Dual Consciousness
Imperialism is when a powerful nation politically and economically controls less powerful regions and peoples. Sometimes imperialism involves colonization—settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people. Sometimes it does not. Regardless, the effects of imperialism and colonialism are not just political and economic. Peoples drawn into wide trade networks or occupied by a colonizing power also experience cultural, emotional, and psychological consequences. As industrial imperialism increased over the course of the nineteenth century, it relied more on the ideology of scientific racism. In other words, many people, including scientists, wrongly believed that people of color were inferior because of their biology. Soon leading intellectuals of color began to talk about these arguably deeper effects of imperial power, especially as they related to race and racism. One of these intellectuals was W.E.B. DuBois, an African-American scholar. Another was Frantz Fanon, a psychologist from the colony of French Martinique in the Caribbean. Fanon became involved in the Algerian War for Independence.
W.E.B. DuBois, Racism, and Double Consciousness
W.E.B. DuBois was a sociologist, historian, and author. He helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). DuBois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, just after the end of the U.S. Civil War. He worked and traveled extensively in both the United States and Europe, and died in Ghana in 1963.
In 1905 DuBois published a book, The Souls of Black Folk. It had a lasting impact on how people across the world think about the effects of racism. He said he aimed to outline “the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive.” The term that he used to discuss this spiritual world of black Americans, many of whom still remembered the experience of enslavement, was “double consciousness.”1 He sometimes illustrated this concept using the metaphor of a “veil.” This veil divided the world of black Americans from that of white Americans. On one side of the veil (curtain), among themselves, people of color felt comfortable being themselves: dreaming dreams, making music, expressing their full humanity. But on the other side of the veil, confronted with racism, they lived with “a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment.”
The long passage below further explains his idea of double consciousness. (In the passage, DuBois uses terms for “racial” or historical groups that were common at the time he wrote. For example, “Egyptian” instead of “Arab,” “Teuton” instead of “northern European,” “Mongolian” instead of “Asian,” “Negro” instead of “African” or “black.”)
After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and the 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 twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
DuBois discussed in depth the psychology of racism. He also discussed political issues. He argued against the work of another leading black intellectual, Booker T. Washington. Washington stressed job training and “racial uplift” for people of color. However, Washington refused to engage in struggles for civil and political rights. DuBois admitted that Washington’s approach was popular in the industrializing society of the American South. But for DuBois, this wasn’t true freedom, and it wasn’t enough. “It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow,” he wrote sadly, “in order to give them force.”
DuBois developed a sense that the “whole story” of a society or culture could not be told if any part of it was left out. Black Americans, he said, were “gifted with second sight” because of their dual consciousness. So, they had much to teach white Americans and the world. He also wrote about the way in which other stories were excluded from history. For example, he openly talked about how black women were excluded from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women’s movement. At that time, speaking out about this topic was unusual. “As I look about me today in this veiled world of mine,” he wrote in an article in 1919, “despite the noisier and more spectacular advance of my brothers, I instinctively feel and know that it is the five million women of my race who really count.”
DuBois’s attention to black women’s experience might have been influenced by his friendship with Anna Julia Cooper. She was a leading black woman intellectual who wrote A Voice from the South in 1892. DuBois set out to show the particular spiritual life of black Americans in a racist political and economic system. Similarly, Cooper set out to present “an intelligent and sympathetic comprehension of the interests and special needs of the Negro.” But, unlike DuBois in Souls of Black Folk, she included “the real and special influence of women.” “’Tis woman’s strongest vindication [defense] for speaking,” she wrote, “that the world needs to hear her voice.” In 1896 Cooper helped to found the National Association of Colored Women. Its motto—”Lift as we climb”—combined the uplift of Washington with the activism of DuBois.
Colonialism, Culture, and Dual Consciousness
In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois wrote famously that “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Indeed, by the early twentieth century, people of color around the world were thinking internationally. They connected their struggles and their work. DuBois attended the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900. It attracted participants from Africa, the West Indies, the U.S., and Britain. One attendee was Dadabhai Naoroji. He was the only British Indian member of Parliament and one of the founders of the Indian National Congress.
