotations of spiritual longing and
unbridgeable opposition between two viewpoints, of the real
distinctiveness and moral parity of the two *personae* and the
possibility of their merging in a new synthetic unity signifying a
cure, a fact reported in a number of cases of the psychological
malady.


### 2.2 Color-Line Hegelianism



The first book-length study thematizing Du Boisian
double-consciousness was Sandra Adell's
*Double-Consciousness/ Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in
Twentieth-Century Black Literature* (1994). Engaging debates over
theoretical approaches to Black literature, Adell argues for an
intertextualism inspired by Derridean deconstruction, and aimed at
transcending the "Afrocentric/ Eurocentric" divide. The
book begins with a chapter on Du Bois's "Strivings"
text; Adell, following the lead of Joel Williamson's earlier
article, "W.E.B. Du Bois as a Hegelian" (1978), presents
Du Bois's text as a reading and use of crucial passages in
Hegel. Du Boisian double-consciousness, she claims, "emerges
from the philosophy of Hegel as it is articulated in the
*Phenomenology of Spirit*" (1994: 8). She adduces as
evidence for the Hegelian reading of *Souls* Du Bois's
studies with William James and Josiah Royce, references to Hegel in Du
Bois's Philosophy IV notebook from his time at Harvard, as well
as 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 "doubling
of consciousness" in Hegel's text (in the section on
"Self-Consciousness"; in "Lordship and
Bondage"; and in "The Unhappy Consciousness"); it is
the third of these that, she claims, forms the basic pattern for the
"Strivings" text:



> 
> Du Bois's "double-consciousness" decontextualizes
> Hegel's "Unhappy Consciousness" ... and opens
> it up to other contexts. In this case, the new context is one upon
> which is inscribed the problem of the twentieth century: the problem
> of the color line. (1994: 19)
> 



Adell then sketches a reading of the entire text of *Souls* as
a detailed "sociological, psychological, and
philosophical" account of "the Negro's
being-in-the-world" (1994: 19). Her reading identifies other
borrowings from German Idealism, noting along the way that



> 
> the title of Du Bois's text itself, *The Souls of Black
> Folk*, remarks and reiterates the two concepts - soul and
> folk (*Volk*) - that are central, not only to
> Herder's aesthetics, but to that of Hegel as well. (1994: 23)
> 


### 2.3 A Deflationist Reading



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



> 
> that millions of individuals experience a peculiar form of bifurcated
> identity, simply by virtue of common racial status... seems
> preposterous on its face. (1997: 125)
> 



Setting out a contextualizing account, Reed shows the considerable
cachet of ideas of duality current when Du Bois wrote, and argues that
the claims connecting Du Bois's use of double-consciousness to
Emerson, James or Hegel fail. Reed aligns Du Bois's concept with
evolutionary and Lamarckian social-scientific views instead. He argues
that an emphasis on double-consciousness emerges in Du Bois
interpretation only after the 1960s, when it supplants critical
attention to the critique of Booker T. Washington's strategy of
"accommodation" in the third essay of the book. Reed
attributes this shift in focus to "an ideological current within
the post-segregation-era black petite bourgeoisie" (1997: 130)
"centered on assertion of black presence within hermetically
constituted communities of academic discourse" (1997:
94-5).



Ernest Allen Jr. presents a similarly deflationist case in his
article, "Du Boisian Double Consciousness: The Unsustainable
Argument" (2002), arguing that the Du Boisian conception of
double-consciousness was a "tactical, political" attempt
to gain support among sympathetic white philanthropists for the
efforts 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 in
*Souls* involves for Allen a "*double sleight of
hand*" (2002: 25), requiring a slippage between a putative
conflict of ideals within the minds of the black elite and a more
general problem for African Americans "who could not help but
have internalized some of the negative sentiments that white society
held towards them" (2002: 29).



The attribution of distinctive "American" and
"Negro" ideals is empty, Allen argues: there are no clear
examples of "Negro" ideals in the offing in Du
Bois's text. Though there is no conflict between
"warring" ideals as claimed by Du Bois, there *is*
a conflict between white racial prejudice, intransigent hostility and
exclusion of blacks, on the one hand, and the ideal of civic equality
for all emblazoned on the ideological banners of the American
republic, on the other. This - what Allen calls "the
institutionalized as well as everyday double consciousness and double
dealings of white Americans" - is, he claims, "the
social foundation" of the "African American ideological
ambivalence" (2002: 38) that Du Boisian double-consciousness
expresses.


### 2.4 An Analytic Politico-Philosophic Reconstruction



Robert Gooding-Williams develops a tripartite account of the concept
of double-consciousness as a keystone in Du Bois's
political-philosophical project in his *In the Shadow of Du Bois:
Afro-Modern Political Thought in America* (2009).
Double-consciousness functions as part of an account of the subjective
experience of African-Americans in conditions dominated by Jim Crow
and the "color line"; it serves as an essential component
of Du Bois's critique of certain forms of black political
leadership under those conditions; and it underwrites Du Bois's
own positive theory of "political expressivism".
Gooding-Williams, like Allen, distinguishes double-consciousness from
the more general idea of "two-ness" that Du Bois connects
it to, arguing also that "second sight" is a distinctive
feature of Du Bois's conception.



Gooding-Williams emphasizes that Du Bois presents the concept in
*Souls* in a passage that begins with the question, "How
does it feel to be a problem?" - a question which
references the so-called "Negro problem". This indicates
an 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 two
sources for the idea of second sight - one in African-American
folklore, and one in the nineteenth-century literature on animal
magnetism. Both these present it as a capacity for a sort of
extra-sensory perception (e.g., of ghosts) or a kind of vision into
the 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 himself
through the eyes of white Americans. Because white Americans
constitute what Du Bois refers to as "the other world", a
social 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 that
gives such access. In "this American world", however,
whites' perspectives on blacks are deeply distorted by racial
prejudice. It is the "gift" of second sight, then, that
makes blacks' self-consciousness into a "false
self-consciousness", Gooding-Williams claims, by fostering in
them a self-concept molded by contempt and a presumption of
inferiority.



Thus, Gooding-Williams presents double-consciousness as a "false
self-consciousness" arising through second sight exercised in
conditions of a racially prejudiced dominant culture. This false
consciousness can make way for a "true self-consciousness"
only when those conditions have been transformed and whites no longer
perceive blacks as "contemptible" or
"inferior" (for only then will the Negro's
"second sight" reflect a perception of himself undistorted
by prejudice). This eventuality, neither inevitable nor unattainable,
requires the achievement of reciprocal recognition that has been
denied the Negro by the white "other world" throughout
American history, and is a prime object of the Du Boisian political
project. That project's broader object - indeed, the goal
of the history of African-American striving - is for black
Americans to be recognized as "co-workers in the kingdom of
culture". Gooding-Williams concludes that the overcoming of
double-consciousness is a necessary and sufficient condition for the
achievement of full equality: equality grounded in reciprocal
recognition cannot be won without eradicating the basis for
double-consciousness.



Gooding-Williams argues that Du Bois was concerned with
double-consciousness not only as a correlate of the disenfranchised
condition that constitutes the so-called Negro problem, but also as a
crucial test of the effectiveness of those leading the struggle to
overcome that condition. In his discussions of Booker T. Washington
and Alexander Crummell (in chapters III and XII of *Souls*), Du
Bois makes a case that both fell victim to double-consciousness,
vitiating their effectiveness as leaders of the freedom struggle.
Specifically, Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" was
a strategy that undermined the struggle for recognition, reinforcing
double-consciousness by failing to challenge the white perception of
Negro "inferiority".


