Double Consciousness in Today's Black America

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduces double consciousness as a result of racial prejudice and oppression. Explained as a state of confliction felt by black Americans, Du Bois presents double consciousness as integral to understanding the black experience. Later philosophers question the importance of double consciousness to current race discussions, but this paper contends that double consciousness provides valuable insights into black and white relations. To do this, I will utilize the modern slang term, “Oreo,” to highlight how a perceived incompatibility between blacks and whites could prevent America from achieving a greater unity.

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Double Consciousness in Today’s Black America

Stance An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal ◽

10.5840/stance20191211 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 12 ◽

pp. 116-124

Author(s):

L.E. Walker ◽

Keyword(s):

Black Americans ◽

Racial Prejudice ◽

Double Consciousness ◽

Black Folk ◽

Black America ◽

Black Experience ◽

Black And White ◽

Du Bois ◽

Blacks And Whites ◽

Souls Of Black Folk

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On the Possibility of Democracy in the Present-Past

10.1093/oso/9780190642792.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Gregory Laski

Keyword(s):

Political Action ◽

Linear Time ◽

The State ◽

Double Consciousness ◽

American Democracy ◽

Eternal Return ◽

Black Folk ◽

Du Bois ◽

The Past ◽

Souls Of Black Folk

This chapter constructs a conceptual grammar for untimely democracy by pairing Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Jefferson’s vision of an ever-progressing polity rests on his principle of generational autonomy: the notion that each cohort of citizens is free from the burdens of its ancestors. Slavery stands as the limit for such a model. For Jefferson, blackness signifies a future haunted by bondage; thus Africans can have no place in American democracy. Jefferson’s future is what Du Bois terms the “present-past.” With this phrase, Du Bois reorders linear time—positioning the past after, not before, the present—and posits intergenerational responsibility as a democratic value alongside equality and liberty. And yet, even as he advocates a temporal double consciousness that blurs past and present, Du Bois worries that emphasizing slavery’s seemingly eternal return might paralyze political action.

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The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to the Brownies' Book

PMLA ◽

10.1632/pmla.2013.128.3.590 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 128 (3) ◽

pp. 590-607 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Michelle H. Phillips

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Children’S Literature ◽

Black Children ◽

Double Consciousness ◽

Black Folk ◽

Du Bois ◽

Black Subjectivity ◽

The Face ◽

History Of ◽

Souls Of Black Folk

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that the history of double consciousness lies in childhood as the crisis that brings an end to the “days of rollicking boyhood.” Yet in his children's literature, written in the teens and twenties, Du Bois returns to the scene of double consciousness in an effort to transform this experience. In the children's numbers of the Crisis and in the Brownies' Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois's works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child's entry into double consciousness and to repurpose double consciousness as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.

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Missionary Cultures

Congo Love Song ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469632711.003.0005 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Ira Dworkin

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

African American ◽

American Culture ◽

African American Culture ◽

Black Folk ◽

Colonial State ◽

Sacred Texts ◽

Fisk University ◽

Du Bois ◽

Souls Of Black Folk

This chapter examines the work of APCM missionary Edmiston, a Fisk University graduate and skilled linguist, who in the first decades of the twentieth century controversially wrote the first dictionary and grammar of the Bushong (Bakuba) language. Shortly after her fellow Fisk alumni Du Bois used African American spirituals as signposts for his groundbreaking tour through U.S. history and culture in The Souls of Black Folk, she also contributed to the APCM’s effort to translate religious hymns into Tshiluba by adding African American spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to the Presbyterian hymnal. The translations by Edmiston and her colleagues insured that Tshiluba developed not only as the language of the colonial state, but also as a language that was shaped by the sacred texts of postbellum African American culture.

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