The idea of imperialism has to do with one nation controlling another group or region. The powerful nation often has more money or political power. Sometimes imperialism involves colonization. It is the settling among and establishing control over a land’s native people. Still, the effects of imperialism and colonialism are not just political and economic. Peoples drawn into wide trade networks or taken over by a colonizing power also experience cultural and emotional consequences. Industrial imperialism increased throughout the 1800s. Soon it relied more on the belief system of scientific racism. Many people at the time wrongly believed that people of color were lesser because of their biology. Soon leading thinkers of color began to talk about these arguably deeper effects of imperial power. They especially discussed it as they related to race and racism. One of these thinkers was W.E.B. DuBois, an African-American scholar. Another was Frantz Fanon. He was 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. DuBois was born in Massachusetts in 1868. The U.S. Civil War had just ended. He helped create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He worked and traveled in the United States and Europe. DuBois died in Ghana in 1963.

In 1905 DuBois published a book, The Souls of Black Folk. It greatly affected how people worldwide think about the effects of racism. He hoped to outline “the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive.” Black Americans, he said, had a “double consciousness.”¹ Many of them still remembered the experience of enslavement. He sometimes illustrated this idea 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), people of color were among themselves. On this side, they were comfortable being themselves. They had dreams. They made music, and could express their full humanity. But on the other side of the veil, people of color faced racism. So they lived with a strange “wrenching of the soul.” DuBois said they carried a “sense of doubt” and confusion.

The passage below further explains his idea of double consciousness. (In the passage, DuBois uses terms for historical groups that were common at the time he wrote. For example, “Egyptian” instead of “Arab.” “Teuton” was a word for northern Europeans. He also used “Mongolian” instead of “Asian,” and “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,” DuBois said. That seventh son was “born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world.” It was strange, he noted, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. A person is always “measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on” with pity and hate. “One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings… in one dark body.” Only their strength “keeps it from being torn” apart.

DuBois discussed how racism affects the mind. He also discussed political issues. He argued against the work of another leading black thinker, Booker T. Washington. Washington stressed job training and “racial uplift.” However, Washington refused to help fight for civil and political rights. DuBois admitted that Washington’s approach was popular in the American South. Businesses were booming there. But for DuBois, this wasn’t true freedom. It wasn’t enough. “It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow,” he wrote sadly, “in order to give them force.”

DuBois spoke of the “whole story” of a society or culture. The story could not be told if any part of it was left out, he said. Black Americans, he said, were “gifted with second sight.” They had double consciousness. So, they had much to teach white Americans and the world. He also wrote about the way in which other stories were left out of history. For example, he openly talked about the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century women’s movement. Black women were left out of it, he said. At that time, speaking out about this topic was unusual. He noted the “spectacular advance” of black men. “As I look about me today in this veiled world of mine,” he wrote in an article in 1919, he felt “that it is the five million women of my race who really count.”

DuBois was friends with Anna Julia Cooper. She was a leading black woman thinker. Cooper wrote A Voice from the South. She might have influenced his attention to black women’s experience. DuBois set out to show the particular spiritual life of black Americans. Specifically, he saw a racist political and system of business. Similarly, Cooper set out to present “an intelligent and sympathetic” understanding “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 woman.” “The world needs to hear” the woman’s voice, she said. In 1896 Cooper helped to found the National Association of Colored Women. Its motto was “Lift as we climb.” This 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.” He explained this as “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 1900s, 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. The event attracted participants from Africa, the West Indies, the U.S., and Britain. Dadabhai Naoroji attended, too. He was the only British Indian member of Parliament. Naoroji helped found the Indian National Congress.

Many Pan-African Congress participants focused on gaining civil rights. However, they also explored how racism and colonialism affected culture and the mind. Indian nationalists, for example, were very interested in maintaining local languages and traditions. In the 1830s the British in India had established a system of education. It forced students to learn English alone. Indian scholars like Rabindranath Tagore believed this was damaging. “To break the lamp of any people” is to take away “its rightful place in the world festival,” Tagore said in 1919. This lamp’s “light” was a nation’s original language and culture.

Women of color were also building new global networks. In 1920, black American women founded the International Council of Women from the Darker Races. They wanted to connect directly with women of color who lived under colonialism. The women were descendants of people who were enslaved. They were treated as commodities.² The women saw similarities between their own experience and that of other colonized peoples.

In 1952 Frantz Fanon released a book. It was called Black Skin, White Masks. He again brought up the idea of dual consciousness. Fanon tried “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. He called it a “livery”.⁴

Fanon’s experiences all went into his understanding of race and colonialism. He had lived in French Martinique. He was a student in Paris. Fanon was also a doctor in Algeria. At that time, Algerians were trying to gain independence from France. The French violently tried to end the movement. Fanon believed the invented categories of race didn’t affect only black-white relationships. They also affected relationships between different “racial” groups worldwide. Powerful groups all over had invented a scale of race, culture, or civilization. Fanon discussed how people of color tried to get ahead in a made-up ranking system. He also warned against simplifying the experience of racism and colonialism. There was no single “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 thinkers of color helped us understand the experience of oppression. It “splits” one’s sense of self. They also help us understand how we ourselves might behave differently in different situations. People can “perform” an identity for others. These thinkers 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.