### 2.5 Rousseauian Self-Estrangement



Frank Kirkland notes Du Bois's description of
double-consciousness as a "feeling", and articulates that
feeling through Rousseau's notion of *amour-propre*, the
form of "civilized" self-love that is reflective,
contrastive, and radically corrosive of social solidarity.
(Rousseau's account distinguishes *amour-propre* from
*amour de soi*, an instinctual urge to self-preservation;
*amour-propre* is a purely social feeling.)



> 
> Du Bois' "double consciousness" refers to a black
> person's felt awareness of the harmfully comparative measures of
> others on her character and self-esteem, by which s/he takes
> herself to be a problem in and of a social arrangement permitting such
> measures or obliging them. (2013: 144)
> 



For Kirkland, Du Bois' conception of double-consciousness is
inherently comparative, the consequence of *amour-propre* in
conditions of the color line. Du Bois, according to Kirkland, began
from the "inflamed *amour-propre* of others":



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



For Kirkland *amour-propre* is not the cause of the color-line,
but it does spread its reach and intensify its effects. Kirkland also
stresses the element of awareness within double-consciousness, in
keeping with the Rousseauian analogy:



> 
> [F]or Du Bois, this comparison gone awry is a matter about which black
> people are, at least, sentient, awake to, even if they have not
> grasped it conceptually,
> 



writes Kirkland, adding that this is "their sentience to the
comparison by which they are made a problem" (2013: 140).



Kirkland follows the "Faith" text in identifying two forms
of the danger double-consciousness poses for African-Americans: a
"dual/duelist" threat of internally conflicted aspirations
and expectations, and a "duplicitous" hypocritical stance.
Both these arise from the felt need to maintain self-esteem given
hostility to one's ideals. Notably, Kirkland also identifies a
third, "dyadic" form of double-consciousness which



> 
> would reflect, via education, the result of an individual coming to a
> true, non-estranged comprehension of the position s/he deserves
> in comparison to others as both a citizen and a person of color with
> certain 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 a
critical discussion of double-consciousness in his first book,
*Prophecy Deliverance!* (1982). In the first chapter, West
suggests an ingredient missing from Du Bois's analysis of the
self-consciousness of Africans in America, claiming that



> 
> Du Bois overlooked the broader dialectic of being American yet feeling
> European, of being provincial but yearning for British
> cosmopolitanism, of being at once incompletely civilized and
> materially prosperous, a genteel Brahmin amid uncouth conditions.
> Black Americans labored rather under the burden of a triple crisis of
> self-consciousness. Their cultural predicament was comprised of
> African appearance and unconscious cultural mores, involuntary
> displacement to America without American status, and American
> alienation from the European ethos complicated through domination by
> incompletely European Americans. (1982: 30-1)
> 



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



West's formulations do not unmake but add refinements on Du
Bois's basic claim. It's worth noting that, near the end
of West's discussion, he acknowledges that, in the first
attempts to shape their own self-identity, "Black people were
relatively uninformed about British culture...". This seems
to minimize the significance of "British cosmopolitanism"
and "alienation from the European ethos" as issues for
black folk in America generally.



In *The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness*
(1993) Paul Gilroy extends Du Boisian double-consciousness both beyond
the American context and at odds with an essentialist understanding of
race. Gilroy claims double consciousness as an overriding thematic
element in Du Bois's thought and writing, both in and beyond
*Souls*, part of Du Bois's attempt to subvert rigidly
fixed racial identities as imposed categories keyed to the oppressive
social structures of white supremacy. The "Strivings" text
is taken as one early expression of Du Bois's own ambivalence
toward modernity - an ambivalence shared widely in diasporic
black cultures and political debates - and as prefiguring the
increasingly transnational and pan-racial scope of Du Bois's
evolving concerns.



In a reading of *Souls* that is central to his book, Gilroy
highlights the



> 
> nagging anxiety over the inner contradictions of modernity and a
> radical scepticism towards the ideology of progress with which it is
> associated (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 tension
with, and textually submerged under, the "smooth flow of
African-American exceptionalisms" (1993: 120). These elements
within the discourse of *Souls* point to the wider significance
of double consciousness, according to Gilroy. He claims this
global-diasporic theme would, subsequent to *Souls*, come
"to illuminate the experience of post-slave populations in
general" and to "animate a dream of global co-operation
among people of color which came to full fruition only in [Du
Bois'] later work" (1993: 126).



Paget Henry's phenomenological treatment of Du Bois's
conception in his "Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical
Implications" (2005) identifies a "theory" of double
consciousness as part of a "comprehensive phenomenology of
Africana self-consciousness" (2005: 85). Henry distinguishes Du
Boisian double-consciousness from the double consciousness found in
Hegel's discussion of lordship and bondage in the
*Phenomenology* by its focus on 'the Africana
subject' Hegel neglected entirely*.* Henry offers further
an 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). But
Henry claims a further, ethically propitious form of second sight is
possible - 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, according
to Henry, when an Africana subject is able to uproot the
"blackface" stereotype from her consciousness and
reconceive herself as "an African" by operating
"within the creative codes of African discourses and
symbols" (2005: 91). Henry cites the Rastafarians as an example
of this route to potentiated second sight. An alternate route is
through an individually acquired standpoint on the world, independent
of white supremacy: Du Bois himself is an exemplar.



Henry sees a close relation between Du Boisian double-consciousness
and Frantz Fanon's existential-psychoanalytic account of black
self-consciousness, found in Fanon's *Black Skin, White
Masks* (1967). Noting the Freudian and Sartrean idiom in which
Fanon carries through his analyses in that text, Henry writes that
"there is no finer or more detailed account of the state of
racial double consciousness" (2005: 95). In the very first pages
of 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 Aime
Cesaire's *Discourse on Colonialism*. Fanon
observes that



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



Henry details a process he dubs "negrification", to which
the black is subject in the confines of the West. In that process,
"colonized Africana people lost their earlier cultural
identities and became identified by the color of their skin"
(2005: 96). The white colonizer projects the most reprehensible and
forbidden aspects of himself onto the black man, thereby bringing
about the stereotype of "the Negro". Fanon also borrows
Jungian formulations for his account, writing of the "collective
unconscious of *homo occidentalis*", in which the black
man "symbolizes evil, sin, wretchedness, death, war,
famine". Referring to his native land, Fanon writes



> 
> [i]n Martinique, whose collective unconscious makes it a European
> country, when a "blue" Negro - a coal-black one
> - comes to visit, one reacts at once: "What bad luck is he
> bringing?" (1967: 191)
> 



In an earlier text, *Caliban's Reason* (2000), Henry uses
the Shakespearean motif, from *The Tempest*, of the clash of
the European colonizer Prospero with the native Caliban. He cites the
"Calibanization" of the Africans imported by European
slavers to the Caribbean:



> 
> [C]olor eclipsed culture. ... Africans were transformed into
> negroes and niggers in the minds of Europeans. This racial violence
> shattered the cultural foundations of the African self.... Race
> became the primary signifier of Europeans and Africans and of the
> differences between them. Consequently, the identities of these two
> groups were rigidly inscribed in a set of binary oppositions that
> linked the binary black/white to other binaries such as
> primitive/civilized, irrational/rational, body/mind,
> prelogical/logical, flesh/spirit. (2000: 11-2)
> 



Henry sees Calibanization - the imposition of a racialized
identity based on a set of insidiously contrastive binaries on top of
an original and native cultural identity grounded in African ways of
life - as the production of a form of double consciousness.



