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This is a psychosocial concept that refers to the constant struggle an oppressed person experiences between, on one hand, the necessity to be true to one self (that is, achieving self-consciousness, self-realization, and self-respect, as a natural condition of being a normal human being) and, on the other, the demands of oppression that require emasculating this true self by the constant need to try and create an alternative “pseudo-self” that will measure up to the standards set by the oppressor as a means of escaping the oppression, but which is always impossible because the oppressor has no intent to allow one to meet these standards by deliberately ensuring that they are always shifting—like moving the goal posts every time one is about to score a goal. Examples of people who may/did experience the tyranny of double-consciousness are quite wide-ranging; they would include immigrants (e.g. the Greeks, the Italians, the Irish, the Poles, etc. who immigrated to United States in the past and, of course, recent U.S. immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America); women in any patriarchal society; black women in the West (who must deal with both patriarchy and racism simultaneously); Jews in pre-Nazi Europe; people of working class background in professions that are bourgeois dominated; the Dalit in India; the Kabyle in Algeria, and all peoples of African ancestry living in the West, such as the United States.
For the purposes of this definition, the last group is of particular importance, because the most well-known definition today of this concept was first articulated in relation to African Americans living in a racialized society by that great African American intellectual, W.E.B Du Bois. Writing over a hundred years ago in The Atlantic magazine, in its August 1897, issue in an article titled “Strivings of the Negro People,” he described the concept thusly (after explaining when the relevance of this concept dawned on him as a result of an experience in childhood in an almost all-white classroom):
“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 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 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. 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 his definition of the concept, as Bruce, Jr, (1992)[1] explains, Du Bois was concerned with three sets of issues as they related to the psyche of African Americans: the distortions generated among African Americans arising out of Euro-American stereotypes of black people; the racist discrimination that black people experienced at the hands of Euro-Americans; and against the backdrop of a rapidly industrializing society on the eve of the twentieth century where hedonism and materialism were jarringly on the ascendancy, the contradiction of being both an African and a U.S. American, but not really belonging to either designations for historical reasons. About the last, he would explain that the African American “does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes—foolishly, perhaps, but fervently—that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.”
It should be noted that in his articulation of the concept of double consciousness, there appears to be both illogic (what would a “single consciousness” signify and where would it come from for a people who were no longer immigrants but whose existence—culturally, socially, economically etc.—was inextricably interwoven with that of Euro-Americans), and an oversimplification of the “humanness” of African Americans in the sense of being incapable of resisting oppression and forging an identity that is not in complete thrall to the Euro-American identity, which of course is not true. This not to say that the concept of double-consciousness has no analytical value, but rather that one must be extremely careful when applying it to African Americans in the manner he articulated it.[2]
[1]. Bruce Jr., Dickson D. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” American Literature 64, No. 2 (June 1992): 299-309.
[2]. For a critique of this concept, see, for example, Dennis, R. M. “Du Bois and Double Consciousness: Myth or Reality.” In: Stone, J. & Dennis, R. M. (Eds.), Race and Ethnicity: Comparative and Theoretical Approaches, pp. 13-27. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. For a counter argument, see Itzigsohn, José, and Brown, Karida. “Sociology and the Theory of Double Consciousness: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Phenomenology of Racialized Subjectivity.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 12, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 231-48.
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