Double Consciousness

A concept initially articulated by civil rights leader and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois to describe some of the conflicts inherent in developing a black identity in a society dominated by a white majority.

W. E. B. Du Bois first articulated the concept of “double consciousness” in his essay “Strivings of the Negro People,” which was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1897. A revised version of the essay became the first chapter of his landmark book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). This work has become one of the most widely read and commented on books in the African American tradition, and the concept of “double consciousness” has become a key theme in scholarship about the black experience.

Du Bois defines double consciousness as the “sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.” He links the idea to the concept of “twoness,” writing in The Souls of Black Folk that “one ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts…two warring ideals in one dark body.”

Double consciousness has been defined traditionally as a conflict between a Black Nationalist identity and an assimilated American identity. The scholar Dickinson Bruce, in an article titled “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Ideal of Double Consciousness,” has suggested that African Americans who attempt to gain self-consciousness in a racist society will inevitably face difficulties because any reflected image coming from white Americans is necessarily a distorted one.

In the African American context, the concept of double consciousness originates with Du Bois. He did not invent the term, however, but appropriated it from other sources. For example, the American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson used the term in his 1843 essay “The Transcendentalist” to describe being torn between the divine and the drudgery of daily existence. Other literary critics have observed that Du Bois's language echoes that of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in whose dramatic poem Faust the title [Page 265]character declares, “Two souls, alas! Reside within my breast, And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.”

Du Bois's concept of double consciousness is commonly invoked in discussions of black identity. The concept has been particularly widely embraced by literary critics, who have identified it as a common theme in black literature.

Scholars have identified internal and external dimensions to the double consciousness phenomenon. The term refers both to the way that black people view themselves and to the way that they are viewed by white society.

An African American might feel conflicted internally between a black identity and an American identity that seem incompatible. In addition, black Americans might be forced to reconcile unflattering images of blackness imposed by white society with more positive self-images. In whatever form it takes, the concept of double consciousness has assumed a prominent place in black intellectual thought. Scholar Perry Hall has declared it “the basic theme… underlying the form and function of African American identity and culture.”