Lewis Gordon touches on double consciousness in his *Introduction
to Africana Philosophy* (2008). Gordon starts from Du Bois's
'unasked' question, "How does it feel to be a
problem?" For Gordon, this question presupposes the
subjectivity, and the humanity, of the black person being addressed.
And yet, the ascription of the status of a "problem" to
that person involves at the same time a *denial* of the
humanity of that black addressee. Gordon notes that "[t]he
appeal to blacks as problem-people is an assertion of their ultimate
location outside the system of order and rationality" (2008:
76). This outsider status, Gordon suggests, is crucial to the
formation of double consciousness, leading as it does to "the
splitting of worlds and consciousness itself according to the norms of
U.S. society and its contradictions". Those norms instantiate
the fact that "'American' was persistently defined
as 'white' in North America and the rest of the
Americas" (2008: 77).



Gordon takes the "negative version" of double
consciousness to result when the self-image of the black person is
wholly determined by how racial others view her - her view of
herself is a "white point of view" (2008: 78), relegating
her to the status of noncitizen or second class citizen. Its
epistemological significance is that one of the two perspectives
implicit in it - that of the white world - is necessarily
partial, yet positions itself as universal, and so, is "a form
of consciousness that hides itself" (2008: 79). But this
dominant white self-concept brings into being a
"subaltern" consciousness, a consciousness of the
contradictions of that dominant self-concept. This, Gordon claims, is
the second, doubling consciousness in its affirmative, fully realized
manifestation.


## 3. Double-Consciousness in *Souls of Black Folk*: Problems



The preceding survey yields several points of contention: issues
concerning the source(s) of Du Bois's conception and
terminology, of its putative Rousseauian, Hegelian and/or American
philosophical connections; the scope of the conception, that is, how
widely and to whom Du Bois thought it applied; the relation between
double-consciousness and the psychic duality he associated it with;
the nature of "second sight", and its relation to
double-consciousness; double-consciousness's relation to alleged
"pathology," and to critical awareness or critique; the
conception's usefulness for an understanding of the situation of
black folk, both at the turn of the twentieth century when Du Bois put
it forward, and today. Here we briefly recapitulate several of
these.



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 for *any*
Negro consciousness under conditions of Jim Crow - then how
could Du Bois himself write as if transcending it, as having
"true self-conscious manhood"? Although Du Bois never
explicitly makes the claim that he himself is free from
double-consciousness, his text hints at no such internal
soul-struggle. And yet, his conception of double-consciousness is
introduced as part of an account of his own personal experience and as
based on that experience.



Gooding-Williams tries to overcome this paradox by distinguishing the
narrative authority of *Souls* from the historical author of
the text. It is the narrator of *Souls*, and not Du Bois
himself, who has escaped double-consciousness. This may save
*Souls* as a literary text, but it doesn't rescue the
idea of black political leadership, implying that no actual black
political leader is immune from double-consciousness. Another possible
resolution to the paradox involves the notion of a second sight awake
to the contradictions of the dominant white cultural milieu, allowing
a rejection of its biased assumption about black folk (what Henry
calls "potentiated second sight").



Du Bois often insisted that his accounting of "the Negro
problem" - or, alternatively, of "the race
concept" - involves leading his readers "within the
Veil" - making it possible for his (presumably mostly
white) readers to gain some sense of the experience of "being
black". This involves, as he puts it in *Dusk of Dawn*
(1940), "elucidating the inner meaning and significance of that
race problem by explaining it in terms of the one human life that I
know best" (1968 [1940]: viii). But that one life was one lived
at the top of "the upper layers of educated and ambitious
Negroes" (1968 [1940]: 185), and so, it was exceptional. This
returns us to the question of the scope of double-consciousness.



While Du Bois presents double-consciousness in the 1903 texts as a
problem for black folks generally given conditions of segregation and
historically persisting inequality, a closer inspection of the text
suggests that the phenomenon might be specific to black leadership or
those who are most fully caught *between* the white world and
the world of color, who have deliberately undertaken the "the
moral uplift" of the "backward" black masses, and
who stand as "representatives" of these
"worlds" to each other. The "Strivings"
passage cites as illustrative examples only educated,
"better" Negroes: the 'black artisan', the
Negro minister or doctor, the "would be black
*savant*" and the black artist. Du Bois also devotes
several further chapters in *Souls* to detailed
characterizations of the inner struggles of actual or fictional
leaders - 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 that
double-consciousness, in the sense of a self-perception of
inferiority, has been a universal feature of black life. Molefi Kete
Asante, 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 roads
> of Valdosta never saw themselves as intellectually or physically
> inferior to whites. There existed no reference points outside of
> ourselves despite the economic and psychological poverty of our
> situation. (1993: 133)
> 



Several pages later Asante states flat-out, "I was never
affected by the Du Boisian double-consciousness" (1993: 136). He
does go on to acknowledge his distinct circumstances



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



A third issue for Du Bois's conception of double-consciousness
concerns its putative relation to the "two-ness" of the
Negro psyche, which he never clarifies. Du Bois was concerned early on
to establish a distinct contribution of "the Negro" to
world culture and civilization, since lynch law and the backlash
against Reconstruction raised the specter of genocidal extermination
of black folk in America. A distinctly "Negro" cultural
contribution seems to require distinctive Negro "ideals".
Allen and others have argued that Du Bois presents vague, seemingly
empty, or contradictory accounts of just what the conflicting American
and Negro "ideals" are. The question, then, is whether Du
Bois's reference to such ideals can be sustained as an
independent source of the "two-ness" which Du Bois
connects 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 complex
phenomenon yet.



The Du Boisian conception has been criticized as well for
oversimplifying the complex multidimensionality of contemporary
selves, harboring a nostalgia for a unitary, integral self that never
existed, an unachievable ideal. Thus Darlene Clark Hine asserts:



> 
> had Du Bois specifically included the experiences and lives of black
> women in his lament, ... instead of writing, "One ever
> feels his twoness", he would have mused about how one ever feels
> her "fiveness": Negro, American, woman, poor, black woman.
> (Hines 1993: 338)
> 



Critiques of Du Bois's conception along these lines have become
widespread, but, it might be argued, they are in one sense beside the
point. That the 1903 text is masculinist seems undeniable. But
it's also true that Du Bois's
"double-consciousness" was not proposed as a comprehensive
account of the reality of human being, was not addressed to the
variety of sources of human social identity *per se*. His
conception was an attempt to capture the lived experience of black
folk *as black folk* in the United States under conditions of
Jim Crow. So it would be wholly consistent with his conception if,
added to the doubling of consciousness due to racial oppression, other
forms of psychic doubling or fragmentation, responses to other forms
of inequality, might exist.



Henry Louis Gates Jr. addresses the normative thrust of Du
Bois's conception in noting that



> 
> cultural multiplicity is no longer seen as the problem, but as a
> solution - a solution to the confines of identity itself. Double
> consciousness, 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-consciousness
conception itself. Surely even if "cultural multiplicity"
has come to be valuable in itself, as Gates has it, the "amused
contempt and pity" directed against oneself, crucial to Du
Bois's formulation, cannot be part of any
"cure".



