Double Consciousness

The term double consciousness is used in reference to W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, when referring to a dual awareness developed by Black Americans in the United States: knowledge of one's own individual identity, as well as knowledge about how one will be read through a racial lens. This duality is also frequently interpreted as a dual and sometimes conflicting sense of being both American and not fully American, and likewise as the dual sense of being both American and African. Each interpretation has had its own trajectory in U.S. and international philosophy and thought, but they all reference the same basic theme of contradiction and complexity in the African American experience, as this entry describes.

W. E. B. Du Bois describes the conflict of being both “Negro” and “American,” double consciousness is a term used to describe an individual's awareness and negotiation of the relationship between these two irreconcilable identities. It is used to identify the ways in which an individual's Black and American identities, because they signify different sets of ideals and privileges, neither can be reconciled nor can one entirely usurp the other. Instead, the perpetually imbalanced relationship between these two identities creates a dissonance within the individual that makes him both a participant in and an observer of his own life. In describing the Black American's awareness of his predicament, in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folks, published in 1903, Du Bois propounds that the Black American is endowed with 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”. An individual who is doubly conscious is not simply cognizant of his identities but also of the freedoms he is denied as a result of this antagonistic relationship.

The Black American can never truly enjoy all of the privileges of being an American because his identity as Black mediates his ability to do so because the latter subjects him to imposed social restrictions. This “other” judges the Black American based upon the assumption of his inferiority to his White American counterpart. Double consciousness assumes recognition of this hierarchy of racial identities. However, at the same time, because there is no essential code of conduct for Blackness, the relationship between a Black American's two identities is a dynamic one—a constant negotiation between imposed limitations and the individual's attempts to push beyond those boundaries. This entry explores the conflict associated with dual identities, examines how double consciousness is experienced, and provides a literary example.

Double Consciousness and Dual Identities

Double consciousness, for Black Americans, refers to both an internal dialectic of identifying one's self as Black and American and the external conflict that results from this duality. How does one exist as both and sustain a whole self? It is this attempt to rationalize the reality of being Black, and then American, or being Black versus ...