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Du Bois' Theory of Double Consciousness Beard, Shane 2020 PSCI Thesis Title: The Search for Cohesive Consciousness: Du Bois’ Theory of Double Consciousness in a Contemporary ContextThe Search for Cohesive Consciousness: Du Bois’ Theory of Double Consciousness in a Contemporary Context Advisor: Nimu Njoya Advisor is Co-author/Adviser Restricted Data Used: None of the above Second Advisor: Release: release now Authenticated User Access (does not apply to released theses): No Contains Copyrighted Material: No The Search for Cohesive Consciousness: Du Bois’ Theory of Double Consciousness in a Contemporary Context By Shane Emmanuel Beard Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Department of Political Science of Williams College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelors of Arts with Honors in Political Science May 8th, 2020 1 Acknowledgements This thesis owes its existence to an innumerable amount of people. Foremost, I want to thank my advisor, Professor Nimu Njoya. Every conversation in her office was a demonstration in patience, kindness, and wisdom, and I can’t thank her enough for her guidance (and for chewing me out when I didn’t send her emails in time). I hope that I can keep learning from and with her for years to come, and I couldn’t have had a better advisor. I would like to thank all of my peers and friends at Williams College, especially my sisters in the Good Morning Gang (Dominique, Jazmin, and Evette) and every single member of the Black community, who inspired me to undertake this project. I also want to thank my wonderful girlfriend, Jasmine, whose boundless support and encouragement helped me pull through many rough nights and rougher drafts. I also want to thank Rocky, who convinced me I could take on writing a thesis. To the faculty, associates, and affiliates of the Africana department, your teachings and commitment to the study and celebration of Black identity has changed my life, and I can’t think every one of you enough. Finally, I want to thank my family, especially my mother and grandmother, who have guided and loved me throughout my entire education. You taught me to love every dimension of myself and inspired a love of learning within me. You are my heroes. 2 Introduction: On Being A Problem “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word." - W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls Of Black Folk ​ Being a Problem What does it mean to a problem? Seeing the difference between myself and my white peers at predominantly white institutions like Williams College has made this a recurring consideration in my life. In this thesis, I explore what it means to live within the paradox of Black American life, and what it might mean to stabilize the material and psychic realities of that life. To do so, I identify three of Du Bois’ strivings for “cohesive consciousness”, or the resolution of the paradoxes of Black American life. They are as follows: the striving towards ​ freedom, the striving towards political power, and the striving towards education. I find that each ​ has a contemporary manifestation: Black capitalism, the fight for reparations, and the leadership of Black movements by Captive Maternals, respectively. Each contemporary striving is paired with what I find to be most representative of the contemporary strivings: the rise of Jay-Z as hip-hop’s first billionaire, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case For Reparations”, and the life and death of Erica Garner. In each, new paradoxes emerge: as exemplified in Jay-Z’s economic ascension, 3 the liberatory goals of Black capitalism may be warped by the desire for personal profit, or limited by scale. In “The Case for Reparations”, Coates challenges the nation’s own double consciousness, which prevents it from offering full restitution to those it’s harmed. Joy James’ Captive Maternal theory, which I believe is complementary with double consciousness, suggests that Black women face the paradox of caring for Black life when that life is extinguished by the state. Each new paradox goes beyond Du Bois’ vision. If the problem of the 20th century is the color line, I’d argue that the problem of the 21st is the collective under neoliberalism. Today, the market commodifies all people, not just the indigenous and the enslaved (even though they bear most of the consequences). This new problem may not define the rest of the century, given its fragility in our current crisis, but it certainly affects how Black psychic life operates post-Reconstruction in ways Du Bois couldn’t have imagined. This reality unravels Du Bois’ vision that there are just two consciousnesses; there are many, and I believe that the friction between them generates identities that are cohesive in their own right, identities that may never consider that their existence is a problem at all. A State of Twoness To live as a problem is to never be oneself. Such a status condemns the soul to a perpetual state of seeing oneself through the eyes of others, seeking an answer to the legal, social, and spiritual predicament that is your skin. This contradiction is double consciousness. W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term double consciousness in his 1903 book “The Souls of Black Folk” to describe a consistent condition shared by Black people in America. Du Bois finds 4 that the condition that the phrase denotes emerges from a revelation following a racialized encounter. When his white classmate harshly refused to exchange greeting cards with him as a child, he writes, “it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the ​ others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast 1 veil." In recognizing the congenital veil between himself and the world of whiteness, Du Bois finds himself in “a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see ​ 2 himself through the revelation of the other world." This is double consciousness, a state of ​ “twoness” that springs from the clash between being Black and being an American. “One ever ​ feels his twoness,—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 3 asunder." Du Bois sees this dogged strength as a singular, distinct striving. While the clash between two souls produces “a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes,” double consciousness is also the psychic manifestation of the African American social 4 and political struggle, driven by a desire for unified consciousness. The project of emancipation is extended to the psychic self, and the endpoint of this freedom project is a singular self-consciousness that is both undeniably Black and wholly a citizen of America. Du Bois argues that the striving toward Freedom—the concept of liberation from slavery and systemic injury towards citizenship and equality—is so worshipped by Black people because it holds the promise of cohesive personhood. But with the freedom to enter the white world, the tension of 1 Du Bois, W. E. B.. The Souls of Black Folk : The Oxford W. E. B. du Bois. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ​ Incorporated, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central. p. 3 2 Du Bois, Souls, p. 3 ​ ​ 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 96 5 double consciousness grows more intense. The struggle of the Black American, Du Bois finds, is a collision of contradictory goals that pull one in opposing directions. For example, in becoming educated, “the would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his ​ people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would 5 teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood." The beauty of the music the black artist loves “was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not 6 articulate the message of another people." At the dawn of Black Reconstruction, Black people are denied unity of consciousness, at least through any large-scale national project, by coordinated terror from a coalition of rich and poor white people and the nation’s failure to follow through on social reform. Du Bois cites these as the reasons that the legal emancipation of enslaved people failed to truly free Black people. The Reconstruction era, which begins after the Civil War, stretches from 1861 to 1872. This period is anchored by the nation’s attempts to grapple with the social conditions of race for the first time, starting with institutions like the Freedmen’s Bureau. Simultaneously, Black people begin the work of the striving for emancipation post-slavery, and while the aforementioned focus on education was a component of this movement, the more dominant movements, attempts to develop political and economic power, also failed to create a unified Black consciousness in the decades following the war. By 1903, 40 years after Black Reconstruction, Du Bois saw no progress on the front of a unified Black consciousness.
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