Finally, a question might be raised about the relation of Du
Bois's double-consciousness conception and the sorts of
self-doubts, troubled feelings, and "identity issues" that
have been linked to biracial or mixed-race appearance or identity in
our persisting, harshly racialized American social world. White
supremacy has presented particular difficulties for persons of
ambivalent racial descent, visibly marked as brought into being by
"race mixing". Mixed-race persons have encountered
hostility from "both sides", and are often deemed weak or
inferior *just because they are mixed*, as Naomi Zack documents
in her *Race and Mixed-Race* (1993: chapters 11, 12). Indeed,
Du Bois was personally familiar with this issue. His "most
interesting" professor during his university days in Berlin was
Heinrich von Trietschke;



> 
> [o]ne day he startled me by suddenly declaring during a lecture on
> America: "*Die Mulattin sind niedrig! Sie fuhlen sich
> niedrig!*" [Mulattoes are inferior; they feel themselves
> inferior.] I felt as if he were pointing me out; but I presume he was
> quite unaware of my presence. However my presence or absence would
> have made no difference to him. ... My fellow students gave no
> evidence of connecting what he said with me. (Du Bois 1968: 165)
> 



Yet when Du Bois formulated "double-consciousness" in
*Souls*, mixed-race and skin-color discriminations within the
black racial designation were not topics he addressed in print. The
duality posited in the texts of 1903 is one between
"Negro" - an identity then typically keyed to a
metaphysically conceived racial designation - and
"American" - one based on a putative citizenship
status. Racial designation at that time was determined primarily
through hypodescent, and the citizenship status of black folk had
recently been impugned by *Plessy v. Ferguson* (1896).


## 4. Du Boisian Double-Consciousness after *Souls*?



Commentators are agreed that while Du Bois names
"double-consciousness" and uses the concept in his own way
in that 1903 text, the term does not reappear in any of his subsequent
texts. That does not mean he abandons the concept, of course, yet most
of the commentary on the concept focuses on the
"Strivings" text in *Souls*. There have been some
attempts to interpret various of his other works in terms of the
conception, but these tend to focus on his fictional writings, and the
use made of these is not primarily to develop the conception but
rather to show its uses by Du Bois in other contexts. This is
undoubtedly due both to the canonical status of that 1903 text in
African-American literature and social criticism and to the fact of
its very singular use there. More than one writer has asserted that
the passage in which Du Bois presents the term is the most-referenced
text in all African-American letters.



It seems problematic, however, to pin a full-blown account of and
theoretical reconstruction on one passage in one work, however seminal
or influential it may have been. So it may be useful to examine
several later texts of Du Bois's to see if the claim some
commentators have made that Du Bois abandons the conception after 1903
can be substantiated or rejected. There are discussions in later texts
that seem to involve aspects, at least, of the 1903 conception.


### 4.1 "The Souls of White Folks" in *Darkwater* (1920)



While Du Bois does not present the "double-consciousness"
concept in so many words in *Darkwater*, published in 1920, the
second chapter of that text, "The Souls of White Folks",
seems to invoke it. There, Du Bois characterizes the development of
what he calls "the religion of whiteness" and discusses
its impact on social relations in the nineteenth and the early
twentieth centuries. Du Bois makes a claim for a special kind of
knowledge of the psychology of white people. He writes of himself
that, about them, "I am singularly clairvoyant". After
specifying that his knowledge is not that of the foreigner, nor of the
servant or the worker, he writes:



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



Du Bois here claims an insight into the psyches of whites that depends
in part on an awareness of their beliefs and attitudes concerning
race, of their falseness. This insight is of the kind that
double-consciousness makes possible. But what Du Bois claims here also
seems to go beyond the 1903 conception, since that conception did not
specifically and explicitly refer to *knowledge* of the souls
of white folks. Several pages into the "Souls of White
Folks" chapter, after identifying the "discovery of
personal whiteness" as an historically recent phenomenon
associated with "this new religion of whiteness", Du Bois
indicates 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 him
> clearly, with world-old eyes, and saw simply a human being, weak and
> pitiable and cruel, even as we are and were. (1920: 20)
> 



Here is a condition of consciousness that allows "the
humiliated" to see more clearly the reality of the lives of
those who humiliate than the humiliators themselves do. While such
knowledge does not involve "know[ing] the thoughts" of the
humiliators *in detail*, it does require that one know some
*patterns* of what and how they think and feel. Du Bois is here
considering the ideology of white supremacy, tracing out the
historical conditions of its development and some of the psychological
consequences it has for whites who accept it and live in and on the
basis of it. To the extent that whites accept the premises of white
supremacy, and live and act upon them, they are deceived *about
themselves* and act out a deception that the blacks who are
subject to the consequences of those premises are in a position to see
through. This is not the core of double-consciousness, though it seems
to be the sort of thing Du Bois had in mind when he referred in 1903
to "second sight", a key adjunct to double-consciousness,
in the "Strivings" passage. This matches the reading found
in Henry, Gordon, and Kirkland as well.



But there is a bit more here, and other than, "second
sight". For what Du Bois presents in this chapter is a critical
analysis of the American ideology of white supremacy that is informed
by sociological analysis and backed up by historical and
social-scientific understanding. Du Bois both begins and ends the
chapter 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 trained
social scientist - indeed, one of the most highly trained minds
in America at the time - bringing his powers of analysis to bear
on the "souls of white folk". Du Bois gives a
scientifically-informed, nuanced historical analysis built on a
"clairvoyant" insight into the psyche of the white person
"under the influence" of white supremacist ideology, one
predicated on both the second sight and a kind of
ideology-critique.


### 4.2 "On Being Ashamed of Oneself: An Essay on Race Pride" (1933)



Du Bois begins the essay, published in *Crisis* in September,
1933, with a story about his grandfather, who indignantly rejected an
invitation to a "Negro" picnic:



> 
> [i]t meant close association with poverty, ignorance and suppressed
> and 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 being
> represented before American whites by this lower group, or being
> mistaken for them, or being treated as though they were part of it,
> they are pushed to the extreme of effort to avoid contact with the
> poorest classes of Negroes. This exaggerates, at once, the secret
> shame of being identified with such people and the anomaly of
> insisting that the physical characteristics of these folk which the
> upper class shares, are not the stigmata of degradation. (1933: 199)
> 



Here Du Bois draws out the intra-racial implications and grounds of
this 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 theme
arising from the first in his thinking about double-consciousness
- its close connection to divergent personal and political
strategies for managing, and working to transform, its social
conditions. He identified these especially in the 1903
"Faith" text, where he speaks both of "double
classes" and of "pretense or revolt",
"hypocrisy or radicalism". In the 1920 text, Du Bois notes
that such feelings of shame can motivate the strategy of "race
suicide" - "the attempt to escape from
ourselves", as he describes assimilation. This attempt involves
- and also is grounded in - "a drawing of class
lines inside the Negro race" and "the emergence of a
certain social aristocracy" defined by "looks"
- by which Du Bois presumably means complexion - as well
as education, income, cultivation, and aspiration.



But this sense of shame is both impediment and adjunct of any strategy
based on race pride and solidarity, as well, since it can undermine
any concerted political action, which demands racial unity in common
cause, and under the leadership of the "talented tenth" of
race aristocrats, to be successful. While calling for efforts
"to build up a racial ethos", Du Bois thus warns against
too 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 yellow
race".