Many Pan-African Congress participants focused on political and economic rights. However, they also explored the effects of racism and colonialism on culture and psychology. Indian nationalists, for example, were very interested in reasserting local languages and traditions. In the 1830s the British in India had established a system of education that required instruction in English alone. Indian scholars such as Rabindranath Tagore insisted this was part of the damage of colonialism. “To break the lamp of any people is to deprive it of its rightful place in the world festival,” Tagore said in a 1919 speech. “He who has no light is unfortunate enough, but utterly miserable is he who, having it, has been deprived of it, or has forgotten all about it."
Women of color were also building new global networks. In 1920, black women from the U.S. founded the International Council of Women from the Darker Races. They wanted to learn about and connect directly with women of color who lived under colonialism. They saw similarities between their own experience, as descendants of people who were enslaved and treated as commodities,2 and that of other colonized peoples.
In 1952 the concept of dual consciousness was raised again, in a book called Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. He attempted “to discover the various mental attitudes the black man adopts in the face of white civilization.” Like DuBois, Fanon recognized that people of color had a divided sense of self. “The black man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. A black man behaves differently with a white man than he does with another black man. There is no doubt whatsoever that this fissiparousness3 is a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking.” The very idea of “blackness,” of being black, Fanon argued, was a product of white minds: “Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery4 the white man has fabricated for him.”
Fanon’s experiences all contributed to his understanding of race and colonialism. He had lived in French Martinique, was a student in Paris, and was a doctor in Algeria, which was trying to get its independence from France. The French violently attempted to end the Algerian independence movement. Fanon believed the invented categories of race didn’t affect only black-white relationships. They also affected relationships between different “racial” groups worldwide. Fanon discussed how people of color tried to position themselves along a scale of race, culture, or civilization that was actually invented by dominant groups. Remember DuBois lamenting that a black man measures his “soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”? This is what Fanon was talking about. He also warned against simplifying the experience of racism and colonialism into one “black” experience; some figures in the Pan-African or Negritude movement had done this. He also wrote: “Is there in fact any difference between one racism and another? Don’t we encounter the same downfall, the same failure of man?”
Together, DuBois, Fanon, and other people of color spoke out about the effects of racism and colonialism during the era of industrial imperialism. They helped us understand how the experience of oppression “splits” one’s consciousness, or one’s sense of self. They also help us understand the ways that we ourselves might behave differently in different situations, “performing” an identity for others. They taught how these performances are affected by power.
1 Double or dual consciousness refers to feeling as though you have two identities housed in one person or mind. It’s as if you view yourself one way and then others view you a different way or see you through a different lens.
2 Commodities are goods that are bought and sold.
3 Fissiparousness means a sense of division or separation.
4 Livery means a set of clothing or a costume.
References
Bolt, Christine, Sisterhood Questioned? Race, Class, and Internationalism in the American and British Women’s Movements c. 1880s-1970s. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Cooper, Anna Julia, “A Voice from the South,” excerpted in Estelle B. Freedman, ed. The Essential Feminist Reader. New York: Modern Library, 2007.
DuBois, W.E.B., “The Damnation of Women,” excerpted in Estelle B. Freedman, ed. The Essential Feminist Reader. New York: Modern Library, 2007.
DuBois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Classics, 2005.
Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.
Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend, “Three Great Revolutions: Black Women and Social Change.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, January 18, 2016. Accessed November 28, 2018. http://berkeleyjournal.org/2016/01/three-great-revolutions/
Slate, Nico. Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Tagore, Rabindranath, “The Centre of Indian Culture.” The Complete Works of Rabindranath Tagore. Accessed November 28, 2018. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.36111
Amy Elizabeth Robinson
Amy Elizabeth Robinson is a freelance writer, editor, and historian with a Ph.D. in the History of Britain and the British Empire. She has taught at Sonoma State University and Stanford University.
Image credits
This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0 except for the following:
Cover: African Americans March in Protest. Prominent African Americans residents of the city paraded on Fifth Avenue in protest of the recent East St. Louis riots. Many signs they carried stated their purpose and their desires. Several thousand marchers were in the parade which attracted the attention of many bystanders. The East St. Louis riots occurred several weeks ago. W.E.B. DuBois is shown third from right, in the second row. Photo by George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images.
W.E.B. DuBois, 1904. By James E. Purdy. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WEB_Du_Bois.jpg
Anna Julia Cooper, 1892. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anna_Julia_Cooper_1892.tif
Attendees at the Pan-African Congress meeting in Paris, 1919. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pan-African_Congress,_Paris,_February_19-22,_1919.png
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). By https://wiki.uchicago.edu/display/powerpedia/Frantz+Fanon. Fair use. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37296352
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