### 4.3 *Dusk of Dawn* (1940)



There is a discussion of something like double-consciousness in Du
Bois's book *Dusk of Dawn*, published in 1940, two years
after Du Bois turned seventy. Indeed, since *Dusk of Dawn* is
more nearly autobiographical in design than *Souls* (its
subtitle is *An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race
Concept*) it's not surprising that Du Bois writes more
expansively there of black life in conditions of segregation and white
supremacy, even though he doesn't use the term employed in
*Souls*. But also, by this time, his conception of race itself
has opened up even further beyond that of any linear historical
development. As he writes at the end of the central chapter of that
book, "The Concept of Race",



> 
> It had as I have tried to show all kinds of illogical trends and
> irreconcilable tendencies. Perhaps it is wrong to speak of it at all
> as "a concept" rather than as a group of contradictory
> forces, facts, and tendencies. (1940: 133)
> 



A number of things change in the account given by Du Bois in *Dusk
of Dawn* of the phenomena that, in *Souls*, are brought
under the sign of double-consciousness.



The first is that the *Dusk of Dawn* treatment of the issues is
subsumed much more fully under a thematics of
"environment", articulated as socio-political,
geographical, and cultural in its dimensions, and both dynamic and
relatively stable in historical terms. Writing about "the facts
of the Negro's double environment", Du Bois explains:



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



This way of putting it is prefigured in the "Faith" text
of *Souls*, in which Du Bois writes of the "double
life" of Black folk and of the "worlds within and without
the Veil of Color". Note also the claim that, while the
inhabitants of the "white world" and the "colored
world" look at one other each through "the concept"
they have of one another, individuals within the "colored
world" know each other through "direct contact".
This is the impact of the veil, the color line. Writing of his own
personal experience, Du Bois details the effect of this environing
white world on him:



> 
> I was by long education and continual compulsion and daily reminder, a
> colored man in a white world; and that white world often existed
> primarily, so far as I was concerned, to see with sleepless vigilance
> that I was kept within bounds. All this made me limited in physical
> movement and provincial in thought and dream. I could not stir, I
> could not act, I could not live, without taking into careful daily
> account the reaction of my white environing world. (1940: 135-6)
> 



There is in this account, in addition to the definite limitation of
possibilities imposed by the veil - and consequent to it -
an active appropriation, and employment in strategic thinking by Du
Bois, of the understanding he has of the white world. This suggests
another, practical mode in which double consciousness - which is
what we are dealing with here - can operate. If double
consciousness also is *practical* consciousness, "taking
into careful daily account" whites' reactions -
tinged as they are by prejudice, by expectations grounded in that
prejudice - in one's plans, one's own expectations,
that would not necessarily involve internalizing the prejudicial
racist viewpoint itself, though it might nonetheless produce profound
disturbance of the soul. Double consciousness would then also yield a
practical, and affective, rather than a strictly cognitive, impact of
the environing conditions on the black soul.



There is also, on the *Dusk of Dawn* account, a further, more
telling 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 the
> greatest thing in my life and absolutely determined it, because this
> surrounding group, in alliance and agreement with the white European
> world, was settled and determined upon the fact that I was and must be
> a thing apart. It was impossible to gainsay this. It was impossible
> for any time and to any distance to withdraw myself and look down upon
> these absurd assumptions with philosophical calm and humorous
> self-control. (1940: 136)
> 



The "absurd assumptions" can and do infiltrate the
Negro's psyche, affecting how she thinks and feels about herself
in ways that stubbornly resist her own efforts to override or ignore
them. More rarely, perhaps, they elicit fierce and abiding anger, even
rage. Writing in a less autobiographical vein, Du Bois notes that
despair of racial progress "too often" results from the
Negro's "lack of faith in essential Negro possibilities
parallel to similar attitudes on the part of the whites". This
attitude itself is, he continues, "a natural phenomenon",
since Negroes share "average American culture and current
American prejudices". Because of this, it is



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



This, arguably, is Du Boisian double-consciousness as set out in
*Souls*.



But the 1940 text never asserts a basic inner duality within the
Negro: missing entirely from the *Dusk of Dawn* account is any
mention of inward two-ness, of the psychic splitting that was so
crucial to the account given in *Souls*. In the 1940 text the
issue is characterized in the terminology of "Negro
self-criticism" (1940: 179), a "lack of faith in essential
Negro possibilities" (1940: 191), and the "inner
contradiction and frustration which [segregation and white racist
intransigence] involves" (1940: 187) - a terminology that
conveys the ambivalence and complexity of the earlier text, but falls
far short of asserting an overriding psychic duality. And this is not
because the text does not address the "felt experience" of
being black in America: the central, longest, chapter in *Dusk of
Dawn* is "The Colored World Within".



There are, 'naturally', problems with the unitary
consciousness of a soul within the double environment Du Bois depicts,
but these fall short of causing a split in the psyche itself. There is
resentment, frustration, and anger; there is a faithlessness, and,
often, consequent despair; there are the temptations to turning
one's back on 'the folk'; and also temptations to
reject absolutely anything the "environing" white world
offers 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, contemptuous
> judgment of nearly all that Negroes do, say, and believe....
> (1940: 179)
> 



What two-ness there is in the *Dusk of Dawn* account has been
relocated from the inwardness of souls to the "environing"
world.



There are two other ways the *Dusk of Dawn* account diverges
significantly from that of *Souls*. First, the brute facticity
of what Du Bois calls the "inferiority" of the colored
world is asserted in this text explicitly, and its effect upon the
attitudes of Negroes described tellingly. Du Bois presents this stark
reality as undeniable, while at the same time rejecting the related
claims made by racist prejudice:



> 
> It is true, as I have argued, that Negroes are not inherently ugly nor
> congenitally stupid. They are not naturally criminal and their poverty
> and ignorance today have clear and well-known and remediable causes.
> All this is true: and yet what every colored man living today knows is
> that by practical present measurements Negroes today are inferior to
> whites. 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 and
> they control a larger part of the earth than all the colored peoples
> together. (1940: 173-4)
> 



By invoking these facts, Du Bois is citing historically contingent yet
palpably certain realities that, he claims, "every colored man
living today knows". Consequently, "Negro
self-criticism" is, in part, grounded in "a perfectly
obvious fact" (1940: 179), "that most Negroes in the
United States today occupy a low cultural status" and a
"low social condition" (1940: 180). Among these, he
discusses "Negro ignorance", death rate, "criminal
tendencies", poverty, and "social degradation". Du
Bois lists these not as representations of white prejudice but in
acknowledgment of patent observable realities. Though their causes,
present and past, count against the prejudiced conclusions often drawn
in the white world, these causes are less visible, less obvious.



Another important departure of *Dusk of Dawn* from
*Souls* is an explicit recognition in the later text that the
psychic phenomena attributed to Negro Americans are not distinctive of
their experience alone. Du Bois writes,



> 
> [s]imilar phenomena may be noticed always among undeveloped or
> suppressed peoples or groups undergoing extraordinary experience. None
> have 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 the
*Sturm und Drang* period. In 1940 Du Bois makes a broader
historical claim, that "the imprisoning of a human group with
chains in the hands of an environing group" was not "a
singularly unusual characteristic of the Negro in the United States in
the nineteenth century", but, rather, "the majority of
mankind has struggled through this inner spiritual
slavery..." (1940: 137).


## 5. Beyond the Black/White Binary, Beyond *Double* Consciousness



So far we have considered applications and extensions of the original
double consciousness notion to encompass the experiences of persons of
African heritage, within the United States, and more broadly in the
African diaspora. There have been other recent deployments of the
concept that extend its reach to the other side of, and then beyond,
what's been called the 'black/white binary.' We note
three of them here.



One recent inquiry - Nelson Maldonado-Torres's 2006
article, "Post-continental Philosophy: Its Definition, Contours,
and Fundamental Sources" - explores a version of double
consciousness of normative subjects of 'dominant (white)
European' cultures, citing the *oeuvre* of J-P Sartre as
a case study. The increasing diversity of evolving U.S. society, and
the 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 but
in a pluralist rather than a racial-binary context. Linda Alcoff, who
has argued for the need to get beyond a binary conception of U.S.
racial dynamics, considers the rise of 'white double
consciousness'. Finally, Jose Medina advocates for a
related 'kaleidoscopic consciousness' as a personal tactic
for resisting epistemic injustice in conditions of the fight for
pluralist democracy.


### 5.1 A 'Post-Continental' Turn



A distinctive application of 'double consciousness' comes
out of 'decolonial' theory. Of and from non-dominant
cultures and social groupings, these theorists' commitment to
social struggles at the 'borderlands,' in geopolitically
liminal spaces, yields arguments from doubled perspectives, both
within and outside the dominant, 'North Atlantic' system.
Thinkers like Gloria Anzaldua, Sylvia Wynter, and Walter
Mignolo, among others, came to constitute this movement, featuring
distinctive styles of inquiry and writing, advocating a
'decolonial turn' in humanistic research. A philosophical
argument associated with this group, making explicit use of the notion
of double consciousness, is Nelson Maldonado-Torres's account of
'Post-Continental Philosophy'.



One guiding purpose of the de-colonial project is simply to make the
charge of Eurocentrism stick against the dominant modern
'Western' intellectual tradition initiated at the time of
Descartes. Maldonado-Torres' use of double consciousness takes
it in its original bivalent Du Boisian form - as a source of
both potentially deleterious illusion and of veridical insights; he
employs it as an interpretive strategy for critiquing the
20th-century Continental tradition in philosophy, and
through it the entire modern European tradition. He does so by
situating that philosophical tradition in global anti-systemic
struggles originating and developing in Western-hemispheric societies.
In this connection the term 'post-Continental' alludes not
only to the commonly accepted name of the primarily French- and
German-speaking European phenomenological tradition.
'Post-Continental' also signifies its rejection of the
prevailing 'geography of power,' the largely implicit
notion that the (European) continent is the locus of all significant
modern philosophical production.



Of the canonical figures in that continental tradition, it is Sartre
who Maldonado-Torres sees as expressing the double consciousness of
European modernity, its intellectual guilty conscience. Double
consciousness serves as an interpretive schema for reevaluating the
meaning of both Sartre's overall intellectual activity as well
as the Sartrean conception of bad faith. This is now read as an
implicit critique of the complicity of the intellectual culture of
modernity in domination, with particular reference to the colonialist
entanglements of its dominant philosophical traditions. Developing the
political argument and its philosophical critique involves arguing
that for Sartre, bad faith should be understood not only in an
individual, but also in a social, collective sense, cutting against
its 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 dominant
social order, from that of the 'damned' - a term
taken from Fanon's *Les Damnes de la Terre* (1961)
(translated as *The Wretched of the Earth*, for which Sartre
wrote a preface) referring to those peopling the
'underworld' at the bottom of the world-system. The double
consciousness of the oppressed arises in their direct experience with
the system in which their very being and daily existence confront them
with 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 contradiction
between the purported ideals of the oppressive system and the reality
of their lives is, for them, starkly apparent.



For the normative subjects, however, the lie is, in a sense, within
them, insofar as they are complicit with the regime; their
confrontation with that lie demands self-scrutiny and self-critique.
This complicity with oppression and the lies it involves, and the
self's confrontation with its own duplicity, can be understood
in terms of Sartre's account of bad faith. As Maldonado-Torres
puts it, there is within the normative subject a struggle whether to
take on fully the dominant culture's "demand ... to
occupy the center of the world." This demand represents a
requirement that the self, "with the help of an impressive
cultural, symbolic, material, and epistemological arsenal, posits
itself as normative," and thereby accedes to playing a part in
the "dehumanization of Europe's racialized and colonized
populations." Bad faith, which, in Sartre's terms, is the
subject's refusal of its own freedom, a flight from
responsibility and into conformism, finds a political expression in
the dominant culture's demand for normative subjects'
conformity.



Bad faith is the conceptual hinge of Sartre's entire critical
response to the situation of European 'civilization' as he
found it already at the inception of his philosophical career. The
culmination of European anti-Semitism in the Holocaust and the war
against fascism -Maldonado-Torres calls this the 'crisis
of genocidal Europe' - fueled by the active participation
or silent complacence of much of the intellectual middle classes, was
the original condition for Sartre's political-philosophical
authorship. Sartre's engagement with the global anti-colonial
struggle that followed the allied victory, and particularly the
Algerian revolution, confirmed and focused Sartre's increasingly
political opposition to the policies of the dominant European
powers.



His engagement with the work of the Afro-Caribbean theorists
Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon pushed him further, adding
energy to his sometimes explicitly anti-racist critical reflection.
Sartre's engagement with their thought make him, for
Maldonado-Torres, a 'border subject' as well, grounded in
the split allegiances of a kind of 'double life,' itself a
product of this basic rift at the heart of Europe's empire.
Maldonado-Torres quotes a passage from Sartre's
"Preface" to Fanon's *The Wretched of the
Earth*, in which Sartre addresses the book's [presumably
white] French reader. The quotation reads, in part:



> 
> 
> This fat and pallid continent has ended up lapsing into what Fanon
> rightly calls 'narcissism.' Cocteau was irritated by
> Paris, 'the city which is always thinking about itself.'
> What else is Europe doing? Or that super-European monster, North
> America? What empty chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love,
> honour, country, and who knows what else? That did not prevent us from
> holding forth at the same time in racist language: filthy n\*\*\*er,
> filthy Jew, filthy North Africans. Enlightened, liberal and sensitive
> souls - in short, neocolonialists - claimed to be shocked
> by this inconsistency; that is an error or bad faith. Nothing is more
> consistent, among us, than racist humanism, since Europeans have only
> been able to make themselves human beings by creating slaves and
> monsters.
> 
> 
> 



Here, then, through Sartre, double consciousness takes the form of
both a confession and a self-critique, an admission and a renunciation
of duplicity. Maldonado-Torres's use of double consciousness as
a lens through which to read Sartre's conception of bad faith
sharpens Sartre's account of European culture's willing
racial ignorance, its foundational self-deception, and shows his
ambivalence toward Europe's oppressive civilizational
hierarchies. It is what Maldonado-Torres calls Sartre's
'potentiated' double consciousness that, he claims, yields
Sartre's critical relation to the colonialist complicity of the
continental tradition. Sartre's focus on the self-deceptive
aspects of the modern European tradition's intellectual
identity, taken as the historical work of double consciousness, both
reveals and subverts the hypocritical complicity of the philosophical
mainstream with the geopolitics of colonialism.


### 5.2 White Double Consciousness



A similar argument about the applicability of Du Bois's notion
to 'white folk', in the American vortex, is presented by
Linda Alcoff. In *The Future of Whiteness* (2015), she claims
that many white Americans are subject to 'white double
consciousness' due in part to recent social changes. The
book's argument - part of an anti-racist 'project to
rearticulate whiteness' - describes what she calls the
'crisis of white hegemony' and the pressure exerted by
this crisis on white individuals' racial identity and
self-understanding. Her account specifically addresses the
disaffection of many 'progressive' whites from the
dominant, mainstream cultural form of whiteness, and from its
justification by what she calls 'white vanguardism,' a
false historical narrative of a decidedly racist cast. (Alcoff notes
the existence, but foregoes the analysis, of a reactionary, right-wing
white double consciousness, claiming it lacks any significant
fact-based theoretical basis for critical argument.) White double
consciousness is a specific kind of disaffection with whiteness, an
alienation from whiteness as norm, "a turmoil in white
subjectivity" (174).



The crisis of white hegemony results partly from demographic changes
under way that will transform the U.S. into a
'minority-majority' society by mid-century, and an
acknowledgment of these impending changes by white Americans still
able and willing to face social reality. These demographic shifts
portend a shifting spectrum of political contestation. Citing the work
of historian Nell Irvin Painter charting the historic formation of
whiteness, Alcoff's argument identifies other broader social and
political changes to U.S. society that track what might be called
'the declining significance of whiteness'. These include a
diminished capacity of white identity to secure for its possessors the
differential advantages once available to them; an increasing
contestation in the terms of public discourse on race, given changes
in the federal government's identification and counting of race
categories, and recent theoretical uncertainties in academic and
journalistic writing about race categories; a declining possibility of
living in whites-only communities and for restricting one's
daily life to segregated spaces; the end of state-sanctioned racial
hierarchy, enabling the increasing openness of new generations of
whites to interracial contact, interaction, relationships, families,
and multiracial community.



Alcoff's focus on these and other actual social conditions
forming the matrix for white double consciousness resembles Du
Bois's own increasing attention to the 'environing
conditions' materially grounding changes in double consciousness
in the developing century of his life. Whiteness is not an ideology
for Alcoff, but an 'organically emergent' social reality.
Alcoff takes as a given both the fluidity of all such racial
determinations of identity and the relative stability of the lived,
material reality of whiteness. Her broader account is aimed to counter
recent arguments that whiteness is too closely tied to white supremacy
in its origins and motivations to be freed from its racist past, on
the one hand, and, on the other, that it is an ideological formation
which can be simply given up and left behind as part of the struggle
to overcome that historic legacy. Rejecting these claims, she argues
whiteness may well be de-linked from racism and white supremacy, a
possibility that white double consciousness prefigures in its
specific, binary form.



The ideology of 'white vanguardism,' which Alcoff
characterizes as the "illusion ... that has configured
European whites as the scientific, technological, moral, artistic, and
political leader of the human race" (24), has increasingly lost
plausibility to significant numbers of whites themselves. This
'illusion,' which once supplied some sense of dignity and
social standing to the many whites without other cultural or economic
resources, has been increasingly contested both in the academy and the
public forum, and is at odds with changing social realities. Thus,
white double consciousness is a growing reflection in significant
sections of the population of the deep crisis of whiteness. At the
same time, Alcoff argues, whites affected with double consciousness
are living out their disillusion with their own previous white
vanguardist assumptions.



Alcoff relies on a variety of sources to support her account. These
include, in addition to philosophical critiques of the racial
formation and of whiteness, ethnographic studies of local white
communities, narrative accounts of anti-racist and anti-klan activists
in the South and episodes from her own life and experience. She
presents as a paradigmatic case the 'Beat' writer Jack
Kerouac - who exemplified the anxiety about whiteness in the
form of a lived creative artistic rebellion, one nonetheless
identified by the culture as racially white. Alcoff characterizes
Kerouac as exhibiting such white double consciousness in his
deportment and self-presentation, saying that his 'alienated
consciousness' "manifested as discomfort with his embodied
identity." She adds that:



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



Another noteworthy example is the description by Simone de Beauvoir of
her own experience, during a visit with Richard Wright in New York, as
a white person walking through Harlem and experiencing a measure of
discomfort on confronting the accusatory glances of the
neighborhood's residents. "Beauvoir notes the hostile
glances and feels herself 'stiffen with a bad
conscience'" (139). This provides Alcoff with an example
illustrating the role that reactive emotions such as guilt and shame
can have in triggering the formation of white double consciousness.
Such encounters with racialized others in conditions of daily life can
prod whites into seeing the disparity between how they view themselves
and how they are seen outside of their own segregated communities, as
they begin to "intuit how they are viewed by nonwhite
others" (170). For many whites, Alcoff argues, the guilt and
discomfort with whiteness which results provokes a critical rethinking
and attempt to reshape their identity even as, for others, it drives a
desire to escape the attribution of racial whiteness altogether, an
ultimately dead-end path.



A growing disaffection with the mainstream condition of whiteness
- and with its dependence on the ideology of 'white
vanguardism' - is the core of white double consciousness
for Alcoff. It is linked, for many whites, with a close daily lived
association with communities of brown and black people. Nonetheless,
an honest, fact-based and realistic approach to their lives requires
their acknowledging the actuality of whiteness as their own personal
racial identity and their understanding it as an historically shifting
social construct. Acknowledging whiteness as a social construct
involves both accepting its connection with historical and ongoing
brutal racial oppression and questioning its core ideology of white
vanguardism. The double consciousness this acceptance/suspicion
elicits involves, to some extent, a self-ascription of whiteness as
identity, a critical distance from it as a form of life, and a
rejection of its 'white vanguardist' ideology as false,
and falsely justifying continued white supremacy.



White double consciousness can lead whites to a deeper understanding
of the realities of U.S. social conditions and the history shaping
them. It thus represents a resource and potentially a trigger for
working through their false views about race and moving toward
anti-racism. Unlike the case of black double consciousness -
which is the native understanding of their own lives, achieved through
intraracial communal cultural associations and solidarities, that
makes possible blacks' understanding of the lies upholding white
domination - whites' double consciousness "involves
coming to see themselves through both the dominant and non-dominant
lens and recognizing the latter as a critical corrective truth"
(140).


### 5.3 Kaleidoscopic Consciousness



Alcoff's reflections on whiteness and white double consciousness
come in the wake of her arguments for transcending the black/white
binary in *Visible Identities*. Jose Medina does Alcoff
one better, in a sense, by opening up the possibility of a
multiplicitous version of double consciousness as an epistemic tactic
in the struggle for a more expansive democratic society.



Medina discusses double consciousness - and its hypothetical
multiplicitous twin - in relation to his core argument, in
*Epistemic Resistance* (2013), about the epistemic conditions
of democratic citizenship and participation, that "a crucial
part of th[e] perfectionist ongoing struggle toward democracy is the
resistance against epistemic injustices" (4). 'Epistemic
injustice' is the term Medina takes from Miranda Fricker's
naming and analysis of that phenomenon, referring most broadly to a
'credibility deficit' - the discrediting of the
testimony or epistemic contributions of persons on the basis of their
racial, gender, or other elements of 'visible identity'.
Medina's project is to develop methods to resist the domination
of such oppressive epistemic circumstances.



Addressing Du Bois's 1903 formulation, Medina argues that double
consciousness is inadequate for addressing the diverse forms of
racialization of experience in the contemporary U.S., in which a
multiplicity of racially oppressed groups exist, as well as other
groups facing various other oppressions, on the basis of gender,
sexuality, and other aspects of identity. The theory of democratic
resistant consciousness Medina develops is also expansive in aiming to
encompass the epistemic effects of not only racial but also gender,
class, sexual, and other forms of oppression, and the forms of
epistemic injustice related to these, and so it necessarily transcends
Du Bois' binary conception. Medina thus invokes a multiplicitous
consciousness - he actually dubs it 'kaleidoscopic'
- instead, but one that shares crucial similarities in profile
with Du Bois's original conception.



Medina's conceptualizations emerge out of a pragmatist approach
to democratic political theory. He assumes that the achievement of
progressive democratic socio-political objectives involves prolonged
periods of struggle, in which oppressive ideologies continue to exert
their influence on social agents. Democratic activists - and,
indeed, all moral agents in such circumstances - must therefore
develop and use strategies of epistemic resistance to the deleterious
effects of oppressive structures on their own internal patterns of
response to racialized and 'othered' social actors
generally. These forms of structural silencing and social ignorance
foster internalized blockages impeding agents' self-awareness,
blockages which not only impair cognition but also impact the
sensibilities, feelings, and imaginations of those agents as well.
Because he, as theorist, pragmatically adopts as well an activist
perspective, Medina's concerns are not only diagnostic. He
develops normative proposals for democratic forms of
'resistant' epistemic practices.



Medina interprets Du Bois's account of double consciousness as
an indication of how oppressed subjects can utilize their social
position 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 of
oppression - the ignorance and lack of self-knowledge of those
in the dominant group itself. This is because those who are subject to
oppression have, as a function of double consciousness, access to both
social viewpoints, and also are compelled by their situation to
question the basis of their social standing and their
self-understanding in a way those in the dominant positions are not.
Indeed, according to Medina, those situated in the position of
oppressors, or who benefit from the oppressive regime, are often
'actively ignorant' - that is, ignorant in a way
their own mode of life and activity helps to maintain and reproduce
- of the basis and consequences of their standing and the social
context of their own lives.



To bring about the epistemic resistance required, Medina argues for an
epistemic stance he terms "kaleidoscopic consciousness".
This is Medina's expanded version of Du Boisian double
consciousness, now explicitly presented as a norm of epistemic
practice rather than an account of a pre-given social reality.
Kaleidoscopic consciousness involves an open, always anticipatory
stance toward the possibility of new forms of oppressive social
relations and their related modes of 'active ignorance.'
Since forms of active ignorance as Medina calls them are in a sense
self-fulfilling, blinding one to their own existence, and producing
what he calls 'meta-blindness' - it is always
possible - in some cases likely - that there are forms of
blindness one suffers from without even knowing that fact.



This counter-hegemonic project is not confined to a reform of the
individual's consciousness alone: it involves a corresponding
recognition of and commitment to open, exploratory, and conscious
interactions with diverse social 'others.' Virtuous
epistemic agents must be guided by what Medina calls an
'imperative of epistemic interaction,' of attunement to
and reliance on regular encounters with those who are
'othered,' in various ways, by the system. This set of
extended and socially distributed interactions is aimed at producing
epistemic friction as a necessary condition for an adequate epistemic
orientation to the diversity of agents' viewpoints, and to
resisting the diverse forms of socially functional blindness to the
perspectives of socially 'othered' persons. Such
understanding is a key component of a successful democratic political
project, according to Medina, and can only be achieved through what is
itself a form of socially transformative epistemic practice.


## 6. Conclusion



Any account of double consciousness rooted in the sweep of Du
Bois's writings must acknowledge his taking it as both a state
of consciousness of individual African-Americans as members of an
oppressed group and also as a form of social recognition of the status
of that group in the wider culture. Such an account must also confront
the glaringly peculiar fact of the singular use of the term by Du Bois
despite his revisiting in his writing, on various occasions in
different contexts of publication, what seems to be an increasingly
expansive 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 the
impression that this is simply and only a problem *of*
consciousness, a problem *only of and for* black folk,
unconnected with any palpable social facts. Also, as we have seen, the
close 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. He
also increasingly wanted to distance himself from the idea -
explicitly rejected in *Dusk of Dawn* - that
collectivities are entities with their own consciousnesses, reified in
what he came to regard as mistaken idealist overreach. Finally, Du
Bois seems to have opened up and expanded the range of phenomena
related to double consciousness beyond the exemplar in the 1903
texts.



But Du Bois did not characterize the matter succinctly in one place so
as to embrace both all its effects on consciousness and affect
*and* the correlative reality of an 'environing'
condition. Rather, he employs, alternately, two strategies of writing
to capture its fullness. He presents first- and third-personal
accounts of "what it is like", "spiritually",
to live subject to double consciousness, through autobiographical
writing or by personifying the feelings, attitudes, and thoughts
associated with double consciousness in fictional or composite
characters. And he describes social environments along with the
"customs" and "irrational",
"subconscious" attitudes and modes of being typical of
social groups living in those environments.



Near the end of his life, in the posthumously published
*Autobiography*, Du Bois revisited his original formulation of
"two-ness":



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



This passage relates the feelings triggered in young Du Bois while
observing "the pageantry and patriotism of Germany in
1892". This plainly autobiographical formulation in no way
suggests anything like a basic psychic split; it reflects an
ambivalence, a conflict of affections and loyalties within an integral
self.



All previous critical attention has been fixed steadily on the
spiritual aspect of the phenomena of double consciousness, virtually
none 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 the
> maintenance of vastly unequal and segregated living conditions of
> social groups ideologically and culturally identified as racially
> distinct and unequal, creating a "double environment"
> inimical to members of the subordinate racial group.
> 



The *spiritual* correlate of these environing conditions would
include some combination of at least some of these sorts of emergent
aspects:


* harboring a view of oneself premised on false, demeaning, or
derogatory estimations of one's capabilities, preferences,
aptitudes and desires - estimations made primarily or
exclusively due to one's racial identity - and a
consequent determination of a life course and practical orientation to
one'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, to
being "all mixed up" and/or in a state of
double-mindedness, ambivalence, inner turmoil or indecision in
relation to conflicting or opposed views and feelings about oneself
and/or one's social situation;
* an awareness of oneself as characterized by others in an
unfavorable or demeaning way in keeping with disparaging descriptors
associated with one's racial identity;
* a reflective confrontation with a stable social situation
characterized by consistent disparities in the life-prospects,
achievements, social station, power, wealth, and cultural recognition
typically available to members of one's race relative to a
dominant race;
* a consciousness of and feelings related to a tension associated
with being taken for, or acting as, a member or representative of a
devalued race to members of the dominant race, in either a cultural,
social, or a political capacity;
* a practical attitude or orientation, for strategic purposes
related 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 a
falsely degrading, fearful, or dismissive judgment of who or what one
is, on the basis of one's race, and revision or adjustment of
one's plans on the basis of such ascriptions;
* a pervasive sense of uncertainty regarding the reception of
oneself, one's activities and projects by others, under the
weight of inappropriate, prejudicial, false and/or demeaning
generalizations 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 and
in keeping with recognition or awareness of any of the sorts of
experiences listed above.



This list, while including the sense of
"double-consciousness" as Du Bois develops the idea in
*Souls* (particularly the first three items), also expands the
sense of "double consciousness" to include more active,
practical, and critical appropriations of the situation established by
the 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 corrosive
effects of the multiplicitous oppressive structures in modern
societies.